"How to Change my Vote" Trending on Google

[Pavel Mosko]

There has been a huge spike in people looking into how to "change my vote" in the last few days, especially today. Right now it seems it is only conservative Blogs and news outlets talking about that. During the last debate one of the significant things Trump managed to do was to get Biden to admit to intending on "closing down" the oil industry, which would obviously hit some Democratic blue collar folks very hard. I did some reading while Googling this, 7 states allow you to change your vote if you voted early and I'm pretty sure on of them is PA (my new home state).



“Change My Vote” is Google Trending in PA, FL, NC, MI, GA, TX, WI – After Biden Lies on Fracking & Vows to “Close Down” Oil

 

[( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)]

I hope this doesn't turn out like the Bush/Gore fiasco. What a nightmare.

 

[NerdGirl]

Very interesting.

 

[Triumvirate]

Willing to bet this is about as credible as #Walkaway was

 

[Michie]

There has been a huge spike in people looking into how to "change my vote" in the last few days, especially today. Right now it seems it is only conservative Blogs and news outlets talking about that. During the last debate one of the significant things Trump managed to do was to get Biden to admit to intending on "closing down" the oil industry, which would obviously hit some Democratic blue collar folks very hard. I did some reading while Googling this, 7 states allow you to change your vote if you voted early and I'm pretty sure on of them is PA (my new home state).



“Change My Vote” is Google Trending in PA, FL, NC, MI, GA, TX, WI – After Biden Lies on Fracking & Vows to “Close Down” Oil

I’ve heard several people say in daily life they wished to adjust their ballot.

 

[Triumvirate]

Oh and just to keep a sense of proportion about this, iirc Google Trends only displays relative trends on a term's usage, not absolute trends.

IOW, that term's entry into google might have spiked over the last couple of days - but that still doesn't mean it's a very popular search in absolute numbers, so this whole affair is potentially pretty meaningless without further context.

 

[Michie]

I think there are many people that regret their early vote.

 

[Triumvirate]

I think there are many people that regret their early vote.

That's as maybe, but a spike on Google Trends is not proof of that.

 

[Triumvirate]

This is almost certainly the same manner of nonsense as walkaway was - a storm in a teacup designed to dissuade people who haven't voted yet. Ignore.

 

[Pavel Mosko]

This is almost certainly the same manner of nonsense as walkaway was - a storm in a teacup designed to dissuade people who haven't voted yet. Ignore.

There is the saying that imitation is the highest form of flattery. From what I can tell Walk Away was more than a "Tempest in a teapot" because the Democrats copied it's style and format making their own less successful version on You-tube both as well as having various personalized testimonials of former Republicans at the Democratic convention.

 

[Triumvirate]

There is the saying that imitation is the highest form of flattery. From what I can tell Walk Away was more than a "Tempest in a teapot" because the Democrats copied it's style and format making their own less successful version on You-tube both as well as having various personalized testimonials of former Republicans at the Democratic convention.

Apologies for the initial glibness, it just seemed a little tedious to me that it seemed like Walkaway was basically being tried again - but this is Google Trends, not social media trending, so it's not quite the same thing (can't potentially astroturf a Google trend in quite the same way, as far as I know), and that's my mistake. It is still not much evidence of...much, however.

I'm not sure what year you're referring to with the Democratic copy of Walkaway, but in terms of 2018 - an explicitly DNC run version of the campaign would have been more honest than the astroturfy Walkaway campaign, and in 2018 I'd hardly argue Walkaway was successful given that Republicans lost the House! I'm not sure who these sorts of messages are meant to influence, but they can potentially engender a sense of false security on the same side of the aisle, rather than a sense of dissuasion across the aisle.

 

[Pavel Mosko]

I'm not sure who these sorts of messages are meant to influence, but they can potentially engender a sense of false security on the same side of the aisle, rather than a sense of dissuasion across the aisle.

