Last night, as the first GOP debate stumbled and lumbered on, I saw the Fivethirtyeight liveblog use an interesting metric for how the different candidates were doing: Google's real-time info of whose names Internet surfers were googling as the debate unfolded. They first did it for the 'kiddie table' debate (which left Fiorina by far the most searched name). During the main event, sometimes Nate Silver just linked to the real-time info for five of the candidates, sometimes they posted their own list, indexed to have The Donald (who trumped everyone else in search traffic) at 100.
Since it's now the day after, I thought I'd quickly redo the exercise, but making sure to cover the data over time for (almost) all candidates, and with an eye on whose names people kept googling even as the focus on the debate itself was replaced with a focus on media coverage about the debate.
Since Trump got far more search traffic than anyone else, I've followed 538's example and used him as reference point. Google Trends doesn't seem to allow you to track more than five names at a time, so I made two charts - but I included Trump in both, to make it easier to compare the two charts (and keep the axis anchored at the same values). That meant dropping one of the ten candidates, though - and since Huckabee turned out to be the least googled one of the lot of them, he's the one I left out. I used the data are for the U.S., specifically, not worldwide.
Here are the first two charts: I think you just need to click them to enlarge them.
Observations and more charts (featuring Fiorina fever?) behind the fold.
Couple of things I noticed about these charts:
- Donald Trump keeps sucking the oxygen out of the room. By this metric too - nobody else even approaches him in terms of how much attention he attracts.
- The only other two who come close are Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. That's interesting, since those are certainly not the names that were held up as winners of the debate either in the media or in the discussion here on DKE.
To show this more clearly, here's a chart with just the candidates who ranked second through to sixth in how much search volume they attracted. Without Trump in the mix, it's easier to see how they did in comparison with each other; but all of these did 'better' than Rand Paul, Christie, Walker and Huckabee:
- Carson didn't just trigger more googling than anyone else but Trump during the debate, he also kept doing so throughout the subsequent twelve hours or so. Whether it's media coverage or word of mouth that had people looking up some of the debate participants once they started a new day, it was Carson who was being looked up most (after Trump). Rubio and Kasich got a very modest bit of second wind as well; and nobody else did.
- John Kasich put in a performance that impressed many pundits, but he didn't particularly get the viewers googling. That seems noteworthy in particular because he is one of the least known candidates in the race. You'd have thought that especially a relatively unknown candidate, if he had really done well, would get people wanting to look up more info about him. But that doesn't seem to have happened especially.
- At least, though, Rubio, Jeb and Kasich "outperformed", by this metric, Christie, Rand, and especially Scott Walker and Huckabee. Those were the stragglers, barely rousing any interest.
- Considering his status as one of the front runners, it's surprising to what degree Scott Walker was truly the invisible man. He got (or took) the second least speaking time of all. He ended up second last in this Google ranking. He doesn't seem to have gotten much attention on Twitter either.
At that last point, though, we have to take a step back and make space for a major and and obvious disclaimer. As the Washington Post's Monkey Cage bloggers pointed out, "we really don't know whether Google searches or tweets during/after a debate are a measure of anything meaningful."
But hey, charts.
Talking of which, here's one more, and it's pretty striking: How did the second-tier candidates, who took part in the 'junior' debate, fare on Google?
Whoa, Carly Fiorina! Note how during the debate Lindsey Graham seems to have gotten as good a boost of interest as Fiorina, but afterwards, when the media coverage started kicking in, it was only Fiorina who kept getting attention.
When comparing the most searched participants from the 'junior' debate with the least searched ones from the main debate, all the junior ones, including Lindsey Graham, fade in comparison with all of the guys who were at the main table, even Huckabee. But Fiorina is in a different league. Not just did her search appeal easily outdo all of the stragglers from the main table, it held up even compared with the top performers from the main debate:
In an overall ranking, she'd be right up there in #3, behind only Trump and Carson. For whatever it's all worth, of course. :-)