For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.





Tea party activists have been very adamant that their movement, which started with spontaneous public protests in 2009, has nothing at all in common with Occupy Wall Street. Tea partiers insist that OWS doesn’t really speak for regular Americans—the way they say their movement does. But now comes data, albeit rather unscientific, that offers evidence that Americans are much more interested in OWS than they ever were in the tea party.

The Google Politics and Elections team has teased out some comparisons between tea party-related Google searches and OWS searches to see which group had more demand at their peaks. The results? “Occupy Wall Street” has been a far more popular search term than “tea party.”

The Google team also looked at the volume of media coverage for each movement. By that measure, OWS isn’t quite keeping up.

They write:

Despite big leads in polls and search traffic for Occupy Wall Street, it is almost in a dead heat with the Tea Party for the volume of news coverage. Using Advanced Search in Google News we found that between October 7 and last week, Occupy Wall Street only barely bests the Tea Party when we examine the number of news pieces covering each movement: 29,000 to 22,000.

Other interesting takeaways from the Google search crunching: Searches for “tea party” peak each year around tax time and then peter out again. And while New York would seem like the obvious hot spot for people searching for OWS news, the state actually ranks third in OWS searches, behind Vermont and Oregon.

The Google search numbers dovetail with public opinion polls showing that OWS is twice as popular with regular Americans than the tea party. They may also reinforce what the tea partiers have been saying all along: the two groups have nothing in common.