There are so many ways you could look at an election. The media is often the leader in deciding what the public mood is, setting a news agenda and probing the candidates on their stances. Or you could look at the polls — a moment in time snapshot of how a select group feels. Both of these serve their purpose, and make for interesting conversations in their own right.
But what we’re interested in is the content that actually impacts people, the content they’re compelled to react to, to share, to comment on.
Here, we’ve focused on some of the news that has had the most impact for presidential candidates and their running mates, as well as the timing of that coverage. Below are some of the highlights:
- Engagement has fallen since summer, when both candidates hit peak levels of interactions and interest from the media
- Trump and Harris use different platforms across social to get their agendas across
- Taylor Swift has the most engagement with any individual political post on any platform
Let’s take a closer look at some of those points.
Kamala Harris engagement peaked at her announcement
It’s fair to say Kamala Harris never expected to be in this race. As is befitting to a first-term VP, she was not in the spotlight much for the majority of this year, quietly going about her business, perhaps expecting to start preparing for a 2028 presidential run. Then everything changed. Joe Biden dropped out of the race at the end of July and endorsed Harris within the space of an hour.
Suddenly attention from both the media and public turned to her like Sauron’s eye when Frodo puts on the ring, and she saw more attention in the space of a week than she had in the entire year up until that point. The week after Biden’s announcement, Harris received 15 million engagements from
175k articles written about her, compared to 4.26 million engagements from 111k from January to July.
Attention has dropped fairly significantly since then, at least in media articles about Harris, declining from that peak of 9 million engagements to around 3 million engagements per week as a baseline heading into the election.
The one notable exception to this trend occurred on the week of the debate, when engagements with articles about Harris rose to around 5 million — a significant jump, but still far lower than the week that Joe Biden dropped out and Harris entered the race.
The top articles about Harris have been mixed, including the NYT’s piece about Black men rallying for her (737k), her debate against Trump (159k), and a recent poll finding her performing well at the national level (128k). Despite this mostly positive coverage at the top end of the articles about her, the top individual publisher writing about her this year has been The Daily Wire, which has 4 million engagements with coverage that is generally much more critical of her and her record.
Harris channels Gen Z with Kamala HQÂ
While coverage evidently increased in the wake of her becoming the nominee, Harris has not been waiting for earned media to get her message across. She’s relied on a very modern strategy that includes all digital platforms, and deployed her Kamala HQÂ account across social to great effect. Reportedly run by a group of Gen Z staffers, the account has seen huge success creating memes and short clips of VP Harris, making the case for her with younger voters, and particularly on TikTok.
The post opposite showcases the tone of the most popular posts from the account, remixing political content into fun, easily digestible content within a framework that references pop culture. This was by no means the full extent of the content, and the account also posts more traditional political messaging. Harris’s first campaign video was one of the top posts so far with more than 4 million engagements. An ad on the effects of Roe vs. Wade being overturned also had more than 2.5 million engagements, and was viewed more than 12 million times.
Donald Trump’s constant firehose of content
Donald Trump is covered in a very different context to Kamala Harris. Despite not being in an active position of power like his Democratic rival, he has been the presumptive Republican nominee since at least March when Nikki Haley dropped out the race.
As a result of this, as well as his continued legal travails, attention to him has been more consistent from both the media and the public.
down, but the base line for Trump is higher — closer to 5 million. The top stories that focus on Trump specifically rather than both presidential candidates have included the BBC’s reporting that he would not do another debate with Harris (250k), a story on his on-again, off-again feud with Georgia governor Brian Kemp (190k), and a piece on how the false story of a “gang takeover” in Colorado reached, and was amplified by, Trump (172k).
The Instagram election?Â
If 2012 was the first social media election, and 2016 the focus was on Twitter (now X, of course) then 2024 might be the first Instagram election. Trump has seen huge engagement with his posts on the platform, topping a million interactions more than once.
His WWE-esque entrance to speak at the convention was his top post of the election cycle, and has generated more than 2 million engagements, and he has several more posts that topped a million.
These have included a post about uniting America (1.7M), a video at a wreath ceremony (1.4M), and the now infamous AI cat photos (1M).
Of course, it’s possible we’re missing the wood for the trees here when the biggest post about either candidate isn’t from the candidates themselves or any news organization. Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris on debate night is by far the biggest individual post of this election cycle, with more than 11 million engagements (and that’s with the comments turned off!)
If we’re talking about the influence of Instagram, it would be foolish not to reference Swift’s impact there in actively engaging voters with an affirmative endorsement, as well as directing people to make sure they were registered to vote.
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
The upshot
So what does all this tell us? While traditional media has helped to shape narratives around candidates Harris and Trump, a broad array of social networks are increasingly pivotal in influencing voter engagement and perceptions.
Harris’s strategic use of social media, particularly through her Kamala HQ account, demonstrates a concerted effort to reach younger voters. Meanwhile, Trump’s sustained presence in both the news and on social, and the significant engagement give him a potential name recognition advantage with less engaged voters.
This can be taken as another signal amongst the range of good options that election analysts already have of what’s actually influencing the public. Next week, we’ll apply the same treatment to the VP candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance, looking at what has cut through the noise about them.
This is all just a snapshot of the vast amounts of analysis you could do on the presidential campaigns, and only includes the presidential candidates themselves. We’ve put together a longer report including some of the most talked about topics shaping public interest, from the economy to immigration to abortion, which you can read here.
