Site rankings provide an important indication as to the changing interests of society.
For election analysis, we’ve created two cohorts – conservative and liberal-biased news and opinion sites – and follow their respective average rankings to see where interest is trending.
For instance, if conservative-biased sites see their average ranking improving going into election-day in relation to liberal-biased sites we can assume that potential conservative voters are showing more interest / enthusiasm and therefore are more likely to vote.
For the 2020 race, we have covered Alexa site rankings here and here, refer to those posts for further details.
For the 3rd week of September, we see a slight improvement for the conservative-biased cohort and an approximately equal deterioration for the liberal-biased cohort. For the most part, however, the past week has seen both cohorts more or less stabilize. Especially in comparison to previous weeks and months, the 3rd week of September was surprisingly stable.
The longer term trend of conservative-biased site rankings improving while liberal-biased site rankings deteriorating continues intact. The trends since June are presented in Chart 1.
Chart 1: Average Alexa Site Rankings of Conservative-Biased and Liberal-Biased News and Opinion Site Cohorts, June to 3rd Week of September 2020
Source: Alexa.com and ZettaCap
The average ranking of the conservative cohort continues to improve (decline) while that of the liberal cohort continues to deteriorate (increase). Note that a lower ranking is better. The conclusion is obvious — conservative-biased sites are receiving increasing relative traffic. The implication is that conservative-biased voters are showing more interest and enthusiasm going into election-day.
Verifying the Results
Results have been so lopsided, that we worried that perhaps the cohort construction distorted the findings. We have created various cohort mixes, including taking only more mainstream (higher ranking) sites as well as taking more politically biased (usually lower ranking) sites and the results are along the same lines.
For instance, Fox News (mainstream right-leaning) has seen its ranking improve since June while MSNBC, CNN, NY Times, and Washington Post (mainstream left-leaning) have all had deteriorating rankings. Similar results have been found on more niche and more politically extreme sites, namely that, on average, conservative sites have tended to see their rankings improve while liberal-leaning ones have tended to deteriorate.
We also verified the results on social media. We created similar cohorts of social media accounts and found that conservative-biased news, opinion, and political accounts have trended much better over the previous months using a variety of metrics. In short, this does not seem to be a cohort construction issue.
Liberal-Biased Cohort
For liberal-biased sites, we have included:
- CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post, NPR, NBC News, FiveThirtyEight, CBS News, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, Vox, Slate, New Yorker, MSNBC, Salon, Daily Kos, Axios, RawStory, The Intercept, TPM, ProPublica, Mother Jones, Palmer Report, The Nation, The New Republic, Jacobin Magazine, Democracy Now!, Yes! Magazine, and The Young Turks
Conservative-Biased Cohort
For conservative-biased sites, we have included:
- Fox News, Breitbart, Wall Street Journal, Western Journal, NY Post, The Gateway Pundit, Drudge Report, Daily Caller, Zero Hedge, Daily Wire, The Blaze, Newsmax, National Review, Washington Examiner, PJ Media, Red State, Townhall, reason, Hotair, Twitchy, OANN, Free Beacon, True Pundit, Judicial Watch, and America’s Voice News
Farther Left or Bernie Sanders’ Supporters
Speculating a bit further, we believe that the Democrats could be losing its farther left-leaning base, in other words the supporters of Bernie Sanders.
Focusing just on Alexa site rankings, we see farther left-leaning news and opinion sites among those deteriorating the quickest. For instance, sites as Jacobin Magazine, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Intercept, The Atlantic, and Vox are generally more left-leaning and have deteriorated considerably over the last few months.
In contrast, some of the farther right-leaning sites have been improving the quickest. For instance, sites as The Gateway Pundit, Daily Wire, Red State, and Twitchy have seen some of the largest and most consistent ranking gains.
One potential interpretation is that Democrats seem to be losing influence among the more extreme-left of their party.
This should not come as such a surprise as the possibility had already been raised by the consensus near the end of the primary season which put Bernie Sanders versus Joe Biden. At that time, many wondered if Sanders and his supporters would enthusiastically follow Biden, a centrist, to election-day.
Alexa site ranking cohorts tell us that Democrats in general have lost a considerable amount of interest. Taking it one step further to look at which sites are declining or improving the most seems to show that enthusiasm is most lacking among the farther left readers — that is, those most likely to have supported Bernie Sanders.
We will continue to follow this trend. As of now, it looks as if voter turnout of Sanders’ supporters for Biden could end up being lower than consensus expectations.
Conclusion
It looks like the Trump base is far more enthusiastic than the Biden base going into the election, at least based on the increasing traffic going to right-leaning sites. We have seen other alt data trends that lead us to a similar conclusion. Assuming no significant change in these trends, we expect turnout to favor Republicans on election-day.