Election Day 2014 Deep Dive into the Media Coverage of This Year and Years Past

One amazing perk of being a citizen of the United States of America is our right to vote. In this year’s general election on November 4, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 33 of the 100 seats in the Senate were contested. In addition to the House and Senate selections, 38 state and territorial governorships, 46 state legislatures and numerous other state and local races were determined.

We dove into our media intelligence platform to find mentions of this year’s election and how those mentions stack up against previous midterm and primary election years.

Election Day 2014 Deep Dive into the Media Coverage of This Year

and Years Past

Election Day 2014 Deep Dive into the Media Coverage of This Year

and Years Past

As the momentum leading up to the election grew, we were curious to see what kind of coverage Election Day had received to date. Our data returned over 200,000 results with a spike in mentions on November 4, the actual date of the election.

We also compared that search against coverage of mid-term elections to find out if there were more mentions of those type of elections than Election Day itself. This only increased total mentions by about 30,000 and there were only 2,400 mentions of mid-term elections on Election Day.

Overall Coverage of Election Day 2014

Election Day 2014 Deep Dive into the Media Coverage of This Year

and Years Past

Chatter About Election Day Throughout the YearOur Discovery tool within our media intelligence platform also contains historical data. We completed the same search but dating back to January 1, 2014, and the data gets interesting. While there aren’t hundreds of thousands of hits, you can see spikes in the number of mentions of the key word “mid-term elections” that occur about once a quarter. Let’s take a deeper dive into those spikes to find out top stories that occurred with the mention of the mid-term elections.

Election Day 2014 Deep Dive into the Media Coverage of This Year

and Years Past

A Deeper Dive Into the SpikesThe first spike occurred on January 28, 2014 with over 800 mentions of the mid-term elections due to a State of the Union address from President Obama. The address consisted mostly of the President’s concern over a divided Congress and his warning that he “go-it-alone” without legislation’s help to pass important bills into law.

Many of the news articles also addressed the President and Democratic Party’s concerns over the Republicans possibly taking control of the Senate in the November 2014 elections. That fear was made a realization on Election Day 2014, when the Republicans did indeed take majority stake in the Senate.

Election Day 2014 Deep Dive into the Media Coverage of This Year

and Years Past

Coverage Spikes on April 23, 2014The second spike in mentions occurred 8 months before the election, on April 23. There were over 1,600 mentions of mid-term elections on this date, and interestingly, the top story from that spike features the famous WWE wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. It was on this date that Austin declared his support for same-sex marriage, a topic that was heating up as candidates prepared and took their stances on top issues for the mid-term elections.

Election Day 2014 Deep Dive into the Media Coverage of This Year

and Years Past

Election Day 2014The last spike in coverage occurred on September 1st, with over 1,300 mentions of the mid-term elections as Labor Day is the traditional start of the autumn campaigns for the upcoming election. The majority of mentions stem from a speech President Obama delivered to a union crowd in Milwaukee calling for Congress to raise the minimum wage due to the recent economic gains.

Election Day 2014 Deep Dive into the Media Coverage of This Year

and Years Past

Election Day 2013, was an off-year election, so as you can imagine, there were not as many mentions as this year, but mentions still topped the 200,000 mark. On actual Election Day, mentions reached just over 12,000. Last year’s elections were held on November 5, and featured several special elections to Congress; notable races included the Democrats picking up governorship in Virginia and New Jersey Chris Christie being re-elected to his second term.

Election Day 2013

Election Day 2014 Deep Dive into the Media Coverage of This Year

and Years Past

The 2012 Presidential Election was held on November 6, 2012. There were over 400,000 mentions of Election Day that year with over 48,000 mentions on the actual day. When comparing that with the keyword “presidential election”, total mentions top over a million, with total mentions of presidential election at over 800,000.

Election Day 2012

Election Day 2014 Deep Dive into the Media Coverage of This Year

and Years Past

Conclusion With another election year come and gone and another two years before the next Presidential Election, it will be interesting to see how the media coverage of the elections starts to change. With next year being an off year, we are excited to watch our media intelligence tool for mentions of the candidates that each party will elect for future President.

What are your predictions? Will election chatter continue to grow? With a media intelligence tool like iQ media, what kind of trends can you predict for your organization or industry? Take a look at our Discovery tool today and how you can utilize it and the entire iQ media platform for your content marketing efforts. Visit us at www.iqmediacorp.com.