Publicity is the life-blood of a political campaign, and the more coverage a candidate gets through the news media, the less critical it is to have huge amounts of money to spend on campaign advertising. As the chart above (from Television Campaign Tracker) shows the "winners' of being mentioned by the news media are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Is that really good? Much, if not most, of the mentions have been negative for Clinton and for Trump. Considering that, I think it shows the strength of both candidates that they both still hold large leads in their respective primary races.
Some might say that any mention, even negative ones, are good -- but I'm not at all sure I buy that. There have been times in the past when negative publicity on the news programs have killed campaigns.
Sanders supporters have been complaining loudly that their candidate doesn't get his fair share of coverage. But I wonder if they'd really like to have an enormous amount of negative coverage. I suspect they'd then be complaining about how that large coverage was still unfair.
The charts below show the percentage of news media mentions by each candidate in their own party race.
I think Sanders gets about the right amount of coverage given how he's doing. What really bugs me is that Chris Christie gets more coverage than he does. I don't expect Sanders to get the nomination. But he has a hundred times the chance (At least!) that Christie does of getting his nomination.
ReplyDeleteBut most of Christie's coverage is negative -- while most of Sanders' isn't.
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