TV show viewership breakdown by political party

quote:

---

There are only 35 days until Election Day, and candidates across the country are racing to reach their voters and make a connection before they enter the voting booth.

If you watch TV, you’ve seen this in the works: political ads are running fast and furious in battleground states.

The Washington Post, with the help of the Federal Communications Commission and the Sunlight Foundation, has taken a look at which political parties buy airtime on which and what type of shows.

We pulled every PDF filed on behalf of a senate candidate from August 1 through last week (which includes buys into October). We ran a text-recognition tool on them, divvied them up by party, and then created a script that let us search for the names of shows.

Though they note that the method is imprecise due to abbreviations, the Washington Post staff noticed a few “clear patterns.”

They sectioned the shows up by time of day and type of television show, and created pie charts for each show – red for Republican, blue for Democrat, and yellow for Independent. The size of the graphs reflects the number of mentions in ad filings, and the graphs are listed from “More Republican” to “More Democrat.”

---