Who Won Super Tuesday’s Media Coverage. Based On Data

We analyzed all online media articles from March 1, 2020, to March 7, 2020, that mention US 2020 candidates to check who got the most of the attention from media

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

At Politwire, we monitor and analyze the media coverage of politicians. We help political campaigns, businesses and media houses to understand politicians’ media paths.

Democratic Super Tuesday

On March 3, 2020, fourteen US states held primaries. About one-third of all delegates were involved. As you might already know, Joe Biden took back the lead by taking around 100 delegates more than Bernie Sanders.

Even though Joe Biden ended up as a winner, did it give him a significant lead of media coverage?

In the graph above, we can see the number of articles for each candidate per each day of the Super Tuesday week. Biden and Sanders are close, and even after the result of Super Tuesday, Joe Biden had just slightly more attention.

Even though Donald Trump dominated media coverage, he is the current president of the United States, it would be strange for him not to be the first.

No Media Bias?

At first sight, it might seem like the media share of 2020 US presidential candidates is fairly distributed.

The main assumption that we got was that most likely Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders always appear together — most of these articles might tell about Democratic nominee, while Donald Trump has “his news”.

The unique article is an article that mentions one candidate and does not mention any of the other two.

Half of Donald Trump’s articles do not mention Democratic nominees. Look how far above his line is.

The uniqueness of media presence is one of the most important metrics to track. Whether it is for the presidential candidates or business — it is crucial to have your share of the media where competitors do not appear.

Is Donald Trump a media favorite?

Maybe not, even though Donald Trump is the leader of the media presence, those mentions might not be that useful.

One way to segregate the data is to look into the ratio of the positive articles.

The positive ratio is calculated by dividing the number of articles with a positive tone by the number of all articles.

Both, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are outperforming Donald Trump on the positive ratio scale based on all articles.

Also, Biden and Sanders are correlated because the vast majority of the articles are the same. Therefore, we should be more interested in the tone of unique articles.

Analyzing the positive ratio of unique articles, we might notice two major insights:

Donald Trump — 1 out of 10 unique articles have an overall positive tone Joe Biden had better results compared to Bernie Sanders even before Super Tuesday

However, Donald Trump’s 10% is enough to beat Democratic candidates in absolute values.

And The Winner Is…

Not Bernie Sanders. Not that week.

Nevertheless, Joe Biden did not get any abnormal attention after his important win (maybe the most important one).

Donald Trump is not a loser. Whether it is because of his presidency or because of media “like” him a lot, the fact is his name is heard the most.

About The Authors

We are Politwire, we just begin to write about the 2020 presidential elections.

We have our dashboard where you can see the result for the past seven days. It is updated in real-time.

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Originally published at Politwire blog.