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At long last, we’ve found at least one metric in which Marianne Williamson is a top contender: number of Wikipedia views. While polling and donations are great metrics for evaluating who’s leading the 2020 Democratic field, they don’t tell us much about which candidates the electorate find interesting. There’s plenty of candidates who I’d happily spend an afternoon reading about, but wouldn’t necessarily buy a t-shirt from their website.
Presented are the daily Wikipedia view counts for the twelve candidates who have received the most traffic throughout the primary so far. Kamala Harris’s Wikipedia page has been visited almost 9 million times this year, making her by far the candidate most read about on Wikipedia.
Let’s see what the view looks like without Harris, Williamson or Tulsi Gabbard...
...and without Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, or Andrew Yang…
Out of the entire field, Amy Klobuchar takes 12th place in terms of Wikipedia views during the primary. Her page was viewed over 130,000 times on February 11th, the day after she announced her candidacy.
Ouch
As it turns out, stronger polling and fundraising don’t guarantee more views in this race. Williamson, Gabbard and Yang are all earning perhaps more than their fair share of Wikipedia views, despite polling below candidates such as Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. Therefore, it appears a disproportionate amount of attention goes to candidates who are less-traditional, unique, or controversial.
Each of these candidates benefited greatly from the debates. Essentially every candidate received noticeable bumps following the debates held June 26-27th and July 30-31st, but few to the degree of Williamson, Gabbard, and Yang.
This helps explain why candidates who failed to qualify for the September debates were so vocal in expressing their disappointment. Gabbard openly complained about the DNC; Gillibrand dropped out of the race after deciding she didn’t see a winning path without a voice on the debate stage. So is missing a debate really that detrimental?
Yup.
In case you can’t tell, the September debate was on the 12th.
For reference, here’s what kind of Wikipedia traffic some of the candidates who were on stage received afterwards.
Gillibrand, Gabbard and Williamson all have one other major commonality: they each announced their candidacies in January. Let’s take a step back and look at the early months of this primary...
It might be worth noting that Gabbard received twice as many views than Gillibrand when they announced. Announcing first may have given Gabbard a slight edge, but conventional wisdom would expect a Senator representing New York to make a bigger splash than a House representative from Hawaii.
In fact, Gabbard’s launch generated more Wikipedia views than campaign announcements by Senators Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders were all able to achieve.
One could argue that higher profile candidates have fewer Wikipedia views because they’re already household names, negating any need to look them up. But if that was the case, it’s curious that Yang and Williamson don’t have higher view counts around this time period. For context, Yang and Williamson announced their candidacies on November 6th, 2017 and January 28th, 2019, respectively.
Is Gabbard simply in the sweet spot of name recognition? Not famous enough to be well known already, not obscure enough to fly under the radar? Or are there third parties helping drive traffic to her Wikipedia page?
Interested in comparing other combinations of candidates? Explore the graph by clicking on any candidates' names to show/hide their line →
and use the sliders below to change the time period! ↓