In the latest Google Trends report related to the California Gubenatorial Election and Tuesday’s California Primary, Former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D) California has moved into a tie for second place in search intensity with Californa GOP Assemblyman Travis Allen of Huntington Beach – both have 38. The front-runner, Democratic California Liutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, is way ahead by a more-than comfortable margin with a search intensity ranking of 92. Meanwhile, California Controller John Chiang (D) rests at 26, and John H. Cox, who was the darling of President Donald Trump, is now at 5, after registering a 6.
In this author’s first post on this, Allen was in second place and Villaraigosa was third, but the pair of public officials were trading places over the past two weeks. Now, they’re tied.
This flies directly in the face of news reports from the The Sacramento Bee and The LA Times, and referring to the latest-to-date poll by the UC Berkeley Intergovernmental Studies Program. That poll reported that Mr. Cox was in second place over all candidates at 18 percent, and with Newsom at 30 percent.
A number of observers, from Huffington Post Political Blogger Matt Dabrowski to Internet Marketing Consultant Jim Stewart of StewArt Media, Marketing Communications Consultant Tony Wright, and others, have noted the vaue of Google Trends as a near-election-day predictor of voting outcomes. Mr. Stewart has said that Google Trends predicted the U.S. Presidential Election outcome going back to 2004. Google Trends also got right the Hillary Clinton clobbering of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 California Primary, where she had a 30 versus Sanders 16 for June 2016, and before the 2016 June Primary.
At the time of January 7th, 2008, when Erick Schonfeld, then of the blog TechCrunch, and a spokesperson at TechCrunch events, asked the question “If more people are searching on Google for “Obama” than “McCain” does that mean he is more likely to win the election?”, Google was not in wide use to the point where its very name became a verb; today, it’s common to say “I googled it” rather than “I conducted an Internet search..”
That means we have a much larger pool of Google users from which to draw search engine data from, and so many that this author argues its as perfect a representation as we have of what an entire population of people might do in some kind of election: from the Presidential Election to Dancing With The Stars, and the California Gubenatorial Race.
Here’s the Google Trends chart…
And my Zennie62 on YouTube video on its results:
Stay tuned for more updates of this kind up to the June 5th California Primary.