In the days following the Virginia Democratic primary, most people were left scratching their heads wondering how it was that Creigh Deeds had won so decisively. No one really saw it coming, as I remember. People knew Deeds was surging towards the end, but there was little empirical evidence.

However, I remember the one graph that showed the clearest evidence was one of Google searches for each of the candidate’s names in days and weeks preceding the election. Remembering that and thinking it an oddly much more reliable, objective measure of the potential interest in Scott Brown vs Martha Coakley, I mined similar data in the upcoming Massachusetts Senate race.

The graph below shows the volume of search queries for “Scott Brown” and “Martha Coakley” originating in Massachusetts for the past 30 days, which, for the large part, filters out all non-Bay Staters.

Brown in red [A]; Coakley in blue [B]:

Google Trends for Massachusetts Senate Race

To be clear, the ratio of queries for Scott Brown to queries for Martha Coakley is 3.10:1.00. That is absolutely remarkable.

If you add in the other trending query, “Massachusetts Senate Race (MSR),” the ratio for Brown:Coakley:MSR is still 3.10:1.00:0.10, which I take to mean that the level of general interest among Democrats remains low – that is, the Democrats’ recent media blitz is not doing a good job of bringing in uninterested, unmotivated voters. In fact, the MSR query failed to register until a few days ago.

At the risk of sounding confident, I think this is going to be an historic election and completely remake the landscape for 2010.

Tommy Jardon is the former Executive Director of the College Republican National Committee and a recent graduate of the University Florida Law School.