Of all the surprises to emerge from Monday night’s widely-anticipated U.S. presidential debate, perhaps the most unexpected was this: a historic spike in the number of Google searches for the phrase, "register to vote" in Spanish.
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Indeed, searches on Google for the phrase “registrarse para votar”—“register to vote” in Spanish—hit an all-time peak during the two-hour primetime debate, surpassing more than 100,000 hits on the popular search engine.
It was the third-highest trending search in the country at 10:30 p.m. Monday night, surpassed only by two phrases related to the mass shooting earlier in the day in Houston.
The phrase turned up the highest volume in the swing state of Florida, followed by New Jersey, New York, Texas and California, all of which have significant Latino populations.
The only time a similar phrase in Spanish has garnered such high interest was following the first presidential debate of the 2012 campaign season. In this round of the election cycle, the most comparable spike was the day U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made his much-anticipated immigration speech in Phoenix.
While U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has no vast appeal among Spanish-speakers in the United States, it’s likely Trump's antagonism of Latinos on both sides of the border with Mexico that accounts for the spike. While polls entering Monday's debate showed that Trump had closed the gap with Clinton to pull statistically even with his Democratic rival, a dramatic increase in registered Latino voters would doubtless spell trouble for Trump.