Residents of Seattle and Portland Googled “impeachment” more than people living in any other U.S. city at the end of President Donald Trump’s first year in office.
A new study from the Brookings Institution looked at a handful of search terms related to the Trump presidency and the Pacific Northwest showed a keen interest in one particular topic.
“Impeachment” is one of several Google search queries the study focused on. Cities were scored on a scale of 0 to 100 (100 representing the strongest interest in the topic). Seattle and Portland both scored 100, followed by Washington, D.C. with 98 and Denver at 86.
In the “impeachment” section, the study examined searches between Dec. 24-30. The report’s author, Darrell West, wanted to compare cities at the same point in time. West also looked at “impeachment” searches for the full year but did not break the annual results out by region. The annual results were significantly impacted by news events during the year, such as the firing of FBI Director James Comey and the indictment of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
“Search data from the past year indicate that when there are major negative developments for Trump, interest in impeachment rises from three to five times its usual level,” West writes in the study.
Although searches for “impeachment” don’t necessarily translate to a desire to impeach, the study’s results are consistent with the Pacific Northwest’s resistance to the Trump agenda over the past year. Just yesterday, Washington and Oregon jointly sued with other states over the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality repeal, the latest in a series of legal challenges to actions from the Trump administration.
Read the full Brookings report, titled “What internet search data reveal about Donald Trump’s first year in office,” here.
