Some Perspective on the 2020 Primary (Using Google Search Data) dkyana Follow Dec 12, 2019 · Unlisted

By u/Heropon1119

I’ve seen an awful lot of handwringing over the Democratic primary lately and I thought it might be valuable to add a little additional context to these conversations. I’m going to try to tell a short story with the help of a few graphs made with the Google Trends tool*.

Disclaimer: This will be told from the point of view of a Pete Buttigieg supporter, although I think the broad themes apply to anyone following the race carefully.

Each of the following graphs was generated at about midday on December 11, 2019. Let’s take a look at what happened over the previous day:

The key to follow the different colors on the graph is at the top of the image. One thing to note when considering these graphs is that the total area under the curve is more relevant than the height of any particular peak. This first graph gives a sense of how big news or media events impact relative search traffic among the Democratic frontrunners.

Next, let’s look at the past month. You get much lower resolution for individual events when you zoom out like this, but it helps bring attention to the more impactful things going on in the primary:

I think the combination of these two events in such close proximity to each other constitutes the most important development of Pete’s campaign since his launch. I believe it led to a national polling bump of somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 points (and I eagerly await the polling model that will be published by 538 in the coming days to help track these things).

Let’s look even farther back now, at the course of the entire primary cycle to date. This chart is much busier than the previous two:

All I can show is correlation, not causation, for each of those arrows. But I’ve been looking closely enough at this data through the last year that I’m pretty sure those are all the events driving each of the search traffic patterns I point out. Does the graph look like you would have expected? Is there anything you expected to see that doesn’t seem to have driven much interest?

Now, let’s try to put some of this search data into historical context. Looking back over the last 5 years will include data from the 2016 primary:

It seems like the attention paid to the race so far this year has been approximately in line with the 2016 contest**. If search traffic can be used as a proxy for interest and this primary follows the same pattern as the previous cycle, then we can expect that the interest in the primary right now is nowhere near what we might expect in the coming months. Buckle up.

I have one final graph to show, including an additional search topic that I think is vital for appropriate political context:

I hope this final graph serves as a striking reminder about what Democrats are up against, and what we need to prepare for. This should make all of our current squabbles seem quite literally, quantitatively, small. I invite you to return to the beginning of this piece and consider earlier graphs with all of this information in mind.

I hope you found that meaningful. In my view, there are two main takeaways from this little exercise. The first is that at the moment, it will probably be more meaningful to advocate for your preferred candidate to the sizeable chunk of the electorate that has not yet tuned into the process than to other people who are already highly politically engaged. The second takeaway is that whatever is going on at any given time, don’t forget to keep it in context.

* The Google Trends tool is available for anyone to play around with here: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US

One note about this tool, it doesn’t give search traffic in specific units, it sets peak search traffic for a given graph at “100” and scales the rest accordingly.

** The “Note” on the graph there is that Google adjusted their data collection methods on 1/1/2016, so a direct comparison can’t be made between data before and after that date, but search interest in Sanders started modest at the beginning of January and climbed up to its peak at the start of February.