Silver Bulletin. Nate Silver

One thing that hits a little different this year is that the main characters have really been the Democrats: Kamala Harris and, before her, Joe Biden.

Source for this? Me, someone who’s been writing on the Internet for a long time. My instinct has been that headlines involving “Harris” (or “Kamala”) or “Biden” will click better with Silver Bulletin readers than those involving “Trump”. We don’t A/B test our headlines, so that might be wrong. But it’s been validated if you look back at the top posts as determined by whatever algorithmic magic Substack uses, which are pretty Kamala- (and Biden-) centric. It was just a truism in 2016 and 2020 that if you wanted to drive traffic on the Internet, you framed the story around Donald Trump. But Google search interest in Trump is down by 2x or 3x relative to these past elections, while the numbers for the Democrats are up: