US Election preview: can Musk win Pennsylvania for Trump?

At Signify, we are obsessed with US politics – and every election helps us take a big step forward in terms of technology, and insight. In 2016, our team predicted that Trump would beat Clinton, calling the swing states and the overall result more accurately than any poll or poll aggregator (watch ITV News report). In 2020, our Trumpland series detected an obsession with stolen votes weeks before the election, anticipating the emergence of the Big Lie. And this year, we are using a new methodology to look at the issues that are top of mind for voters in key swing states: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

Our 2024 methodology is unashamedly mainstream and focused on local news only – the top 30 newspapers, TV stations and radio stations in each market, and how coverage from those outlets is shared onto Facebook, X and Reddit. 54% of Americans still cite Facebook as their main news source, so this analysis reflects the engagement of regular folks in each state with politics – a subject they care less about than entertainment or sport, even as the election looms. What we are not measuring, is the engagement of voters who are already sorted into information bubbles on the left, or right – and we also do not measure for inbuilt preconceptions or prejudices. However, by identifying the top local news stories over the past 9 months, we can understand what local people are thinking about as they go to vote. We have asked no questions, and we are studying behaviour only: 138,990 pieces of content, shared 31.5 million times onto social media.

ITV’s Peston recently highlighted our key insights on viral engagement in Pennsylvania, one of the critical battleground states.

Excerpt from Signify’s appearance on Peston’s data wall

Although Elon Musk only recently began campaigning alongside Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, his presence has dominated engagement with local news media in October. Coverage of Musk has been extremely mixed however his team have been very disciplined about mentioning freedom of speech, gun rights and jobs in every media response – and this message discipline makes Musk a net positive for the Trump campaign so far.

Detail from Signify report: top issues over time in Pennsylvania

In less good news for Republicans, coverage of Tony Hinchcliffe’s derogatory remarks about Puerto Ricans at Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden has become the fastest-growing story not only in Pennsylvania but across all swing states we are analysing. With over 472,000 Puerto Ricans residing in Pennsylvania, we will track this viral story to election day.

Detail from Signify report: summary of fastest-growing viral issues over time

Overall, the project showed us how changeable the media environment is in every state – and how affected politics can be by climate events and individual personalities. However there are some fundamentals, and the most salient issues across the four states remain Abortion, the Economy and Immigration.

Signify also tracked the attention surrounding each candidate—not favourability, but the overall level of attention they have received. The chart below shows overall level of engagement with each candidate across the four states and is counter-intuitive given how much attention Trump gets in national and global media. At a local media level, Harris is driving more engagement than Trump in Georgia, Arizona and overall. This reflects one of our key observations from the research – that the Harris campaign has a more active press office, and more local media surrogates than Trump in every state. 

Detail from Signify report: candidate attention over time

A common factor in the media strategies of both campaigns has been to produce media soundbites on their own issues but also try to regain trust on opposition issues. This has been comparatively successful for Democrats in relation to the Economy and Immigration, aided by improving conditions in some states, and public distaste for the ‘eating pets’ narrative. Republicans had some success in the early months of the campaign trying to distance Trump from Project 2025 and the prospect of a national abortion ban. However those efforts faded during the second part of our study, replaced by a focus on immigration and attacks on Harris. The most significant new vectors within the data during the past few weeks have concerned hurricanes, Latino voters and Musk.

For more detail about our work on this race, and the top topics driving voter engagement in each state, please feel free to contact us for a copy of our report. We will share more findings over the coming days as we wait for the results to come in.