America is a vast land, a place where regional and cultural differences can be at once a source of bemusement and deep-seated misunderstanding. The notion of red states and blue states, thus creating a red America and a blue America, has calcified into a belief that both sides of America fundamentally misunderstand the other, consuming different news and living within different pop cultural bubbles. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, an event which more than half of voters vehemently opposed, many of whom who have taken to demonstrating against the new president regularly ever since, and which the rest of the country quietly endorsed, waiting for him to make an industrial economy feasible again.
This analysis of each state’s Google habits since the election, though, seems less notable for the stark differences in each state and more notable for the shared tone of wild, misinformed terror. Performed by the real estate company Estately, which has made a name for itself performing these state-by-state rundowns (check out each state’s lewdest city name or their favorite dumb questions), these are, to be clear, not the most googled term for each state, but the ones performed more frequently compared to other states.
The common thread through all of these is not necessarily red state versus blue state ideological bubbles but simple confusion: Wisconsin wants to know what populism is; Florida is curious about Trump’s record-low approval ratings; the great state of Oregon is here to consume some information about Nazis being punched. A few seem more tied to their geography than others, such as Mississippi’s curiosity about its hometown heroes 3 Doors Down or Montana’s interest in the National Park Service, but most of these are just the roiling swarm of confused, terrified, frequently tawdry news items that have dominated the press cycle since November. (The words “pussy” and “pee pee” both appear on this map of Trump’s America.)
The site’s blog goes into much more detail, listing full word clouds for each state’s searches, and they read like a referendum not on the woes of our political divisions but on the mere confusion of the voting populace. Iowa wants to know where Yemen is. Georgia is asking, “What the hell is going on?” Connecticut is curious what refugees even are. Texas may have gone red, but they’re still wondering how they might secede. If anything, the map shows that despite each state’s electoral voting record, there is an underlying psychological unity to America—that is, a flailing unease about its future. Like many things, it comes from the top.