There’s no way to determine who won last night’s GOP debate because of how subjective that is, but we can still see which of the Republican Presidential candidates were the most popular during the debate. Throughout the entire debate, Google was keeping track of how many people were searching for each candidate and has gathered the results into a neat little visualization that gives us am idea of which of the candidates was the most popular.
The 2016 election is still far away, and it’s a crowded field of 17 candidates. But you can easily see who generated the most audience interest in the debates tonight, according to Google search trends. During the time of the debate, the top five candidates by searches were Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. Rounding out the list, in order: John Kasich, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee. Earlier in the evening, Carly Fiorina dominated search traffic during the undercard debate. General consensus on social media was that Fiorina won the “happy hour debate,” with this Google traffic as evidence. The most notable spike from a candidate besides Fiorina, however, was by Lindsey Graham. The surge in Google searches for Graham happened around the time he spoke about his personal background, when both of his parents died in his early twenties and he relied on Social Security.
