What Story Does Real-Time Data Tell About The GOP Debate?

It turns out that not showing up for Thursday night’s GOP debate was a bad move for Donald Trump.

Polling enhanced by real-time Google Trends data shows that all the candidates’ Web and social media traffic was up except for Trump’s. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz dominated Internet activity during the debate, according to a report by DataPulse, an analytics company that can measure website traffic in real-time by accessing data from the Internet’s infrastructure.

A look at night's data from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. reveals that Trump's website traffic didn't increase despite the buzz around Trump's bowing out of the debate. Trump's loss was Rubio and Cruz's gain.

Google also partnered with Fox News to enable real-time Google Trends data to guide moderators’ questions.

Real-time methods of analyzing data and polling are very much in vogue during the 2016 presidential election race.

“Polling is very old-fashioned, and we’ve been doing it for 40 years -- calling and mailing voters -- but the polls don’t always turn out the way we think they will,” said Jeff Schmidt, DataPulse CEO, in an email to Real-Time Daily. “New ways to gather data that can project voter sentiment are valuable. Internet data is highly important because it’s so critical to all campaigns -- it’s telling the candidates who their audience is and how to reach them. Those metrics are more modern and actionable than we’ve ever seen,” he said.

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