Politics & Elections Blog: November 2010

Searching across the campaign trail

Monday, November 1, 2010

Here at Google we’ve seen a rise in searches about candidates and key political issues throughout the 2010 U.S. election cycle. We used Insights for Search and Google Trends to gather top candidate searches and a few regional highlights.

Top 10 most searched for candidates in Google News in the U.S. in October 2010

Meg Whitman
Harry Reid
Rand Paul
Jerry Brown
Sharron Angle
Carl Paladino
Linda McMahon
Nancy Pelosi
Patty Murray
Charlie Crist

Here’s what the top five look like for the last 30 days:

To see what some of the most popular search terms and videos have been across the country, we ran the numbers for a few major markets and political hotspots:

Los Angeles

While Meg Whitman dominated searches during the week of Oct. 18, searches for Jerry Brown increased on Tuesday, Oct. 26, and have since been neck-and-neck with searches for Whitman. (Source)
In the Los Angeles area, news searches for Whitman and Brown are also neck-and-neck. (Source)
Searches for Carly Fiorina are at their highest point of the year, just above the point where they were around the time of the June primary. (Source)
Google News searches for Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina have been rising since Oct. 20. (Search)
Searches for “health care” in the Los Angeles area peaked on Oct. 26. Angelenos are searching for information about immigration and health care more than information about the economy. (Source)
The most-viewed YouTube video in the race for U.S. Senate is Carly Fiorina’s Hot Air: The Movie.
The most-viewed YouTube video in the gubernatorial race is Jerry Brown’s Whitman: Why I Came to California.

San Francisco Bay Area

In the last week, more San Franciscans have been searching for information about Jerry Brown than Meg Whitman. Search traffic for both began rising significantly on Oct. 25, just over a week before the election. (Source)
Meg Whitman leads the Bay Area (and the nation!) for the most searches in Google News. (Source)
Searches for Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina are at their highest point of the entire year, aside from the time period around the June primary. (Source)
In the Bay Area, “health care” became a more popular search term than “economy” last week.
The most-viewed YouTube video in race for the U.S. Senate is Carly Fiorina’s Hot Air: The Movie.
The most-viewed YouTube video in the California gubernatorial race is Jerry Brown’s Whitman: Why I Came to California.

Chicago

In the gubernatorial race, Bill Brady is leading searches in the Chicago area. Searches for both Brady and Pat Quinn began rising significantly at the beginning of October. Searches for Brady are at their highest point of the year. (Source)
In the Senate race, October searches for Mark Kirk peaked on Oct. 26, and searches for Alexi Giannoulias peaked on Oct. 20. (Source)
Over the past month, Chicagoans have been searching for information about issues such as health care, immigration, and the economy more often than either gubernatorial candidate. (Source)
Searches for “absentee ballot” began rising in late September as Chicagoans searched for information about Illinois’ new absentee voting law. Searches for this term peaked on Oct. 26. (Source)

Miami

Searches for gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink have hit their highest point since the August 24 primary. Searches for Rick Scott are at their second-highest point of the year since the primary. (Source)
In Florida’s Senate race, searches for Marco Rubio are at their highest point of the year. Searches for Charlie Crist and Kendrick Meek are at their second-highest points of the year. (Source)
In October, searches for information about immigration peaked on Oct. 26, but searches for information about health care started falling the previous day. (Source)
This month, Miami-area searches for “tea party” peaked on Oct. 21. (Source)
The most-viewed YouTube video in the U.S. Senate race is Marco Rubio’s A Generational Choice.
The most-viewed YouTube video in Florida’s gubernatorial race is Rick Scott’s Obama’s Mosque.

