How Trump Beat Out Harris Among News Influencers in 2024

Donald Trump won the influencer election in 2024. 

That’s according to a new study from Pew Research Center that analyzed more than 150,000 posts from 500 news influencers published last summer and fall. While the study found that influencers mentioned both Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris about equally, there were more posts about Trump overall – and those posts were generally more favorable of him than posts about Harris were of her.

An equal percentage of influencers who mentioned Trump or Harris – 42% – were critical in their posts about the candidate. 

But Trump’s ultimate advantage came from the sheer number of posts from his supporters. Consequently, twice as many posts about Harris on the social media site X were critical of the Democratic candidate than supportive of her. Trump’s numbers, on the other hand, were more evenly split, according to Pew. 

Right-leaning news influencers also tended to be more dominant overall on social media, posting an average of 183 times a week. Left-leaning influencers, meanwhile, posted just 72 times per week on average – less than half as much as their right-leaning counterparts.

Roughly 1 in 5 Americans say they get their news from influencers, according to a Pew study released last November. That makes online influencers a valuable asset for campaigns and causes as they contend with an increasingly splintered media ecosystem.

Those who report getting news from influencers tend to be younger and less likely to pay attention to traditional media, like legacy news sites and television. And Trump made a concerted effort during his 2024 campaign to reach voters through non-traditional platforms. He notably appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in October.

Harris’ team, meanwhile, opted for a more centralized media approach. She passed up an opportunity to appear on Rogan’s podcast and gravitated toward a more traditional media strategy that included coverage from legacy news outlets and appearances on more ideologically friendly platforms.

The Pew study suggests that Trump’s strategy may have paid off when it came to reaching a large chunk of voters who get their news from online influencers.

What’s more, X, the social media site owned by Elon Musk, was the go-to platform for political news influencers during the 2024 election, the Pew study found. Seventy-nine percent of all posts analyzed in the study came from X. Just 8 percent were posted on YouTube and 6 percent were posted on Facebook. 

Instagram and TikTok accounted for just 7 percent of social media posts that mentioned either Trump or Harris, according to Pew.