Throughout our coverage of the 2024 US presidential election, we’ve tracked the topics of importance to both voters and candidates. Topics like the economy and education have continually been the most engaging, and others, like climate change and the war in Gaza, have risen and fallen with breaking news.
As we close in on election day, we’re exploring how reading about one candidate affects readership of other election-related topics. For example, are people who read many articles about Kamala Harris more likely to read about a topic like immigration or are people who read many articles about Donald Trump more likely to also read about the economy? You might be surprised at what we found.
How we measure affinity
For this study, we looked at visitors who read 10 or more articles about one of the candidates between October 1 and October 28. A “Trump article” is an article that mentions Donald Trump but does not mention Kamala Harris and vice versa. Though we delineate between articles mentioning one candidate but not the other, we do not control for the fact that the same reader could be someone who reads 10+ Trump articles and 10+ Harris articles.
Once we had our groups of “Trump readers” and “Harris readers”, we looked at their reading histories to see which articles and key terms within those articles the members of each group had in common. This allowed us to see the topics one group was more likely to read than the other.
What we found
In general, many more people are reading 10+ articles about Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. In recent weeks, more than 2 million people met this threshold for articles about Donald Trump, which is 4 times as many people who read 10+ articles about Kamala Harris.
A major reason for this is the pool of articles centering Trump is twice as large as those centering Harris. While 90,904 articles featured Trump, 44,453 featured Harris. When we zoom in on the topics and key terms these groups are reading, it’s important to keep in mind there are many more readers in the first group, and that’s why we’ll compare percentages and ratios of percentages while also periodically reminding you of the raw number of readers in each camp.
Topics by candidate
Whereas our data on topics like education and economic policy are broad, this research is based on what we call key terms. In other words, the article must feature the exact term in the exact order it is written. That’s why we have terms like “illegal immigrant” instead of immigration and “election integrity” instead of voter fraud. Let’s look closer at some of these key terms.
Israel and Gaza
Of those reading 10+ articles about Kamala Harris, 64% are also reading articles about Israel. For Trump readers, it’s 46%. When we look at the key term “Gaza war,” however, Trump readers are twice as likely to read these articles as Harris readers.
The economy
The economy has alternated with education as the most engaging topics of this election. When we look at the term “economy” through the lens of candidate interest, Trump readers are 1.4X more likely to read about this issue than Harris readers. Though this sounds like a slim margin, the raw numbers show about 208,000 Trump readers to about 32,000 Harris readers.
Immigration
When we sort these key terms by total engaged time, “open border,” “southern border,” and “border policy” all rank among the top 500, but “illegal immigrant” is the top immigration-related term. Harris readers are 2.2X more likely to read articles with the key term “illegal immigrant” and 4.7X more likely to read articles about “border policy.”
Election fraud
If the 2020 election is any indication, election fraud will be a topic of interest in the aftermath of this election as well. In the past month, 20% of Harris readers have also read about “election fraud” and 17% have read about “election integrity,” making this group more than twice as likely to read about these terms as Trump readers.
Our takeaway
With twice as many articles centering Donald Trump in the lead-up to the general election, there is less competition and more opportunity to reach the audience reading about Kamala Harris. The Trump group, which is 4 times as large, understandably has a wider spectrum of demographics and interests extending outside the political sphere. The Harris group, while smaller, is more focused on political topics, an indication that recommending related articles could keep these readers on site and engaged longer.
Though there are currently less articles about Harris, this logic can be applied to coverage of both candidates. For example, a higher percentage of those reading 10+ Harris articles are also reading about key issues like Israel, immigration, and abortion while a higher percentage of those reading 10+ Trump articles are also reading articles mentioning the economy or the war in Gaza.
Despite the differences in these groups, they have one big thing in common: 95% of Harris readers are reading about Trump and 95% of Trump readers are reading about Harris.
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