2024 Presidential Election

visualization
r
wikipedia
Author

Dean Hansen

Published

11/10/24

Background

Wikipedia is often the go-to source for information online. If you want to read about nineteenth century history, the Manhattan project or types of flowers, Wikipedia caters to every interest.

When Im searching for answers, I usually head on over to Wikipedia too. So, to me it makes intuitive sense that Wikipedia page traffic is barometer for how often people are searching for a person, place or thing.

In this post, we look at how web traffic differed between Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the lead-up to the election.

Dynamic Duo

From the below chart, we see in the weeks following Kamala Harris official democratic party nomination, her Wikipedia page had nearly a million visitors per day. This surge in traffic would be expected after the nomination, but as the chart makes clear, this is a hard trend to sustain over the course of an entire campaign.


Election Day in America Harris named Democratic Nominee 10 1 10 2 10 3 10 4 10 5 10 6 10 7 Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Wikipedia page visits per day, logarithmic scale Kamala Harris and Donald Trump Source: Wikimedia


Leading into the final months before election day, we see Donald Trumps page traffic was slightly higher than Kamala Harris as both experienced a surge in page traffic just before the election on November 5th.

Then There Were Three

Now we turn our attention to Wikipedia page visits since January 1st, 2016 for Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Considering all three candidates gives us a good indication of their popularity over the past 8 years (with the obvious caveat that most people have likely searched them up over the 8 years, so these numbers do not reflect unique visitors to their Wikipedia pages).


Harris named official Democratic party nominee 10 1 10 2 10 3 10 4 10 5 10 6 10 7 Jan-16 Jan-18 Jan-20 Jan-22 Jan-24 Wikipedia page visits per day, logarithmic scale Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Donald Trump Source: Wikimedia


To start off, Donald Trump has had remarkable consistency in page traffic since 2016. On average hes had 263,275 page views per day compared to 32,352 and 35,104 for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, respectively.

  • Donald Trump (in red) consistently had more than a hundred thousand visits to his page per day. Further, for a period of time in early 2021, his Wikipedia page averaged close to a million visits per day.

  • Kamala Harris (in blue) had multiple days with more than a million page visits, this trend is especially clear after being named the Democratic Party nominee (60 days over a million for Harris and 63 for Trump).

  • Joe Bidens (in grey) page traffic was usually an order of magnitude smaller than Donald Trumps leading up to the 2020 presidential election (November 3rd, 2020). It is interesting to note even though Joe Biden stepped down as party nominee, he still managed a large number of visits per day leading up to the 2024 election day.

Overall, we can see Donald Trump has remained popular on Wikipedia ever since he became president in 2016. Itd be interesting to see past the election if his numbers hold up or trend up, only time will tell.

Im planning to do recurring analysis of Wikipedia page traffic data, focused on other topics like topics in mathematics, so if you found this analysis interesting, stay tuned!