Google users are becoming more interested in donating to Sanders, while interest in donating to others is stagnant. de Pony Sum Follow Jan 22 · 2 min read

I’m going to give this in the form of a twee little science paper, because why not.

Methodology:

I added together searches for “donate to Sanders” and “donate to “Bernie” and I added together searches for “donate to Biden” and “donate to Joe”. I then smoothed results by averaging over 7 days (Nerd Note: the results for each day is equal to the average of the raw searches on the three days before it, the day itself, and on the three days after it). I then did the same with Warren. The pattern for Pete Buttigieg was basically in line with Biden’s pattern, so I didn’t bother making a graph for him. All data was sourced from Google Trends.

Results

(Nerd note: Units are arbitrary and an artifact of the algorithm I used, and Google trends data format- only proportions between candidates, and within candidates over time, matter)

In late November, interest in each was relatively equal. Since then interest in Bernie has risen to around three times its previous level- excluding the two massive bumps near the end, which took it even higher. Meanwhile, interest in donating to Biden has remained stagnant, while interest in donating to Warren has seen some bumps over the baseline, but nothing persistent.

Given how close we are getting to the crunch this is bad news for especially Biden- we would expect interest to rise as the election became more imminent, so really, staying in the same place despite increased overall interest from voters is equivalent to falling back. Much the same is true for Butigieg. Things are a little better for Warren, but she certainly hasn’t bounced as much as Bernie.