Trump trounces Biden in campaign site traffic, thanks to far-right outlets
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Traffic to President Trump's presidential campaign website is more than 4x greater than traffic to Joe Biden's presidential campaign website, thanks in large part to traffic referrals from right-wing outlets like The Gateway Pundit and Citizen Free Press, according to data from SimilarWeb.
Why it matters: The data speaks to the enormous role the far-right web plays in promoting the president's ideas and his re-election campaign.
- Web traffic to campaign websites is important because it can help campaigns fundraise, sell merchandise, and rally enthusiasm amongst voters.
Details: Nearly 60% of traffic to Trump's website from May to July of this year came from The Gateway Pundit, a far-right news and opinion website that has a reputation for spreading falsehoods and conspiracies, and Citizen Free Press, a fringe-right website that links out to stories using hyper-partisan headlines.
- Meanwhile, the majority of traffic to Joe Biden's website (over 65%) in May and June came from the Democrats' online fundraising platform ActBlue.
- Small percentages of traffic also come from mainstream news websites.
What they're saying: “It is no secret that Donald Trump and his campaign cultivate the dark, hardcore rightwing fringes of the internet so they can escape reality," says Andrew Bates, Director of Rapid Response for the Biden campaign.
- "In the real world, distraught Americans are desperately searching for Donald Trump's somehow-still-nonexistent strategy to pull us out of this catastrophe of his own making -- even after his failed leadership has claimed over 160,000 lives, cost tens of millions their jobs, and left the United States the hardest hit nation by the pandemic in the entire world," says Bates.
- A source close to the Trump campaign says that according to the campaign's internal metrics, WinRed — the Republicans' online fundraising tool — is a top traffic referrer to Trump's site.
