When Americans look for information about politics and elections, one of the first places they turn to is Google and its search engine. The Associated Press and Google Trends have partnered throughout 2024 to present a look at what’s trending among those searches, offering a weekly look at the election-related topics people nationwide and in every state are Googling.
Ranking of election-related topic searches
Search terms are grouped together into overall topics, including those conducted in different languages. For example, “economy” will include “economic growth” and “GDP.” Follow the trends over time to discover what’s rising in the minds of the American electorate … and what’s falling from view.
Google’s data also allows a deeper exploration of search interest, by topic, by location and by time. Pick one of each and the map will show how the topic ranked in terms of interest by state and county during any week this year.
The most searched topics are scaled from 0 to 100, where 100 represents either the most searched topic (in the chart above) or the region with the most searches of a given topic (in the map below). In the map, all other counties are scored in relation to how they compare to the county with the highest search value. Put another way, the bigger the circle, the more people were searching for information about that topic in that state or county that week.
