In the war of partisan trash talk that frequently consumes online political media, one truth has emerged from this year's election coverage that transcends ideology: No one wants to read about Mitt Romney.
The well-starched Republican's traffic poison has been felt this year at websites across the political spectrum including at BuzzFeed and it's left many editors, publishers, and bloggers yearning for the days of the unpredictable Sarah Palin, the maverick John McCain, and the Obama-Clinton blood feud. Bloggers and editors are left to decipher its causes is it Romney's discipline, his blameless personal life, or the simple fact that his supporters are less likely to be trolling the web?
"Some of this is probably because Romney is old news; in a sense he's been running for president for five years," said Matt Lewis, a blogger at conservative news site The Daily Caller. Lewis, like other journalists interviewed, declined to share specific metrics. But he said he sees a noticeable drop-off in online engagement when he writes a post about Romney.
"He's also a middle-aged white guy, which is boring because it is so common in our history," he said.
And while he said he misses the days "when merely mentioning the name Sarah Palin would give you an automatic spike in both traffic and buzz," Lewis said Romney's traffic-killing persona could be good for him, politically.
"I do think there is often an inverse relationship between running a serious and disciplined campaign, and generating a huge amount of online excitement," he said. "Being exciting and being serious aren't mutually exclusive, but only the truly great politicians seem to maximize both."
Garance Franke-Ruta, senior politics editor at TheAtlantic.com, attributed Romney's deadening effect on traffic to his consistent refusal to veer off his campaign's blame-Obama script.
"Romney is a very cautious politician who benefits from operating under the radar and having the focus of the contest be on Obama," she said. "It's Mittness Protection, general election style. The more boring he is, the more attention which in today's media means negative attention focuses on Obama."
Another specific damper on traffic: The Drudge Report, the largest single source of traffic to the political web, rarely links stories critical of the Republican nominee.
But as BuzzFeed's own statistics indicate, the phenomenon extends beyond traffic for day-to-day campaign stories. In a sort of controlled experiment, BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski created two sets of similar, photo-heavy posts focused on the early lives of President Obama and Mitt Romney. One set focused on Obama's and Romney's childhoods, the other on Obama and Romney as young men. They were comparably promoted with all four posts featured on the site's front page, and pushed out into the social media sphere but in both cases the Obama-centric posts vastly outperformed those about Romney, as the chart below shows.
