'Did Joe Biden Drop Out' Google Searches Spike on Election Night, Suggesting Many Americans Had No Idea He Wasn't Running
'Did Joe Biden Drop Out' Google Searches Spike on Election Night, Suggesting Many Americans Had No Idea He Wasn't Running
Not to defend the American public, who does not deserve any defense in the slightest, but...
I have a friend in advertising who specializes in Google SEO, and he pointed out this will include searches that contain the phrase as a subset of the search, such as "When did Joe Biden drop out" or "Why did Joe Biden drop out".
Right, "did Biden drop out" had a spike as seen in the first picture below. It's hard to tell magnitude. When comparing to another phrase, it's easy to see that the spike wasn't even close to the spike for another election day phrase: 'who is Kamala?'
Also searches I wish voters had done at least 24 hours before the most important election in my lifetime
Also does not include amounts. It’s easy to cause a spike in results when there aren’t many to begin with.
The spike when you zoom out to the past year:
There are uninformed voters for sure, but always be suspicious of stories that confirm your biases a bit too much.
Going off the bars that's roughly 1/8 or 12.5% of the peak. Not what I would consider small.
It’s not nothing for sure, but statistically it’s almost impossible that all of that represents uninformed voters. Children and people ineligible to vote can also do internet searches. So with that in mind, to my eye this doesn’t represent that a significant portion of the voting public had no idea Biden wasn’t running before Election Day.
That's in line with the Brexit vote in the UK.
"What is Brexit? What is the European Union?"
This is the country with the nukes, subs, carriers, and troops in everybody else's backyard.
Europe and the rest of NATO, I think y'all need to figure your shit out without us. Make plans now.
This has to be the biggest fumble of all time lmfao
I mean short of running ads on football games that literally just said "Joe Biden, our current sitting president who took office after Donald Trump, has stepped down from running for a second term. Kamala Harris, our current VP is now the Democrat nominee"...actually...scratch that, maybe they should have done just that.
I think one of the problems with Harris was that she actually believes that the American people are smart, capable, pragmatic folks with a penchant for helping others. That may have been partially true about some subsection of Americans at some point in time in the past, but 40+ straight years of institutional rot and attention attacks from an increasingly shitty and incoherent media ecosystem have taken their toll.
That's exactly what they should have done.
Everyone keeps writing up/sharing/posting this article, but no one has any actual numbers of search results. The 100 line is just a representation of when it was searched over the past thirty days. It's not a representation of how many people actually searched it. That 100 mark could have just been 20 people for all we know.
You cannuse the Glimpse extension for Google Trends to see absolute values of search popularity.
11% of what it was the day he dropped out
Yeah, and how much was that day? Still a pretty meaningless percentage when there isn't a real number to see. You can at least assume it was well over 20 people, based on that.
"Where's Joe? Kamawho? Doh I guess I'll just vote for Trump, I liked cheaper gas"
It's not that uncommon for people to block all that stuff out for personal reasons. Lemmy itself has some users that intentionally filter out all political stuff from their feed. I don't agree with it, but there's a lot of people like that.
Some people call this 'elaborate repression mechanism' or 'retirement into private life'.
I don't like suppressing emotions because suppressed emotions happen to come back at unexpected times in weird places.
Today for the first time in my life I've blocked keywords Trump and MAGA on Lemmy. Also took down my funny user handle. The world feels too real and too unsafe for funny monikers and constantly seeing the fuhrer's face again for half a decade. I'm not ready.
"If it's important someone will tell me about it" is such an infuriatingly common position.
Unfortunately that is not how those graphs are plotted.
I kind of understand why they want to get rid of elections. It feels a bit futile with this crowd.
So that's why I had to vote for Biden as a write-in candidate!
Lmfao. America deserves this.
this could be very sensationalist because as far as I know, we have no idea what the absolute numbers are, the trend is measured in percentages:
Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.
So it's true that the peak is today, but that could be only a few people. Considering most of October the daily number was "0" (not enough data), I'm guessing the absolute numbers are fairly low. Anyone know how many datapoints google needs to publish data on trends?
It's 11% of what it was in late July if that helps
This fact alone is so awesome about America. To be fair, I know very little about the UK government. I keep my voting strategy simple: whoever is proposing to get rid of first past the post closely followed by whoever is proposing more bicycle infrastructure. Failing that, whoever I think is going to lose.
There are tools that help you decide how to vote. Waiting until the day comes and searching Joe Biden is hilarious.
Most of those searches were Biden
He didn't drop out tho. He was forced out by the uncommitted movement due to his genocide in Gaza
This is borderline as ill informed as the people that didn't know he dropped out at all...
