July’s barrage of unprecedented presidential election and campaign news has driven near-historic news engagement among Americans, with Vice President Kamala Harris toppling former President Donald Trump as the top news topic, a technology company that analyzes media readership trends told Newsweek.
“The U.S. elections are driving much more readers to U.S. news sites,” Dave Struzzi, a spokesperson for Taboola, a technology company that analyzes media readership trends, told Newsweek in an email.
Over the past month, the presidential race has changed drastically, with seemingly constant newsbreaks.
Stephanie Scarbrough / POOL / AFP/ Evan Vucci-Pool/ Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
Earlier this month, on July 13, an assassination attempt on Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally that left him and two others injured, and one fatality, shocked the nation.
Just days later, Trump, wearing a bandage around his injured ear from the shooting, announced Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, and accepted the Republican presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention (RNC).
Almost a week later, in an unprecedented move, President Joe Biden exited the 2024 presidential race, causing another media frenzy. Shortly after, he endorsed Harris, who is likely to appear at the top of the Democratic ticket. Days later he gave a televised speech vowing to stay in the Oval Office until the end of his term.
Harris and her new campaign, which was launched just over 100 days before Election Day, has replaced Trump as the number one topic on news sites, Struzzi said. He added that, “this was an overnight shoot to #1.”
More than 57 million people read campaign and election-related news stories across 2,000 different sites over the past month and a half, marking a 56% increase over the 45-day period, according to Taboola.
The surge of political news has also revitalized cable television viewership, which had been relatively stagnant in recent months.
Coverage of the RNC and the assassination attempt on Trump, among other political news, led to Fox News‘ average July prime-time audience to soar to 3.45 million, a 66% increase from the previous six months, according to Nielsen.
Newsweek reached out to Nielsen for confirmation via email on Wednesday.
The ratings company estimated that in total, 28.4 million viewers watched part of Trump’s RNC acceptance speech on July 18, which was aired on 14 television networks. It reported that more than 10 million people tuned into it on Fox.
Other outlets saw spikes in viewership as well, with CNN‘s prime-time average up 41% from the past six months, reaching 856,000 viewers.
However, MSNBC‘s prime-time average of 1.18 million viewers fell by 3% in July. Once Biden dropped out of the race, though, MSNBC’s viewership jumped to 1.7 million, according to Nielsen.