Click here to see the data set… and click on the graphics as you go.

It’s been a wild couple of months for U.S. politics: Biden’s catastrophic debate. Trump’s attempted assassination. The launch of Kamala Harris. The appointment of Tim Walz. Musk and Trump’s love in.‘And, did JD Vance fuck a couch?

Some say that any publicity is good publicity and in the last few years, Trump has been used to grabbing headlines. According to Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s ex-White-House communications director, that’s just how he likes it. 

This August, the buzz around the Harris-Walz campaign is only increasing, culminating in the star-studded Democratic convention. It definitely seems like the Democratic campaign is gaining momentum and attention, whilst the Republicans not only risk being ‘weird’ but stale too. 

But what are the cold-hard stats? And looking at the trends, where can we predict media focus will be in the coming weeks? And on who?

I took three weeks’ worth of headlines from 10 of the most-read news sites in America. I counted how many times they mentioned the first and second names of the four presidential and Vice Presidential nominees: Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Tim Walz and JD Vance. 

But the results don’t just show how much attention the Democrats and Republicans are getting but also show evidence of the difference in how we address “Kamala” versus “Trump”, and the very different power dynamics between the two Presidential candidates and their VPs.

So let’s get into it.

The Trump Slump 

When you take it at face value, the coverage looks pretty even. Combining the headlines for the two teams, Harris and Walz took 53.6% of headlines, and Trump-Vance 46.4% of headlines.

But as you can see in this line graph, it’s not as simple as that. 

At the beginning of the month, Trump and Vance were receiving slightly more press than Harris was. But everything changed when Harris announced Walz as her running partner on the 6th of August. Look at that huge spike. 

However, the Democratic mentions have been quite volatile, and when you take an average it’s actually only a slight incline of .13+. 

The real story isn’t that Democrats are getting way more press, it’s that Republicans are getting way less than they’re used to. A significant negative correlation of -.68. 

Right-wing media is obsessed with “Kamala”, but no one talks about “Donald”

Fox News is obsessed with “Kamala”: when you look at the breakdown of the four people, not only do they give her a bigger slice of coverage than any other news site, but Fox also mentioned “Kamala” 190 times in 3 weeks — 3 times higher than the study average (63.1).

But most significantly, they mentioned her name sometimes in isolation. You can see that they try to get away with it by quoting authors, but it still comes across as derisive.

On TikTok, people have been calling out using the first name for Female presidential candidates: first ‘Hilary’ but secondly ‘Kamala’. For sure, across the sites, you were three times more likely to see “Kamala” than “Donald”, but Fox aside, I think there’s a different reason than gendered bias or blatant disrespect.

Half the time we talk about JD Vance and Tim Walz we use their first and second names. Arguably this is because we’re still being familiarised to the VPs, we aren’t on a ‘last name’ basis yet.

And maybe familiarity is why 88.92% of the time, Donald Trump is referred to just as “Trump”. 

But is there something dangerous about this? I think the more that “Donald” is just “Trump” he becomes less of a human being, and more of a brand, or an ideology-– perhaps another reason why he can get away with shit that your average Tom, Dick or Harry can’t. 

Harris-Walz is much more of a team than Trump-…who?

Considering his recent entry into the arena, maybe it’s not surprising that VP Walz made more than double the headlines of VP Vance (5.48% compared to 12.79%) in the last three weeks.

Now, I didn’t collect the data on this, but I saw the phrase ‘Harris-Walz’ much more than I did ‘Trump- Vance’. In fact, what I did find was that for every 10 Harris mentions, Walz was mentioned 3.17 times. Meanwhile, for every 10 Trump mentions, Vance was mentioned just 1.35 times.

Katty Kay, a political commentator, hypothesised that one reason Kamala Harris didn’t go for the enigmatic Josh Shapiro, is that he might rob the limelight from her. With Walz, she’s the football star, and he’s the coach.

Now, I think that receiving a third of the mentions is hitting a sweet spot. The media are clearly excited about Walz but he’s not stealing too much attention away from Harris. Also, we have to remember this data was collected in the first few weeks of Walz being announced as VP. 

But what I would say is if this number creeps up to 40% maybe this could be a red flag. So, shall we make some predictions? 

AN ELEGY TO VANCE’s RELEVANCY

So looking at the average correlation or trends for each individual — like I did for the two campaigns — should Harris be worried? Has midwestern-dad Walz stolen more than our hearts, has he stolen her spotlight too?

The answer is probably no. If you just crunch the numbers and go by correlation, Harris has a teensy higher positive trend of +.12 compared to Walz’s +.09. Statistically, though these numbers are pretty insignificant. 

If you want to just look at the line graph though, and in the last week or so, Harris’ mentions have plummeted whereas Walz’ are increasing again. But who knows?

Meanwhile someone’s ego needs a stroke. Since August 1st, Trump’s mentions are down -.51. Ouch.

But it could be worse. JD Vance should write himself another elegy because his coverage is dead. Not only have his mentions been on the floor, but from beginning to end they show a negative correlation of -.75. In fact, the share price of Chinese retailer JD.com has been the more newsworthy JD of late. Maybe it’s time for Vance to go and find another high-profile “cat lady” to piss off. 

If you want to dig into this data more and see the results per news site you can find a link to the write-up and data set here.

Methodology:

1. I chose the top 10 news sites according to this list, correct as of 22.8.24: https://today.yougov.com/ratings/entertainment/popularity/news-websites/all
2. . I then used WayBackMachine and accessed the sites at the nearest time to 8am. Note, because often the links were broken or had a severe lag, sometimes the time varied.
3. Due to WayBackMachine issues, I replaced Reuters with the next most-read site: Forbes.
4. I used the front page for all of the new-sites apart from CNBC which I used the https://www.cnbc.com/politics/ page, as the CNBC.com page shows mostly stock market news
5. I counted the number of times they mentioned the following words: Kamala, Harris, Tim, Walz, Donald, Trump, J.D., JD, Vance
6. I was careful to discount irrelevant results: for example “Donald” Sutherland, JD.com, Times.
7. I included mentions of family members as relevant press: e.g. Gus Walz.
8. Data for the 12.8.24 for CNN was unavailable
9. I analysed the time period 1.8.24 – 22.8.24 (three weeks), and collected the data 22.8.24 – 25.8.24