With the Lok Sabha Elections 2019 fast approaching, a rise in interest for political news and personalities has been palpable among people. What has added to the people’s political interest in past one week is the announcement of schedule for General Elections which will begin from April 11, with results coming out on May 23.
Any one digital tool or method may not be sufficient to gauge the overall popularity of a person or party, but Google Trends does give some indications of the interest a person or issue or party has been able to generate in the online world within set timeframes.
Thus, an analysis based on Google trends show that searches for Congress Chief Rahul Gandhi went up by 43% in past one week.
If we look at the search results in sub-region, then Rahul Gandhi interests most to the people of Rajasthan, followed by, Madhya Pradesh and then Goa.
We also looked at the data comparing the popularity of Rahul Gandhi with that Prime Minister Narendra Modi. If we look at the trendline, we find that ‘Narendra Modi’ was consistently ahead of ‘Rahul Gandhi’ in sparking interest in past one week. While the term ‘Narendra Modi’ scores 55, ‘Rahul Gandhi’ scores 6.
Looking at the search interests of people based on sub-regions within same period of time, Rahul Gandhi’s popularity could not fill in the gap between him and PM Narendra Modi. Talking categorically, PM Modi continues to be people’s search interest in Uttar Pradesh, followed by Rajasthan and then Bihar.
