Beto O’Rourke is trying to reboot his campaign. After being in the race for two months, the former Texas representative is getting much less media attention than he did when he first announced his candidacy. The week he entered the race, O’Rourke was mentioned more than any other candidate — his name came up in 870 clips across the three cable news networks we monitor (MSNBC, CNN and Fox News), according to data from the TV News Archive that we accessed via the GDELT’s Project Television API.1 Last week, he ranked seventh.
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 5 | Week of May 12 | ||
| Joe Biden | 1,411 |
– |
1,715 |
– |
| Bernie Sanders | 503 |
– |
530 |
– |
| Elizabeth Warren | 289 |
– |
358 |
– |
| Kamala Harris | 266 |
– |
343 |
– |
| Pete Buttigieg | 196 |
– |
277 |
– |
| Bill de Blasio | — |
– |
263 |
– |
| Beto O’Rourke | 90 |
– |
217 |
– |
| Steve Bullock | — |
– |
162 |
– |
| Cory Booker | 137 |
– |
107 |
– |
| Kirsten Gillibrand | 33 |
– |
82 |
– |
| Amy Klobuchar | 130 |
– |
43 |
– |
| Seth Moulton | 3 |
– |
29 |
– |
| Jay Inslee | 10 |
– |
21 |
– |
| Eric Swalwell | 39 |
– |
14 |
– |
| Julian Castro | 7 |
– |
13 |
– |
| John Hickenlooper | 12 |
– |
13 |
– |
| Tulsi Gabbard | 5 |
– |
12 |
– |
| Tim Ryan | 5 |
– |
11 |
– |
| Andrew Yang | 20 |
– |
11 |
– |
| Michael Bennet | 27 |
– |
11 |
– |
| Marianne Williamson | 9 |
– |
7 |
– |
| John Delaney | 4 |
– |
2 |
– |
| Total | 3,196 |
– |
4,241 |
– |
When O’Rourke first entered the race, his strategy was to stay off cable news. “Seeing you eyeball-to-eyeball, to me, is so much more satisfying than being on cable TV,” he told a supporter at a Virginia town hall when explaining why he chose to avoid the national spotlight TV appearances in favor of smaller gatherings. But his polls have sunk to the lowest they have been since his launch and now O’Rourke is trying to pivot back to major televised events like interviews and town halls.
For a month now, Joe Biden has been the most-talked-about candidate on cable news each week, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders a distant second and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have been either third or fourth. These four candidates have accounted for about 70 to 85 percent of all mentions of 2020 candidates in each of the last four weeks on the cable networks in our data set.
Even in the next tier of candidates, O’Rourke is now struggling to make a splash. Pete Buttigieg, who, unlike O’Rourke, has aggressively participated in all forms of media, rose from relative obscurity while O’Rourke seemed to sink back into it. In the past two weeks, Buttigieg has ranked fifth in cable news mentions, while O’Rourke has floundered at seventh or eighth. Buttigieg is also consistently getting more mentions in online news stories and more Google search traffic.
Even O’Rourke’s reboot appears to be snakebitten. It happened to coincide with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s entry into the race, as well as the launch of Montana Governor Steve Bullock’s campaign, which took up some media oxygen last week. O’Rourke was mentioned fewer times than de Blasio.
With so many 2020 candidates vying for the spotlight, getting the media’s attention may be a lot more difficult for O’Rourke now than it would have been if he had agreed to more TV appearances two months ago when he launched his campaign.