As the September 10 presidential debate approaches, the stage is set for the first—and potentially only—head-to-head matchup between Harris and Trump. This debate represents a crucial opportunity for the candidates to directly appeal to swing voters and draw a clear distinction on the issues that matter most.
Recent public polls indicate the economy, immigration, and abortion are top concerns among voters. Penta’s Swing State Snapshot examines how these issues are playing out in major media markets across the seven pivotal swing states that will determine the outcome of the 2024 election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The 2024 election will hinge on a small group of swing state voters, with campaigns vying for their support through earned and paid media. From front-page headlines in local newspapers to lead stories on local news broadcasts, swing state voters are inundated with campaign coverage that could influence their decisions up until Election Day.
Penta’s Swing State Snapshot has analyzed media visibility across all seven swing states, revealing several key trends:
A closer look at individual swing states shows some variation in issue prominence over the past week:
As the candidates and campaigns enter the final stretch of what is anticipated to be a highly competitive election season, with races ranging from the presidential contest to control of Congress, expect a heightened focus on these key issues with major visibility in swing states. Beginning with the September 10 debate, campaigns will intensify their efforts to sway the last undecided voters leading up to Election Day.
The Swing State Snapshot uses Penta’s real-time global media database to track candidate visibility and sentiment of mentions in the largest newspapers and local broadcast television stations in the top three markets in the top seven “swing states”, based on their narrow margins of victory during the 2020 presidential election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Visibility is Penta's metric for measuring how companies, people, and issues appear in content. The measure incorporates the volume of mentions, the reach and influence of the source, the prominence of the mention in the content, and how relevant the content is to the entity mentioned. Penta has developed a custom Sentiment scoring engine that calculates sentiment of every mention of each candidate on a scale of -100 to +100, trained on billions of records and tuned every day by our analysts.