Tulsi Gabbard and Cory Booker emerged as the clear winners of the first Democratic debate, according to Google Trends

Reuters

The first Democratic primary debate, featuring 10 of the 20 candidates running.

• On Wednesday night, 10 of the 20 Democratic presidential candidates participated in their first debate.
• Though some candidates stood out more than others, there's one clear way to see which candidates provoked the strongest response from viewers: Google Trends.
• During the debate, interest in Julian Castro surged on Google Trends - but Representative Tulsi Gabbard was one clear winner based on search traffic.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The first debate of the 2020 United States presidential election took place on Wednesday night in Miami, and it featured 10 of the 20 Democratic hopefuls.

With so many candidates vying for attention, it can be hard to know who voters were most interested in.

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But Google Trends has two potential answers: Representative Tulsi Gabbard and Senator Cory Booker.

Google

The little-known Congresswoman from Hawaii saw the largest spikes in search traffic from Americans during Wednesday night's debate. Senator Cory Booker took the second spot, followed closely by Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Overall, the most-searched candidate by volume was Booker, with Gabbard picking up second place. Interest in Booker was strongest in the Southeast US, while Gabbard dominated the rest of the country.  

Google compiled a list of which candidates received the most overall searches from Americans during the debate, which was led by Booker:

But those are far from the only data points from Google Trends that point to viewer response to Wednesday's debate.

Interest in former Obama cabinet official Julian Castro "spiked +2,400% in search" during the debate, according to Google Trends. 

Perhaps most importantly of all, interest in a totally unrelated though equally important subject - pizza - stayed constant throughout the debate and beat out most of the lesser-known candidates:

Google

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