• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 24, 2024

Six weeks before the election, Donald Trump continues to dominate the news cycle, according to a "Red, White & Blog" analysis of the most recent 30-day period of news searches vis a vis the Google Trends database.

But unlike his campaigning in the past, the margin is by not all that much -- especially considering the outrageous nature of his campaign rhetoric and the news media's propensity to regurgitate it.

Nationally, Americans searched 17% more for news about Trump than his opponent Kamala Harris, and with the exception of Michigan, the delta between the two candidates wasn't all that much in the rest of the battleground states.

Frankly, I'm not sure what to make of the findings, but I conducted the analysis after listening to the Ipsos political tracking team's monthly presidential election briefing Tuesday and was struck by an important metric cited by Ipsos political analytics chief Chris Jackson: the attention each candidate is able to command among both the news media -- and by extension, American voters.

Jackson said something "unique" has been happening over the past couple of months in that Kamala Harris has been the candidate dominating media attention. He even cited Ipsos odds favoring Harris on that metric by a margin of three-in-five both nationally and in important regions in Ipsos' matrix of key presidential campaign signals that it uses to model its forecasts (see graphic at bottom).

Jackson has described Trump's ability to dominate -- indeed, to redirect -- the news cycle as one of the candidates "super powers" many times in monthly Ipsos briefings over the past eight years and characterized Harris' ability to offset him as a significant shift.

I asked Jackson a follow-up question to see if he could share the attention metrics Ipsos has been using.

"The one I like to look at the most is just Google Trends... and just comparing them over different time frames and different geographies," he explained, adding: "If you do that, you can see that Donald Trump kind of dominated from 2016 to earlier this year, but then starting this summer once Biden stepped down, Harris has been leading on that by at least two-to-one, if not a little bit more.

"I think that's an important indicator of what people are actually doing, right? Google Trends are what people are searching for and more people are searching for Harris than for Trump, which is an important thing to note."

Jackson advised not using it as a projection, but it got me curious, so I conducted the analysis above the last 30 days, which included some of the most off-the-wall press coverage of nutty things Trump has said since coming down his golden escalator in 2015.

Obviously, the analysis doesn't have much of a qualitative valuation to it, but it does show that no matter what cray-cray thing he may say next, Trump no longer has the power to dominate the news cycle.

And never mind the fact that there was even a second assassination attempt on him during that 30-day news cycle.

For what it's worth, I think a big part of it isn't just Harris' ability to command campaign attention, but the fact that Trump is kind of wearing out.

I think most Americans are simply exhausted with his antics and are ready for a change.

And I wouldn't be surprised to see him go even more ballistic -- as if that were possible -- over the next few weeks in an effort to get people's attention.