Week 5 - 540

I found the Google Trends/Insights assignment really interesting and found myself spending considerably more time there than I needed to, just because I couldn't stop digging around.

With politics on my mind, I decided to have a look at how the recall movement was going. My project that got going in my head was that if you could see at what rate recall traffic had happened in the past, you could compare it to current recall traffic and see if it compared.

I began looking for data from the last known successful recall of a governor, which happened to be Gray Davis. This is where I ran into my first problem, which was Gray Davis was recalled in 2003, which happens to be the year before Google started following this sort of data.

My second question was then, which recall efforts would have the most success? Those against the Republicans or those against the missing Democrats. From this I found that the traffic of searches recall and Republican was much greater than those of Recall and Democrats. To me this indicated that the recall efforts against the Republicans would have more traction than those against Democrats.

I did come upon one problem with this, which is the search amounts when I got into smaller regions of Wisconsin was often times too small to see much in the way of difference, whereas when I search in the Madison area, the volume was much greater. This concerned me because those recalls weren't going to be happening in Madison, but rather in La Crosse, or Green Bay or Wausau areas. My concern is that Madison is skewing the traffic and I'm not sure if the sentiments are the same in other parts of the state? Regardless I really enjoyed this tool, and am making it a regular part of the online work.