With the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in the books, the countdown to November 3rd has begun. The election is guaranteed to dominate the news cycle – in fact, it already is. Thousands of stories are already published every day, which reach millions of voters across traditional, digital, and social media channels.
For the next 10 weeks, Cision will track and analyze the U.S. presidential election coverage and publish our findings in a new blog series, The State of the Election. You can expect nonpartisan, data-first insights to understand how the public is consuming and engaging with election coverage before, during and after the campaign all right here in this blog post.
2020 is a year of firsts. For the first time in modern history, U.S. party conventions were unable to be held in person. There was no applause, cheers, or laughs; speeches were scripted for a virtual audience. But the symbolic nature did not change. The conventions jump-start the campaigns and serve as an opportunity to introduce each party’s platform, policies, and objectives for the upcoming election. Each night of the 2020 Democratic and Republican National Conventions attracted approximately 20 million viewers. The eight days of combined programming sparked thousands of news articles, reaching millions more.
Through a comparative lens, we looked at earned media coverage for both the DNC and RNC. The data revealed, the RNC generated 1,000 more articles than the DNC from August 16th to August 29th. Compared to the 2016 convention, the earned media coverage is eye-opening. RNC coverage increased by 15.6%, whereas DNC coverage decreased by 61%