Daoud Hipa > Status Update

In the previous three elections, the candidate who appeared first in more searches received the most votes. More interesting, the order the candidates were searched was predictive of which way a particular state would go.

We have found that these seemingly neutral searches may actually give us some clues to which candidate a person supports.
How? The order in which the candidates appear. Our research suggests that a person is significantly more likely to put the candidate they support first in a search that includes both candidates’ names.

During the 2016 election between Trump and Hillary Clinton, some people searched for “Trump Clinton polls.” Others looked for highlights from the “Clinton Trump debate.” In fact, 12 percent of search queries with “Trump” also included the word “Clinton.” More than one-quarter of search queries with “Clinton” also included the word “Trump.”

A similar number of people search for a candidate because they hate him. That said, Stuart Gabriel, a professor of finance at the University of California, Los Angeles, and I have found a surprising clue about which way people are planning to vote. A large percentage of election-related searches contain queries with both candidates’ names.

There might even be information on who they will vote for. Can we really predict which candidate people will vote for just based on what they search? Clearly, we can’t just study which candidates are searched for most frequently. Many people search for a candidate because they love him.