You are missing the whole point of the Walk Away. This whole thing is kind of like a mix of both an Christian "Come to Jesus" story and an atheist testimony of deconversion only it is about politics and the kinds of thinking and ideology that comes with it. And come to think of it that probably explains why the Democratic version isn't very good ; because they often are largely about disliking Trump, while the Brandon Straka's movement is about this long narrative journey of being raised Democratic, having all your friends be that or more liberal, but just gradually starting to find things that are problematic, don't make sense etc. where you eventually make a big break with the past, probably loose some friends, but with all your various walk away, Red Pill etc. peeps you meet, you start to find some new ones and a community to go with it.

 

[Triumvirate]

You are missing the whole point of the Walk Away. This whole thing is kind of like a mix of both an Christian "Come to Jesus" story and an atheist testimony of deconversion only it is about politics and the kinds of thinking and ideology that comes with it. And that probably is the Democratic ones aren't very good ; because they often are largely about disliking Trump, while the Brandon Straka's movement is about this long narrative journey of being raised Democratic, having all your friends be that or more liberal, but just gradually starting to find things that are problematic, don't make sense etc. where you eventually make a big break with the past, probably loose some friends, but with all your various walk away, Red Pill etc. peeps you meet, you start to find some new ones and a community to go with it.

You're taking a fairly astroturfy hashtag too seriously here I'd say - these things aren't really as important as one might think. A bit like how a single Google trends graph isn't proof of much.

The funniest thing about Walkaway was all these 'Democrats' talking about Dems doing things that were occurring on the right as well - but hey, that's the game

 

[Triumvirate]

So this got me thinking about getting an idea of actual times a term was searched, which Google Trends doesn't automatically give.

Buuuut (back of envelope calculation commencing)

Google does give top 20 searches per region per day, with brackets in terms of absolute search numbers.

Google Trends

Lowest result in the top 20 for October 25 (when 'change my vote' first spiked) is "Sasha Obama" with 50k+ searches, and the next reported bracket on this reporting page for number of searches is 100k+ searches, so let's take that as 'Sasha Obama' getting 50k-100k searches.

Comparing those terms in trends:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now 7-d&geo=US&q=change my vote,sasha obama

At its peak, 'change my vote' got to 40pc the height of 'Sasha obama' at its peak.

Going purely by the height of those peaks, this would suggest if "Sasha Obama" got 50k-100k searches, change my vote got about 40pc of that, so about 20k-40k. Not bad, but over that many states - not huge, either.

But - could still pick up!

 

[Pavel Mosko]

oing purely by the height of those peaks, this would suggest if "Sasha Obama" got 50k-100k searches, change my vote got about 40pc of that, so about 20k-40k. Not bad, but over that many states - not huge, either.

But - could still pick up!

It's not over many states, but over mostly the states that allowed early voting, 7 especially.

 

[Triumvirate]

It's not over many states, but over mostly the states that allowed early voting, 7 especially.

The results will be more than spread out than on those 7, given that most states have had some level of searching for that term, so that 20k-40k will be pretty dispersed. Even averaged out over 7 states, that's 3k-6k per state. Might impact a close race, but hard to say given that there will be multiple competing factors for votes.

But this is one spike, so who knows. And it's been a cool thread to get me thinking about how to measure these sorts of metrics

 

[Triumvirate]

Also at this point, the related searches for 'change my vote' are mostly some variant of 'change my vote trending' which seems like a lot of the related searches are purely about seeing whether this term is trending. When there aren't actually that many google pages up about it - that doesn't seem particular encouraging in terms of how meaningful this trend is.

 

[Kenny'sID]

This is encouraging.

 

[Triumvirate]

Aaaand if I've normalised the results across states (Google gives relative search popularity across states) at most we're looking at at most about 500-1000 searches in some of the states the article names out.

 

[Belk]

After Joe Biden got caught being dishonest in the debates about opposing fracking, the search phrase ‘change my vote’ started trending on Google

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Gosh, the trend has topped out hitting the max of 100 searches. Biden must be running scared now.