Hey, here’s a chart:

I didn’t find this chart. I made it! What you’re looking at here is a Google Trends graph showing the popularity of searches over time. The blue line is for Dale Earnhardt, the red line is for Andy Griffith. Both of them, true sons and kings of North Carolina.

I got to thinking about this because of a recent story from the Charlotte Observer’s Alex Zeitlow, in which the mayor pro tem of Kannapolis noted this about Earnhardt: “Two and a half decades in, he’s as popular now as he was then, if not more so.”

Popularity is a tricky thing to measure. There are there are all sorts of ways to use the internet to create a reality-distortion field, in which people pay to make things like bands and, say, political parties seem to be much more popular than they actually are. Actual, verifiable information is harder to come by these days, but it can help you break out of a bubble, so it’s harder to say stuff like, “well, nobody I know believes/knows/does that.” There’s a big world out there, full of people who aren’t like you doing stuff that you don’t know about! It’s really instructive to be able to measure it every once in a while.

So when someone says that Dale Earnhardt potentially more popular now than he was than when he died on the last lap of the Daytona 500 in 2001, my first thought is: How can you know that?

Google Trends isn’t perfect, but it does provide some verifiable data that shows what people are curious about. Type in a search term, topic, person, or anything else, and it can give you data all the way back to 2004. You can’t tell how many searches people were making, but you can watch the trends go up and down over time, and you can compare them with other search terms.

Hence, we know for sure that over the last 22 years, Google searches for Dale Earnhardt hit their highest level in December 2004, right around the time when ESPN put out a made for TV movie about his life called “3: The Dale Earnhardt Story.” We also know that the state that searches for Dale Earnhardt the most is … West Virginia, although North Carolina is a close second. And the city with the highest rate of Google searches for Dale Earnhardt is, you guessed it, Kannapolis. Of course people there are very curious about Dale Earnhardt! It’s his hometown! But it also explains, maybe, why folks in Kannapolis think he’s more popular than ever.

It helps, though, to have a comparison. If you think Dale Earnhardt is a big deal in Kannapolis, you should check out how hard Mt. Airy stans for its favorite son: Andy Griffith.

I’ve been up to Mt. Airy a few times, most recently in 2022 to run a half marathon that gave out very intense finisher medals (A large depiction of Opie and Andy). Before that, I’d gone to town to see the sights which were, in 2015, mostly Griffith-related. I ate at Snappy Lunch. I met “Floyd the Barber.” I checked out the museum. I talked to locals, who had to gently tell disbelieving tourists that they couldn’t visit Griffith’s grave (he’s buried in Manteo, where he lived later in life). Sometimes those tourists would lean in and quietly reply: “We know he’s here.”

Surry County, according to projections from the state Department of Commerce, saw $160 million in economic impact from tourism in 2024. Not all of that would be from Andy Griffith fans or Mayberry Days or the regular appearances from the late Betty Lynn, who played Thelma Lou. There are wineries and nice rivers nearby too! But, still, that particular industry does somewhat rely on people knowing Andy Griffith, a man who died in 2012 and whose most popular show debuted nearly 66 years ago. How long can that hang on?

Google Search data showed a spike in interest in Griffith in the United States after his death 14 years ago. Hence, interest has trended up over the last 22 years, although over the last 10 years, it’s been trending downward.

You can mess around with all sorts of variables. Over the last five years, Google says more people are searching for Dale Earnhardt than Billy Graham in the United States, although unsurprisingly the numbers are flipped when you include the rest of the world. The now-beloved Petey Pablo lags pretty far behind, although Fantasia Barrino seems to hold the same interest nationwide as The Intimidator and Matlock. And, I regret to inform you that one man inspires more curiosity and wonder (again, in a Google Search sort of way) than Earnhardt and Griffith combined. That’s right. Chuck Norris. That was true even before his death in March. Hey look! An actual Chuck Norris Fact.

So what does all of this mean? Is this correlation (people just happening to think about Dale and then Googling him) or causation (writers, editors, content creators, and bots constantly elevating any Earnhardt-related stories, knowing they’ll do numbers online)? Does it mean that the most popular stock car driver of today—Chase Elliott, who literally won NASCAR’s “Most Popular Driver” award eight straight times—isn’t driving as much search interest online as a man who hasn’t been alive for 25 years? Where does Dale Jr. fit in to all this?

To me, trying to answer a question like “How popular is Dale Earnhardt in 2026” only invites more questions. The answer is a piece of trivia, maybe. Or something to debate. But! By at least one measure, Dale Earnhardt more popular today than Andy Griffith. As Ricky Bobby said: “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” That wisdom came from Talladega Nights, a 20-year-old movie that, according to Google Trends, is driving slightly more interest than Dale Earnhardt.

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT: Forget Google Trends: Who do you think should be on North Carolina’s Mount Rushmore? And, what mountain should actually serve as our Mount Rushmore? Leave a voicemail for the Rabbit Hole at (980) 477-5465 to share your picks. We may use your choices in a future newsletter or podcast.