Over the past several weeks, you likely had to have been living in a bubble not to have heard some news that the Republican National Convention was going on in Cleveland, followed by the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. For these events, tens of thousands of party supporters, media, and politics-lovers head to these cities. The Washington Post obtained some fascinating Yelp data to examine what happened when each respective convention was in town!
How was this data looked at? According to the Washington Post:
Yelp looked at the relative increase in number of searches for each business category in Cleveland during the RNC and in Philadelphia during the DNC as compared with searches in each city from a week prior. These charts compared what people searched for on the first day of the convention – Monday – for each week. They then compared those results with one another, and pulled out the categories with the biggest discrepancies between the cities.
And what did they find? The top 5 week over week increases were:
Republican National Convention
- Hawaiian (+623%)
- Gay bars (+45%)
- Dive bars (+40%)
- Hot dogs (+38%)
- Greek (+36%)
Democratic National Convention
- Distilleries (+74%)
- Mongolian (+48%)
- Kosher (+35%)
- Vegan (+33%)
- Mediterranean (+32%)
What do you make of these differences between searches during each party’s national conventions?
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1 comment
The rest seems fairly obvious, if interesting, but I have to admit that the Hawaiian category puzzles me. Is it Hawaiian information in general that was being searched? I don’t remember any events of consequence happening that would prompt so many searches. Hawaiian food, maybe? I’ve never been to Cleveland, but have trouble picturing it as a mecca of Hawaiian cuisine. My wife suggested that it might be tiki bars, but if so, why not just search tiki bars?