New Jersey Governor’s race search trends

Jeff Quinton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:18:55 +0000

The first chart is the past 30 days worth of search trends from New Jersey for Chris Christie, Jon Corzine, and Chris Daggett. I initially compared just Corzine and Christine but noticed Daggett was showing up in rising search trends so I re-did the comparison.

Christie has been getting the most searches in New Jersey over the past month or so. Daggett had a spike earlier in the month. All the candidates had a dip last Saturday on October 24th and now Christie leads Corzine with Daggett in third. Corzine started a slow decrease before that across the board dip that seemed to follow President Barack Obama campaigning for him.

New York is the Metro area with the most searches in New Jersey, with Philadelphia in 2nd. As far as specific cities goes, most of the searches seem to be centered around Newark.

The next chart is the one with national search trends for all three candidates.

Daggett seems to be a little bit farther under the radar nationally at times, but he is also a rising search trend nationally. The dip last week seems to not be so much across the board nationally. It would seem that Corzine dropped last week after Obama’s campaigning for him while the other candidated didn’t fall off that much. Christie is leading searches nationally with Corzine second and Dagget third nationally as well.

The top three states for searches on these three candidates are New York followed by New Jersey and Pennsylvania.The New York metro area is dominating any other metro area nationally in searches.

After reading Doug Heye’s piece on how the Yankees and Phillies facing off in the World Series could impact earned media in the race, I did a comparison of all three candidates that also includes Yankees and Phillies. The chart for that (with searches originating only in New Jersey) is below.

As you can see, compared to searches on Yankees and Phillies, all three candidates have negligible results. Both teams got spikes immediately following their series-winning victory in the respective League Championship Series and then fell off afterward. The Phillies also seemed to enjoy a spike after their Game 1 win last night. Either way, much of New Jersey’s media will be focused on the World Series with either team being the local team for a signifcant number of voters in the state.

OnQ Social Media Consulting » Chris Christie

New Jersey Governor’s race search trends