New York

In the gubernatorial race, searches for Andrew Cuomo are currently at their highest point of the year. Searches for Carl Paladino reached their highest point of the year on Oct. 11. (Source)
Searches for U.S. Senate candidates Chuck Schumer and Jay Townsend are steadily on the rise. Throughout much of the campaign, New Yorkers have been more likely to search for information about Chuck Schumer, but last week, Townsend surpassed Schumer in search popularity. (Source)
New Yorkers continue to search for more information about Senate special election candidate Kirsten Gillibrand than her opponent Joe DioGuardio. Searches for Gillibrand peaked on Oct. 20 and 21. (Source)
Over the past three months, New Yorkers have consistently searched for more information about immigration and health care than information about the economy.
Searches for “tea party” are nearly at their highest point for the month of October. (Source)

You can also read about more election-related search and video stats on the Official Google Blog and YouTube’s CitizenTube blog.

And don’t forget to vote tomorrow!

Posted by Ginny Hunt, Elections & Public Sector Team

The 2010 election on YouTube: By the numbers

Monday, November 1, 2010

(Cross-posted from YouTube's CitizenTube blog)

In these 2010 midterm elections, campaigns, voters, and interest groups have continued to innovate new ways to share their political opinions on YouTube. Because YouTube is a platform where anyone can post and share videos globally, you’ve made this platform the vanguard of the political media discussion. Some of these efforts to influence the political dialog on YouTube were more successful than others. Today, we’re sharing who emerged on top of the YouTube elections heap - and we’re going strictly by the numbers.

The top 10 most-viewed videos, sourced from all videos categorized as “News & Politics" on YouTube, are a mixed bag of official campaign videos, user-generated content and videos from interest groups:

1. Congressman Assaults Student on Sidewalk

2. We Are Better than That

3. America Rising - An Open Letter to Democrat Politicians

4. President Obama, No One is Laughing in Arizona

5. Language

6. Brewer to Obama: Warning Signs are not Enough

7. Those Voices Don’t Speak for the Rest of Us

8. FCINO: Fiscal Conservative in Name Only

9. Governor Christie Responds to Teacher During Town Hall

10. Arizona Sing-A-Long: Read Immigration Law!

Interestingly, every video in the top ten comes from the Republicans, which is quite a departure from 2008. In addition, immigration was an extremely hot topic on YouTube this year - three out of ten of the most-viewed videos are about the Arizona immigration law (2 came from AZ Governor Jan Brewer).

Now, let’s take a look specifically at the 450 candidates for public office who registered for official Politician channels on YouTube this fall. Here’s a rundown of the top 10 most-viewed Politician channels on YouTube in the last month:

Leading the pack is Christine O’Donnell whose “I’m You” video inspired hundreds of thousands of views... and quite a few parodies. Here's the original:

YouTube Insight allows us to see where the view counts were coming for any individual video. For example, parodies of O’Donnell’s “I’m You” video (like the Gregory Brothers’ “Songify This," above) received millions more views than O’Donnell’s original campaign video nationally, but Insight shows us that O’Donnell still received more views in the state of Delaware than any parody video.

Similarly, the memorable “Why” video from the #2 politician on the list, Kentucky Senate candidate Jack Conway, shows that he too, did an effective job of targeting the voters in his state - even though the video went viral nationally.

Stay tuned tomorrow for more YouTube and Google video and trends data, during our special Election Night coverage with CBS News.

Handy tools to help Americans vote

Monday, November 1, 2010

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

As Americans gear up for the midterm elections on November 2, we wanted to share a few tools that make it easier to gather voting information.

When you search on Google for [polling place] or [where to vote], you’ll see a search box to help you find your polling place, candidates, and local election office. Just type in the home address where you’re registered to vote. The search looks like this:

This feature is powered by the Google Election Center, an experimental service that lets election officials provide data directly to Google in order to create a set of search tools. Anyone with a website can also provide this same functionality by embedding the open source Election Center gadget on your site, or use the gadget code or API to build your own.

And you don’t need to be at your computer to easily find this information. If you’d rather get it on your mobile device, we’ve also created a mobile landing page: m.google.com/elections.