Google Trends Searches During the 2020 Vice Presidential Debate: the Fly, Pink Eye, and More
After Americans tuned in to watch the 2020 vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris on Oct. 7, 2020, much of what was discussed in regards to the debate was about Mike Pence’s eye discoloration and the fly on his head.
Immediately after the debate, the fly on Pence’s head was trending on Twitter, which shifted the conversation from the candidate’s policies and responses to the fly. Viewers also couldn’t help but notice the red discoloration on Pence’s left eye, which they referred to as a ‘pink eye.’
But before we discuss the fly and Pence’s ‘pink eye,’ let’s focus on the candidates themselves — Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. Specifically, let’s look at a Google Trends graphic that compares the number of searches between Harris and Pence.
This graphic displays the frequency of Google searches for Kamala Harris (blue) and Mike Pence (red) between the dates of Saturday, Oct. 4 and Sunday, Oct. 10, which is the entire week that the debate took place in.
Based on the graphic, the value for searches was extremely low early in the week, but then had a slight increase on the day of the debate. After that, the searches for both candidates rose drastically and peaked the day after the debate, then decreased at about the same rate until Oct. 9.
What’s interesting about this graphic is that there are much more searches for Harris than there are searches for Pence; this is interesting because Mike Pence is more well-known by Americans than Kamala Harris because he is the vice president of the U.S.; thus, this graphic makes sense because Harris yielded more searches because people were trying to find out more about her.
In addition, Harris perhaps garnered more searches than Pence in that time period because Harris has been one of three women to become a female major-party vice-presidential nominee, which is rare considering that most nominees have been men.
Now, let’s dive deeper into the discussion regarding the fly and the pink eye. First, to provide context for the following graphic, the fly incident happened during the debate when a fly landed on Pence’s head and stayed there for about two minutes. In terms of Pence’s ‘pink eye,’ White House doctors suggested that the eye discoloration was actually the result of a broken blood vessel.
Now, let’s look at a Google Trends graphic that compares the number of searches between the terms ‘fly on mike pence’ and ‘pink eye.’
Similar to the previous graphic, this one displays the frequency of Google searches for ‘fly on mike pence’ (blue) and ‘pink eye’ (red) between the dates of Saturday, Oct. 4 and Sunday, Oct. 10, which is the entire week that the debate took place in.
Also, similar to the previous graphic, the searches for both terms were very low early in the week, but then rose during the day of the debate and peaked the day after. What’s surprising about this graphic is that the ‘pink eye’ term yielded significantly more searches than ‘fly on mike pence’; this is surprising because the fly was discussed on social media more than Pence’s ‘pink eye. But after some consideration, it makes sense that the ‘fly on mike pence’ term yielded fewer searches because it is such a specific search term compared to the broad ‘pink eye’ term.
Interestingly, on the Google Trends page for the fly and pink eye graphic, the webpage provided a list of popular searches that were related to the ‘pink eye’ term; one of these searches was “is pink eye a symptom of covid 19.”; thus, this search term illustrates people’s concerns in regards to COVID-19. Also, this search term was perhaps popular because President Trump tested positive for COVID-19 a week prior to the debate, and viewers could have likely speculated that Pence had it, too, based on his discolored eye.