On September 26th Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump faced off for their first presidential debate. Up to now, the 2016 election cycled has played out much like a reality TV show, but with so much at stake over 80 million people tuned from 9pm to 10:30pm ET to see how the two remaining contestants met their latest challenge. Live events often cause changes to Pornhub’s traffic, so our friends at Huffington Post reached out to see if the debate followed suit.
Across the United States, visits to Pornhub fell as much as 16% compared to an average Monday in this time period. Traffic was down slightly below average in the hours leading up to the debate and then drop sharply at 9pm. By the end of the debate traffic had recovered fully to match normal Monday night levels.
State by state, traffic during the debate ranged from a -21% drop in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and D.C., to just -4% in Hawaii, Alaska and Mississippi.
The following chart has been colorized either red or blue to show which states voted Democrat or Republican in the 2012 presidential election. With a few exceptions, it seems that former Democratic (blue) voting states were more willing to give up Pornhub to watch this year’s first presidential debate.
Our statisticians also found traffic drops in many other countries during the live debate. Pornhub visits from America’s next door neighbors Canada and Mexico were down -8% and -7% respectively.
Be sure to check out our earlier election coverage including the Presidential Primary Survey, Trump versus Clinton Searches, and results from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
UPDATE:
Die Welt reached out to see if the debate had any effect on German traffic. Even considering the 3 am local time in which the live debate aired, it seems that traffic was off by 4% compared to an average Tuesday morning.
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