Hi rulers! I’ll be in D.C. next week — and I’m in need of coffee recs. I love a good chai latte, so if you know a good spot for that please send it my way. sgardner@politico.com. Let’s get into it: In the past few months, polls show Nikki Haley edging out Ron DeSantis for the No. 2 spot in several early primary states — and she’s tailing him in the national polling average, too. But she’s also catching up to him in another way: she’s almost getting as much media coverage as he is. Data released today by All In Together, a nonprofit women’s civic education organization, shows that former U.N. Ambassador Haley has consistently received less media coverage than the Florida governor. That gap is closing, though — a trend that’s fairly consistent with her rise in the polls. Her national polling average is now three points behind DeSantis, and she’s surpassed him by roughly ten points in early primary states New Hampshire and South Carolina. But Lauren Leader, the CEO and co-founder of All In Together, a nonpartisan nonprofit whose mission is to engage women in politics, still thinks she should be getting more press attention. “In any other world where you could potentially have the first Republican woman nominee in history, this should actually be garnering outsized coverage,” Leader tells Women Rule in an interview. This is up for debate in Washington, as the press has also been criticized for giving her too much coverage. But as Leader sees it, Haley’s performance in the three GOP primary debates — she was often regarded by major publications as one of the “winners” of the debates — is another reason the press should be paying more attention to her. Haley’s coverage spiked after each of the three debates, but always remained below that of DeSantis. A word association analysis in All In Together’s report, which identified the words most commonly used in articles that mention the candidate, also found that Haley was most often mentioned in contrast to her male rivals in the Republican primary — namely DeSantis and former President Donald Trump — as opposed to stand-alone stories about her. Leader wasn’t shocked that Haley hasn’t attracted as much attention from the press as DeSantis. She saw a similar pattern in 2019 — when a record number of women launched bids for the Democratic nomination. Then, as she wrote in an op-ed for The Hill, the women candidates weren’t just covered less — they also received more negative coverage. A report by Storybench, a publication by Northeastern's journalism school, found that news articles from mainstream publications used a smaller percentage of positive words in stories about the female candidate’s campaigns — and used more words associated with their scandals. For example, two of the top 11 descriptive words used in articles about Sen. Elizabeth Warren were “native” and “tribal,” references to her DNA test scandal. “The majority of the field was female, and yet they still couldn't get even close to equal coverage,” she told Women Rule. Friday’s All In Together report measured a candidate’s press coverage by calculating how many articles from top U.S. news sources mentioned them by name. The sum of the candidate’s coverage from Aug. 13 to Nov. 13 showed Haley has received about the same amount of coverage as Vivek Ramaswamy — and only a little more than South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who has since dropped out of the race. But unsurprisingly, the attention all those candidates garner are small potatoes when compared to the press coverage that one former president gets. According to the report, DeSantis has garnered about half of the coverage that Trump has received (excluding coverage of his legal trials), while Haley has received less than a third of Trump’s coverage. That’s indicative of a larger problem for Haley, Leader says. Even if she can beat out DeSantis and become the main non-Trump option, she’ll be faced with the herculean task of competing with Trump for press attention — which Leader expects to have a measurable effect on her campaign. “There's lots of research that shows that the amount of coverage and the kind of coverage the candidates get actually does affect voter behavior,” says Leader. But despite the wealth of challenges before Haley, Leader thinks that the increasing press attention she’s getting is a positive sign for her campaign — and for other women running for office, hoping to be taken seriously by mainstream media. “She got people's attention,” Leader says.
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