Google is truly a marvelous thing. We ask it whatever's on our minds: Who's the coach of the Buffalo Bills? How tall is Barack Obama? How do I spell "circumlocution"?
To answer that last one: Well, maybe. Probably not. And: Who knows.
We did see a spike in search interest for Gov. John Kasich in New Hampshire shortly before the primary in that state in February. Kasich ended up placing a surprising second in that contest, suggesting that people were looking for more information on the governor and then voted for him. But in other states, surprise victories didn't show up on Google's radar.
There's no question, though, that the guy who ended up winning the presidency also won Google searches. According to our analysis of Google Trends data, Donald Trump received at least half of the search traffic for all of the 2016 presidential candidates on 253 of the 360 days through Dec. 25. The lowest percentage of search attention he received was on Feb. 7 -- shortly before the New Hampshire primary -- when he received only about a fifth of all of the searches for the candidates. Mind you, the field was still pretty big at that point, so a fifth isn't bad. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were the only other two candidates who had more than five days where they earned a fifth of all Google searches.
We can illustrate the ebb and flow of the election by plotting how much attention each candidate got over the course of the year. These data are imprecise, pegged to Trump's peak interest in the first and second half of the year. But we still see his dominance -- and how one-off news events can influence the attention people paid to the candidates.
At the outset, people were searching for information about all of the candidates, with Trump at the front of the pack. Sanders consistently attracted more attention than Hillary Clinton.
Jeb Bush didn't really appear on the radar much until mid-February, the point at which he was dropping out. Carly Fiorina, for all of her strong debate performances in 2015, didn't make much of a splash until Ted Cruz identified her as his running mate in a publicity stunt shortly before his campaign collapsed, too.
By June, it was a four-candidate show: Trump, Clinton, Cruz and Sanders. By July, it was down to the two general election candidates, save when past competitors landed speaking gigs at the conventions.
Clinton's most dominant period was in mid-September, when her fainting spell at the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan prompted a flurry of interest in her health. Shortly before Election Day, she took over a majority of searches ... as the letter from FBI director James Comey was made public. In the wake of the election itself, Sanders reemerged, thanks to his appearance in the media and, to some extent, people clearly wondering if he might have prevailed against Trump.
Ben Carson and Rick Perry, mostly non-entities throughout the year, each got a little spike this month when picked for positions with the Trump Cabinet. By the end of the month, Trump was absorbing nearly all of the Google search attention. Not that this doesn't make sense. People want to know what the incoming administration will look like.
In isolation, Google searches actually paint a pretty complete picture of how we got to this point. A big field of Republicans with Trump earning a plurality of the attention. Other Republicans fading while Clinton and Sanders scrapped. A general election face-off in which Trump had an advantage. Reading into it, the story is there -- once we retrofit it to our purposes.
That's the problem. Like a storefront psychic, Google gives us a general sense of what's going on, but an incomplete one until we explain away the rough edges. America wanted to know more about Donald Trump than anyone else on basically every day of the year. (On 347 of the 360 days of data, Trump was the most searched candidate.)
And yet, on Election Day, more voters picked Hillary Clinton.
