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Google searches spiked for Harris and Trump policies on the eve of Election Day

Google searches spiked for Harris and Trump policies on the eve of Election Day

Further searches Google for the vice president’s policies Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump have risen sharply as voters head to the polls on Election Day.

Growth on Google Trends appeared for phrases like “Kamala Harris’s policies” and “Donald Trump’s interview” just hours before voters made their final choice for who to vote for their White House.

States like Utah and Georgia saw particularly large increases in searches involving Harris’ positions on education and immigration. Third Party Candidates like Chase Oliver, who is running for the Libertarian Party and Cornel Westhave seen significant increases in search interest.

Interest spikes began around November 1st and steadily climbed in the final stages of the campaign.

North Carolina and Georgia are both critical and poll states shows both extremely close between the two candidates. Those two states were among the top Internet traffic related to the political positions of Trump and Harris.

Georgia early voting
Voters cast their ballots in Georgia’s primary election at a polling place on May 21, 2024, in Atlanta. Searches for the two candidates’ political positions spiked on election day.

Getty Images

Interest in Harris and Trump was similar, with both candidates receiving one high number of Google searches after November 3rd.

The swing states that polled the most for Trump were Arizona and North Carolina, while the swing states that polled the most for Harris were Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada.

Given that the election will be extremely close, undecided voters on election day it could be the difference between a Harris or Trump victory.

While the search terms indicate that some voters are still undecided about who they want to vote for, millions of Americans have already made that choice. More than 70 million voters have cast their vote earlyeither in person or using a postal ballot.

Early voting figures from the University of Florida Election Lab show that 42,664,880 people voted early in person, while 35,376,421 mail-in ballots were returned as of Monday, Nov. 4.

However, this figure is almost half of the total of 158.4 million votes cast in the 2020 election, which saw millions of voters using alternative methods due to the COVID pandemic.

Early voting numbers were particularly high in swing states that saw the largest increases in these search terms, with over half of Georgia already casting their vote.

Similarly, over 4.4 million North Carolinians have already voted before Election Day, meaning Google’s trends may not be indicative of undecided voters in these states.

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