Last week, for the fifth week in a row, former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders were the two most-mentioned 2020 Democratic candidates on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, according to data from the TV News Archive accessed via the GDELT’s Project Television API.1 While the candidates as a group were mentioned fewer times last week than the week before, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, was mentioned more often, likely because he held a town hall on Fox News last Sunday. He was the third-most-mentioned candidate last week, up from fifth the week before.
Buttigieg boosted his cable news coverage last week
How often each Democratic candidate was mentioned each week in news programming on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, counted by the number of 15-second clips that include each person’s full name
| Number of Clips | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Week of May 12 | Week of May 19 | ||
| Joe Biden | 1,715 | 1,160 | ||
| Bernie Sanders | 530 | 465 | ||
| Pete Buttigieg | 277 | 310 | ||
| Elizabeth Warren | 358 | 258 | ||
| Kamala Harris | 343 | 238 | ||
| Beto O’Rourke | 217 | 187 | ||
| Bill de Blasio | 263 | 83 | ||
| Kirsten Gillibrand | 82 | 74 | ||
| Amy Klobuchar | 43 | 46 | ||
| Cory Booker | 107 | 45 | ||
| Steve Bullock | 162 | 42 | ||
| Eric Swalwell | 14 | 25 | ||
| Julian Castro | 13 | 24 | ||
| Tim Ryan | 11 | 19 | ||
| Jay Inslee | 21 | 17 | ||
| Seth Moulton | 29 | 14 | ||
| John Delaney | 2 | 13 | ||
| Andrew Yang | 11 | 13 | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard | 12 | 11 | ||
| John Hickenlooper | 13 | 9 | ||
| Marianne Williamson | 7 | 0 | ||
| Michael Bennet | 11 | 0 | ||
| Total | 4,241 | 3,053 | ||
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke held a CNN town hall on Tuesday night, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten him mentioned more often on cable news, which had been already been paying less attention to him in recent weeks. Sixteen major candidates were mentioned less than 100 times last week on cable news.
From ABC News:
Buttigieg: Would put my mayoral, military experience up ‘against … any competitor’
Check out the data behind this series and check back each week for an update on which candidates are getting the most cable news mentions.