Live Coverage Of The First Republican Debate

The Fox News moderators managed to cover a lot of topics tonight. Foreign policy was the largest single category (10 questions), but social issues ranked second if abortion, gay marriage and a few miscellaneous questions are all counted together (eight questions total).

Nine other Republicans got a chance to share a stage with Donald Trump tonight, and while Trump remained the literal and figurative center of attention, he didn’t dominate the conversation to the same extent that he has in the past month. Below, I’ve compiled data from Google Trends on search traffic for the GOP candidates — both over the past month and during the two hours of the debate. In each case, I’ve benchmarked Trump’s search traffic as 100 and compared the other candidates against him. Overall during the past month, Trump has received about three times as much search traffic as the other nine candidates combined! In the debate Trump still led, but not by as much. Ben Carson got about three-fifths as much search traffic as Trump, for example. The Google search numbers didn’t totally square with how the journalists I follow on Twitter scored the debate. John Kasich was a big winner in the debate room before a home crowd in Cleveland, and also in the press file, but his search traffic was just middling. Carson, conversely, did well in search despite middling reviews from the media.

Bush had the most questions directed to him by the moderators tonight (I’m not counting interruptions, follow-ups and closing statements). Despite Carson’s complaints, he’s comfortably in the middle of the pack, while Paul appears to have needed his frequent interruptions to be heard.