A lot has been said about the 2012 Presidential Election, but not too much has been said about the presidential nominees in terms of Google Trends. At Eyeflow, we tend to think of most everything in terms of Google trends, so we looked at data from Google Trends and extracted some interesting bits of information about each candidate.
For those not familiar with Google Trends, it is a tool that shows how often a term or phrase is entered into Google. It contains data going back to 2004 and shows searches by geographic region.
The election isn’t up to us, and neither are the results of this unscientific research. In each case we’ll let you take a look at the information and decide what it means.*
Update: 10/11/2012 We decided to turn this blog post into an infographic. Check it Out Here!
Basic Search Data
The chart below shows the search trends for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney over the last 12 months. Both candidates experienced a surge of searches around the time of their Party Conventions, followed by steep drops. Searches for Romney increased again after interest in a statement he made at a fundraiser was recorded unbeknownst to him, and he experienced another surge around the time of the first Presidential Debate on October 3.
The horizontal axis of graphs represents time and the vertical axis shows how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches.
The graph below shows how many searches were conducted in the United States for each nominee, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney throughout 2012:
When reviewing searches for each nominee by state, Romney Searches are the most popular in Utah, whereas Obama searches are most popular in Washington DC:
Vice Presidential Running Mates
As you can see from the two graphs below, at his peak in August, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan received more searches than Joe Biden did in 2008 when running against the McCain-Palin ticket.
This graph shows search volume for each current VP nominee, Joe Biden and Paul Ryan in 2012:
The graph below shows the search volume for Joe Biden and Sarah Palin in 2008. In each election, Joe Biden generated less Google searches than his counterpart:
Past 3 Presidents, Plus Romney
The next graph isn’t perfect because Bill Clinton was out of office and George Bush was already president for several years when Google Trends data begins. Bearing that in mind, based on the information that is available, Obama at his peak was more researched when compared to the last three presidents and Mitt Romney. Romney at his peak so far has not gotten as many searches as George Bush or Barack Obama.
The graph below shows search volume for Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, George Bush and Bill Clinton from 2004 to the present:
Obama Alone
If you look at Obama’s search trends in the United States from 2004 – 2012 you can see he had 4 times the amount of searches when he was running against McCain in 2008 than he has in 2012:
Romney Alone
You can see below how the country’s interest in Romney spiked each time he ran for president, in 2008 and again in 2012 and is reaching a pinnacle now that he is the official Republican nominee:
Romney’s searched are concentrated, with Utah having the overwhelming majority:
Things that made us go, “Hmmmmm…”
In September, more people searched for the iPhone 5 then both candidates combined. iPhone 5 for President?
Stay tuned for more interesting snippets of search data for the 2012 Presidential Election. We’ll be putting things together into a cool infographic very soon!
*This data is not an endorsement of any candidate.
