Democratic Search Data/Delegate Counts

The above is a quick and dirty chart that illus­trates how Google search data for each can­di­date com­pares to each oth­er. It also includes the pledged del­e­gate count in order to show how key races  influ­enced search his­to­ry.  Some notes:

• I was sur­prised to see Bernie Sanders so far ahead in Google search­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly as ear­ly as the Iowa Cau­cus. In general,
• In gen­er­al, see­ing Bernie Sanders ahead in search data was sur­pris­ing. I sup­pose that could be attrib­uted to the pop­u­la­tion not know­ing as much about Sanders as Clin­ton, and con­se­quent­ly look up to find out more information.
• Since the nar­ra­tive has been that Sanders does not get media atten­tion, I’d be curi­ous to see how his men­tions on major news out­lets cor­re­sponds to the Google search data
• The rela­tion­ship between primaries/caucuses and a can­di­date’s search vol­ume was as expect­ed. Search vol­ume peaks around con­tests. Addi­tion­al­ly, days where Bernie does well (New Hamp­shire 2/9, Michi­gan 3/8, Wash­ing­ton 3/2) his search data surges, and the same hap­pens with Clinton

Method:

All the data was grabbed from the 2016 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Pri­ma­ry Wiki Page and Google Trends. The data was fed into R, and lat­er plot­ted using Plot­ly.