Black Lives Matter protests have been dominating my Twitter feed for the past several days. Google Trends data shows a similar trend:
But is it the same experience across the US?
It turns out that interest is strongly related to political affiliation. Here is a scatter plot of Google Trends interest in “Black Lives Matter” at the US state level, compared to the percentage of the vote for Clinton in the 2016 presidential elections.
The fit is pretty remarkable (55%), with states that have more Democrat votes showing more interest in the topic.
State which defy the trend are Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming (more interest in the topic than expected by their voting patterns) and, on the opposing side, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Florida (less interest than expected). Also, anecdotally, the “Related queries” shown by Google Trends in California and Oregon are related to donations to Black Lives Matter, whereas in Mississippi and Florida they are for merchandise.
I also tested interest in the terms “protests” and “looting” across the different states. The former behaves similarly to “Black Lives Matter” while the latter had a similar trend to that of “Black Lives Matter”, only breaking for highly Democrat states, where there was far less interest in looting than expected by the overall trend.
Political scientists may want to theorize if this will change election results, but at least overall the pattern seems to suggest that this is (still?) an issue where interest depends on who you vote for.
Addendum (16 June 2020):
In July 2016 large-scale Black Lives Matter demonstrations were held in 88 cities. Google Trends data from that period (May – July 2016) shows no correlation (R2=0.00) with voting patterns.