The Google Election: Biden Surging Late in Pennsylvania and Ohio
In the last 24 hours, the relative Google search interest in Joe Biden has surged in Pennsylvania and Ohio, far outpacing late interest in President Trump.
Across eleven battleground states, Joe Biden has led President Trump consistently in Google Trends search traffic in the final week before Election Day.
When comparing interest in the two candidates, on average over in the last seven days, Biden has received 115% more interest than Trump in each of these eleven states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada.
As seen below, in the last 24 hours, Biden’s search traffic has surged in Pennsylvania to 153% Trump’s — +34 points compared to his 7-day average in PA — and in Ohio to 127% Trump’s, which is +12 points over the last week in OH.
Search traffic for Biden and Trump is more equal in the last 24 hours in many of the other battlegrounds.
Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania searches includes a lead all PA media markets save the Elmira (NY) DMA which happens to cover the author’s home in rural Bradford County, but even here Trump only has a lead of 104%.
In PA, Biden’s strongest media markets by search volume are Pittsburgh, Youngstown (OH), Harrisburg and Philadelphia.
Similarly, in Ohio Biden interest surpasses Trump in all media markets:
This story is the latest in an older series looking at Google Trends data, which began in the early part of the 2020 Democratic primary campaign before I went to work for Aisle 518 Strategies in part to run digital advertising for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 effort. Find the rest of those older posts on my Medium profile here and follow me on Twitter here.
