![]() Just accounting for other joke telling (which is interesting in itself, here are the multivariate results:īlonde provides the best fit but they all are still pretty good with the innocuous jokes controlled. The bivariate correlations with the Clinton lead are -.67 for “blonde jokes,” -.61 for “nigger jokes,” and -.48 for “holocaust jokes.” Here are the scatters (click to enlarge):Īgain, nothing causal claimed here. This might capture the general tendency to Google for jokes. I compared these relative search frequencies to the state polling summary from FiveThirtyEight, which has the Clinton lead from +32.8 in Hawaii to -30.4 in Wyoming (DC is not included here). So here I compare search frequencies for three offensive kinds of jokes, “blonde jokes” (N=48), “nigger jokes” (N=38), and “holocaust jokes” (N=29), with controls for two kinds of innocuous jokes “puns” (favored by Clinton supporting-states) and “knock knock jokes” (favored in Trump states). Trends does not report the actual number of searches, and some small states are not reported for some jokes, presumably because the data are too sparse. For example, West Virginia scores 100 on searches for “nigger jokes” and Oregon scores 17 (the lowest score). Each search term is scaled from 100 in the state with the highest search frequency of the term to zero for the lowest (except they don’t go down to zero). I use state data from Google Trends, which coughed up relative search frequencies for the past fives years by state. We don’t yet know whether the polls will accurately capture the vote outcome this year, but I’m interested in the underlying patterns anyway. If people were racist, maybe they would not admit they opposed Obama, but they would still Google “nigger jokes” in their spare time. The point of the exercise, as suggested by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in a 2012 paper published here and discuss here, was to look for population traits that might skew votes in ways the polls did not predict. ![]() People Google for racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic jokes more in states that are more favorable toward Trump in the presidential election. This is purely observational, not causal. ![]() Updated: See comment note and data caution at the end.
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