Election 2020: Site Ranking Trends Question Consensus

Over the past week, site ranking trends continue to favor conservative-biased news and opinion sites over their liberal leaning counterparts.  Our conservative cohort has improved its rank by about 1% whereas the liberal cohort has seen its rank slightly decrease.  The difference is not that stark, however, it continues a trend that has been in place for months.

We can make a number of broad conclusions from these trends:

• Blowout Turnout Questionable — the fact that we do not see site rankings from these sites increasing at a significant clip a month before the ‘biggest election of our lifetime’ makes us question if turnout will be as significant as many predict.  Recall as well that in the past week the first presidential debate occurred and Trump went to the hospital for Covid.  Where is the boom in site rankings?  The lack thereof infers much lower interest in the 2020 election than pundits report,
• Biden Landslide Highly Questionable — some respected forecasters have now increased their Biden electoral vote to over 350.  But, we would assume that traffic to left-leaning news and opinion sites would, in this case, be turbo-charged.  In fact, conservative sites have seen the relative traffic trend (as measured by site rank improvement) move in their direction.  This puts the landslide forecasts in doubtful territory.

Site ranking data does not support the consensus view of the 2020 election.

From our experience analyzing alt data, usually (not always) when alt data does not support a consensus viewpoint based on traditional methods or metrics . . . . we have a surprise in store.

For reference, here are sites included in our conservative and liberal leaning cohorts.