{"id":8174,"date":"2017-07-05T14:00:39","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T18:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=8174"},"modified":"2017-07-05T07:52:00","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T11:52:00","slug":"what-can-we-learn-about-2018-from-google-trends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=8174","title":{"rendered":"What Can We Learn About 2018 from Google Trends?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n

A fascinating, but rather depressing, article in Vox<\/a> makes the following allegation: political scientists can learn as much, or more, about political sentiment from Google Trends<\/a> as they can from polls.\u00a0 The reason?\u00a0 People are more honest with Google in their search behavior than they are with pollsters.\u00a0 Subjects that they might never admit would be of interest are in fact searched when no one is watching!\u00a0 Search data may not tell us which candidate will get the most votes.\u00a0 But it can tell us what voters are thinking about when they head to the ballot box.\u00a0 And that is definitely politically relevant.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s do an exercise using Google search trends by people in Maryland over the last twelve months.\u00a0 First, let\u2019s look at searches on five issues that Democrats often run on: public schools, transportation, health care, climate change and diversity.\u00a0 The chart below shows relative search frequency on each of these terms.\u00a0 The horizontal axis shows weeks over time.\u00a0 The vertical axis shows search frequency as an index relative to the peak of the most popular search term in the data set (which is set at 100).\u00a0 In this issue set, public schools wins out, with an average search index of 22 out of 100.\u00a0 Health care gets 20, followed by climate change (18), transportation (11) and diversity (8).<\/p>\n

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Next, let\u2019s look at five issues that Republicans often run on: guns, taxes, illegal immigration, crime and terrorism.\u00a0 Taxes is number one here, with an average search index of 37 out of 100.\u00a0 Crime gets 25, followed by guns (19), terrorism (3) and illegal immigration (1).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s compare the top two Democratic issues (public schools and health care) to the top two Republican issues (taxes and crime).\u00a0 Public schools wins this set with an average search index of 24, followed by taxes (15), crime (10) and health care (8).\u00a0 The fact that public schools gets a higher search index than taxes would seem to be good news for Democrats.<\/p>\n

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There is another search term that rivals these four: Donald Trump.\u00a0 When Trump is inserted into the mix, he gets an average search index of 17 for the past twelve months, followed by public schools (13), taxes (8), crime (6) and health care (5).\u00a0 Much of this is due to spikes in Trump interest around the general election and the inauguration, although he has held his own against the other search terms for most of this year.<\/p>\n

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So should Trump-chanting Democrats celebrate?\u00a0 Not so fast.\u00a0 There is a politically relevant search term that trumps Trump: jobs.\u00a0 A straight-up comparison between jobs and Trump shows the former search term blowing away the Tweeter in Chief 54-17.\u00a0 That three-to-one edge held up roughly the same in the Baltimore and Washington metro areas and on the Eastern Shore.\u00a0 In fact, the only time in which Trump had more searches in Maryland than jobs was around the general election.<\/p>\n

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What does all this mean?\u00a0 Maybe not much.\u00a0 Google Trends is a very new source of data subject to much interpretation.\u00a0 It has almost none of the mathematical science built around it that polling has. \u00a0That said, here\u2019s a suggestion.\u00a0 Donald Trump is indeed on the minds of Marylanders.\u00a0 But they are thinking much more about jobs.\u00a0 To the extent that Trump fixation detracts from the Democrats\u2019 ability to promulgate a positive economic message, Governor Larry Hogan will benefit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco. A fascinating, but rather depressing, article in Vox makes the following allegation: political scientists can learn as much, or more, about political sentiment from Google Trends as they can from polls.\u00a0 The reason?\u00a0 People are more honest with Google in their search behavior than they are with pollsters.\u00a0 Subjects that they might … Continue reading What Can We Learn About 2018 from Google Trends?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[151],"tags":[1545,1426,990],"class_list":["post-8174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-pagnucco","tag-adam-pagnucco","tag-donald-trump","tag-google"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-27Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8174"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8184,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8174\/revisions\/8184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}