On Tuesday November 3rd, millions of Americans headed to the polls to cast their vote for who will be the President of the United States for the next four years. Tens of millions had already cast their vote by mail, making 2020 the largest number of votes ever in a Presidential election.
Pornhub’s statisticians took a closer look at how Erection Election Day affected their usual traffic levels.
In the early morning, excited voters caused Pornhub’s traffic to be 14% higher than normal levels at 6am, before returning to normal by mid-day.
Beginning around 3pm, traffic dropped across the country, with a peak drop of -11% around 6pm (adjusted by time zone). Traffic remained below average for much of the evening as Americans anxiously watched for results to come in.
By 1am most people had given up waiting for final results, so they headed to traffic instead where traffic grew by as much as +14% above normal at 3am.
Compare those results to our 2016 Election Day coverage, when traffic throughout the morning and afternoon was quite similar, but dropped by -23% at 11pm when it seemed likely that Donald Trump would be the winner. After midnight there was a similar traffic increase in 2016, but only by +10 at 3am.
Male vs Female Traffic
If we break the traffic down by gender, we can see that men had a much bigger traffic increase after midnight, growing by +17% above normal levels at 3am. Female traffic was lower throughout the day, and dropped by -17% below average around 5pm.
Red vs Blue State Traffic
Democrat state traffic was much higher in the morning, up +18% at 6am compared to +14% in Republican states. Traffic was similar throughout the afternoon, but Republican states had a massive -14% traffic drop at 6pm, compared to only a -6% drop in blue states. At 11pm, Democrat state traffic dropped by -10%, while Republican states were only down by -5%.
At 3am, traffic from Republican stats saw a huge increase of +16% above average, while blue states increased by 11%.
Battleground State Traffic
It became clear that several states would become the battlegrounds that would determine the final outcome of the election.
The following chart shows the hourly traffic for Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Arizona stands out as having the highest traffic increases throughout the day, in particular from 8pm to 10pm when most states were below average, Arizona’s traffic was up to +15% higher than normal for that time of the day. Arizona’s traffic dropped by -21% at midnight, but then had a massive spike of +33% at 5am.
Wisconsin had the biggest growth in the early morning with traffic up +22% at 6am, compared to only a 6% increase in North Carolina.
Election Evening Traffic
The following heatmap illustrates the average traffic change by state during the evening from 6pm to Midnight. Only a few states had traffic that was higher than normal including Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Indiana, New Mexico, Arizona and Hawaii.
