The last time presidential candidate Donald Trump visited downtown Portland, in March, the event briefly launched Maine into the nation’s top-ranked Google searches.
This time around, though, the same data suggest that Mainers and the nation as a whole are considerably less interested.
In the hours leading up to Trump’s arrival in Portland’s Merrill Auditorium, local search volume for “Donald Trump” increased to peak around 3 p.m., when Trump took the stage. Even then, Maine-based searches related to “Donald Trump” registered only 58% as much search traffic as Maine-based searches for “Hillary Clinton” during Clinton’s Democratic National Convention speech on July 28.
During Trump’s previous rally, held on March 3 in the Westin Harborview hotel ballroom shortly before Maine’s caucuses, the related search terms “Donald Trump, Maine, Paul LePage” briefly reached No. 3 among Google’s most searched topics nationwide.
This story was updated at 2:39 p.m. to correct a reference to Trump’s last visit to Maine. A previous version incorrectly stated that his last visit to Maine was in March; in fact, he had visited Bangor in June.
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