NYU - New York University
10/28/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 10/28/2024 04:32
Yard Signs, Hats, and Shirts—Online Searches Show Division in Preferences for Harris, Trump
Political pundits and journalists have been unpacking polls and early-voting data in an effort to shed light on who will win the 2024 presidential election: Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump.
A team of New York University researchers has taken a different approach. It is looking for electoral answers right in Americans' own front yards by examining online searches of yard signs for this year's major-party candidates.
Since Harris entered the presidential race on July 21, Harris led Trump in yard-sign-related searches, 76% to 24%.
The researchers, part of the Predictive Analytics and AI Research Lab at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, have also studied searches for candidate-related attire. These findings offered a much different result.
From July 21 to mid-October, searches related to "Trump hat" have been two times greater on average than those related to "Harris hat." Trends for "Trump shirts" and "Harris shirts" also show a notable shift over time. From July 21 to August 31, "Harris shirts" searches were trending ahead of "Trump shirts" searches by approximately 15%. However, this trend reversed, with "Trump shirts" leading by 129% from September 1 through October 16.
"If someone is searching for their candidate's yard sign, shirt, hat, flag, or bumper sticker, there is a strong likelihood that they will vote for them," says Anasse Bari, a professor of computer science at the Courant Institute and the study's senior researcher. "While it's uncertain how predictive these behaviors are of election results, search data that supplement traditional election-prediction methods may enhance the accuracy of political forecasts."
Photo credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images.
Photo credit: Michael Vi/Getty Images.
An analysis by the Predictive Analytics and AI Research Lab in the fall of 2020 showed then-candidate Joe Biden leading Trump by 28% in online searches for yard signs.
Yard-Sign Searches
Prior to Harris entering the presidential race on July 21 and after Trump declared his third presidential candidacy on November 15, 2022, yard-sign search results were noticeably different. Beginning in mid-November 2022 and through June 30, 2024, online searches for Trump yard signs led those for Biden signs, 74% to 26%. Notably, the highest interest in Trump yard-sign- search queries occurred the last week of May 2024-coinciding with his May 30 conviction for falsifying business records-and continuing through June 2024.
More recently, searches for Trump signs appear to have been boosted by Elon Musk. Following his October 17 tweet encouraging Trump supporters to display their yard signs ("Most based thing you could do in a Dem neighborhood is put Trump/Vance signs on your lawn"), searches for Trump yard signs surpassed those for Harris yard signs in search volume for the first time-even though Harris sign searches topped those for Trump signs over the longer July-October period.
"If someone is searching for their candidate's yard sign, shirt, hat, flag, or bumper sticker, there is a strong likelihood that they will vote for them. While it's uncertain how predictive these behaviors are of election results, search data that supplement traditional election-prediction methods may enhance the accuracy of political forecasts." Anasse Bari, a professor of computer science at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
Swing-State Searches
The researchers also examined searches in all seven swing states. Their findings showed the following:
- From July 21, 2024 to October 16, 2024 in each of these seven states-Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin-at least 60% of searches were related to "Trump hat" while searches related to "Harris hat" did not exceed 40% in any of them.
- However, searches related to "Harris Walz hat" were at least 84% of the searches in the seven swing states and searches related to "Trump Vance hat" did not exceed 16%-perhaps reflecting interest in the Democratic ticket's camo hat.
The study's other authors included researchers at the Courant Institute's Predictive Analytics and AI Research Group: Charles Wang, Naman Lalit, Yifei Xu, Suryavardan Suresh, Kartik Kanotra, Atmaj Koppikar, Harrison Gao, David Chen, Dev Pant, Anway Agte, and Tomisin Adeye.
Methodology
The study drew from publicly available Google search data and considered a set of search terms and key phrases (e.g., "Harris Yard Sign," "Trump-Vance Yard Sign") to build search indices related to both candidates. During the 2024 elections, the team led by Professor Anasse Bari conducted two additional studies-one on the presidential debate and one on the vice-presidential debate-analyzing big data from microblogs to gauge voter opinion using natural language processing algorithms.