This asshat is a professional troll, people, please don’t pay any attention to them.
I just got back from drowning my sorrows into a patty melt at a local bar I frequent. I normally go at night, so the daytime servers were new to me. Got a 40ish year-old lady server who was overworked because everywhere is understaffed now. I asked for some tea because I hadn't had caffeine yet, and she looks at me puzzled and says, "like hot tea?" And I say "Yes! Black please, but green is ok too if you don't have it." And she looked at me, still confused, and said, "Well i don't know what that is, but we have regular hot tea I can bring you with some hot water." After she left to put in my order, I couldn't stop thinking about this exchange.
This article gives me the same exact feeling. Whatever is happening that allows adult women SERVERS to be unfamiliar with one of the most popular drinks on the planet. Whatever allowed it so so many people didn't even realize Biden had dropped out...is the reason we lost to trump. It's the reason Democrat weren't able to break through on any issue. We were either talking to brick walls, or black holes. It's no ones fault but that servers that she was unaware of black tea. You can't force people to be intellectually curious or skeptical or even open minded. And these same people get to vote. And that's why we can't have nice things.
It's an education system and culture problem. You can't force a 40-year-old woman to be curious and critical, but you can plant the seed and encourage the growth of those skills and behaviors in children. That confusion at hearing something different followed by the attitude of putting it in a box and dismissing it ("I don't know what that is, but we have regular hot tea") comes from a lifetime of being told to accept whatever over simplified answer they are told and be quiet whenever they ask questions.
considering how stridently the Republican Party has been attacking public education for the past 50 years or so, this is a predictable result. They don't need every American to be incurious and shallow, they just need enough to tilt elections in their favor.
And that's exactly why Project 2025 states their desire to get rid of the Dept of Education.
Fostered and inculcated by the plethora of churches across the land, who also DON'T PAY TAXES. They are a cancer, rotting us from within.
I volunteered with a group to drive people to the polls. One of the ladies I drove was black and not quite elderly, still obviously working a full time job. On our way back from the polling place and after we chatted about what time we'd know the results, she asked, "Do people in Africa get to vote for President, too?" And no, she didn't mean the President of Africa. She was sincerely asking if people in Africa get to vote in US elections.
There is a profound level of ignorance in this country, and it's so staggering as to be utterly paralyzing. I honestly don't know where we go from here as a nation, and I fear folks like that will be the first casualties if the worst comes to pass.
I mean, TECHNICALLY, if you're a US Citizen in Africa, yeah, you can vote absentee for President.
One of my co-workers had to move to Algeria and was working remotely, pretty sure he still voted.
I mean, as deeply saddening as this sounds, the reality of it is...that issue will resolve it self. Ignorance is bliss...you won't even know what hit you. And i'm beginning to think i should take that stance and just ignore everything and just carry on. Told a friend that, he immediately said, nope, you're way too decent of a human being for that...so we're going to suffer together.
I was once teaching a student introductory programming when I was in my undergrad.
The problem was to draw two circles on the screen of different colours and detect when the mouse is inside of one.
I said, "So our goal is simple: Let's draw a circle somewhere on the screen. Consider what you'd tell me as a human - I've got the pencil, and you want to tell me to draw a circle of a certain size somewhere on this paper. We have three functions. Calling a function will draw a shape. Each function draws a different shape. We have rect(), circle(), and line(). Which of these sounds like the one we want to use? Which would get me to draw the correct shape?"
".... Rect?" "Why?" "It draws a shape." "What shape would rect draw?" "I don't know." "Guess." "A circle?" "Why do you think that?" "We need to draw a circle." "If I said that rect draws a rectangle, which of the three functions would we want to use then, to draw our picture?" "Rect?"
I've now been teaching for many years, and those situations still come up a lot. When I put up a poll in class, with the answer still written on the board, about 25% of people in a 100+ student class will get it wrong - of people who were not only admitted to a competitive university program, but have passed multiple prerequisite courses to be here.
Not only is it unknown gaps in knowledge, there is just a thought process I haven't been able to crack through that some people really can't see what is immediately before them.
Some people are apparently incapable of learning anything except by rote. To them, every problem or situation has one solution, and they have no answer for any situation that has not previously been explicitly spelled out to them and the solution memorized, and failing that they not only won't know what to do but they flat out won't even try. There is no such thing as figuring out a new solution to anything based on logic or deduction. In any process, they will refuse to understand how the result is actually derived from the actions taken, nor what each step does or why it is done.
I've had to work with several people like this over the years and it's both exhausting and infuriating.
