Election 2020 Briefing

Predicted top stories this morning

Macron tests positive for Covid-19, sending other European leaders into quarantine

The biggest story of the morning comes from CNN. They wrote about French President Emmanuel Macron testing positive for Covid-19, meaning that other European leaders are nnow quarantining. 

The article will rise to 47.4k engagements in the next four hours.

Current interactions: 28k

Predicted interactions: 47.4k

Hunter Biden Was Due ‘Significant’ Pay From China Firm Starting In 2019; Requested $10 Million In 2017: Reports

The second biggest story of this morning comes from the Daily Wire. They wrote about Hunter Biden and emails he allegedly sent about business dealings in China from 2017.

The article will rise to 39.6k engagements in the next two hours.

Trump has threatened not to leave the White House on Inauguration Day, report says

The third biggest story of the morning comes from Business Insider. They wrote about a report that alleged that Donald Trump had threatened not to leave the White House on Inauguration Day.

The article will rise to 29.2k engagements in three hours.

Top social posts of the last 24 hours

Spotlight: Newsmax

As President Trump continues to attack Fox News, especially the daytime programs, there has been a rise in alternative conservative cable networks, most notable Newsmax and OANN.

Of the two, Newsmax has been by far the more successful in generating engagement to its content. In the last 30 days, Newsmax has received around 8.5 million engagements to its website's content, while OANN has received around 1.6 million. These numbers are still significantly below what we would normally see for the top publishers in a month, whose engagement numbers are in the tens of millions.

Newsmax's top article for the period was about alleged migrant caravans, with Ted Cruz's offer to argue on Trump's behalf in the Supreme Court coming a close second. Both of these articles received more than 230k engagements.

Interestingly, their third top article was about how it will still be necessary to wear a mask after vaccination for Covid, which was very highly engaged principally due to the sheer number of Angry and Haha reactions it received on Newsmax's own Page, which were responsible for more than a third of the total engagement.

Top 10 political stories of the last day

Below are the top ten stories of the last 24 hours, ranked by total engagements. The top news of the day was about a Trump appointee saying they wanted younger people to get infected to push a herd immunity strategy for Covid-19.

There was a good deal of conservative commentary among the top articles yesterday, though engagement was lower overall than it has been.