In my line of work I have also been forced to interact with people, mostly clients, who cannot understand hypotheticals. Any abstract or non-concrete concept is completely lost on them and worse, usually exposing them to one will make them irrationally angry in response -- which they will immediately direct at you, you nerd.
These people are not only allowed to vote, but also drive cars, own firearms, and have children. It's shocking.
I struggle to think of what to call it and how to describe it, too. But it really is like a consistent quality. Some sort of reasoning blindness. It's like listening to someone who is colorblind but doesn't know critique a painting.
Get rect. ;)
I got angry reading this. These people should not be allowed to vote on anything.
I deal with adults like this every day at my workplace. Can’t think, can’t reason, can’t troubleshoot, can’t read documentation, can’t even frame their problem correctly- let alone come up with a solution. Its insanity.
Gods, I feel this so hard. I rose to a management position in a pretty short time for doing, like, what I consider to be the absolute bare minimum of learning how to do the job and solving problems on my own.
I have a worker under me now who has been doing that position for longer than I did at this point and still comes to ask me questions that are basic fundamentals of the job.
This makes me really appreciate my current employer, which actually vets people pretty stringently. It's not 100% effective - nothing is - but by and large, I'm working with a lot of creative critical thinkers every day, many making me feel like a buffoon.
I have a coworker who has been with my company as long as I've been in this entire career that we are both in. Between the two of us, I am the expert, because if something goes one iota off the rails, she can't handle/process it. This is a problem because shit goes off the rails ALL THE TIME in our business. How she hasn't figured out how to handle that in 15 years, I don't know
You can’t force people to be intellectually curious, but you can absolutely foster it. The hierarchy of needs is probably totally relevant here; if you want people to be personally invested in developing their brains they need to be and feel physically secure. Unfortunately the USA’s ruling class knows they only have money to lose if more people are educated or desire to become more educated so the education system will continue to rot and we won’t get over that hump.
I need to know what happened after that exchange. Like, after you burned the place down, did the fire department piss on it while high-fiving each other?
It was a pretty bad visit. I ordered ranch with my fries, and my patty melt with only American cuz i don't know why you'd want swiss on a patty melt. They brought me the melt with swiss, and I got blue cheese for my fries. And didn't get a water until i was finished with my melt.
Tipped her 10$ cuz she was overworked and I used to be a server. Yay tip culture.
american culture is such that polite conversations do not permit the topics of religion, sex and politics to be discussed. as a result: evangelicals dominate our political trajectory, abortion is now illegal again; and people didn't know that biden dropped out.
there are also different levels of ignorance when it comes to each topic and it sounds like you've encountered one that's at a slightly deeper level than that of your standard american voter.
Plain ignorance is part of it, but I really don't think it's the driving factor. You don't vote for Trump because you lack some key knowledge, no matter how trivial that knowledge is. You vote for him because you've been inundated with conservative media for decades, and you have no grasp on reality anymore. You really believe Harris is going to hold you at gunpoint and replace your gas heaters with electric. You really believe she's going to sell the United States to China for a hundred bucks. You might even believe there's a war on men, a war on your religion, a war on everything that brings you meaning to your life. If I truly believed the things that conservative media was saying, I'd vote for him too.
It's not just ignorance. It's brainwashing.
A brain that's been washed would qualify as ignorant, for me
I never you. I've had to force myself to be able to eat anything since Tuesday night. I'm so furious with my country.
That's not the reason we lost. It's because our party don't do shit. That's it. Everyone is afraid of what trump is going to do but what was done to prevent it? Nothing. We have a weak party with weak politicians.
So if the party did more, people wouldn't be googling "is the current president running for president?" the day before election? I don't really see how the party trying harder in the right way would fix people's innate ignorance.
The DNC deserves a ton of blame, but 2024 has taught me there is no democracy without an educated population, and ours is not educated.
What would they need to do to prevent it?
... why would a server at a bar need to know about tea? is it part of required knowledge for her workplace? no, its a BAR. you know about black or green tea, probably because it was a common drink with family and/or friends. if somebody else was raised in a different, tea-free family, and without tea-guzzling friends, at what point would they have been like "woah, i have to look into this whole tea thing" before working at the bar (where tea definitely isnt part of the training).
lets be honest, the reason you know about tea and she doesnt has nothing to do with intellectual curiosity. so take that high horse behind the barn and shoot it in the head, you wont need it anymore.
Tea is a globally consumed drink that predates the country that made the country she's from, so "let's be honest" there's no excuse. It's nearly as severe as never having heard of pepper.
If you don’t know what black tea is, you go behind the barn and get shot.
They serve breakfast? Long island iced teas?