Daily Brew: January 29, 2020

January 29, 2020

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Today's Brew announces our new initiative designed to let voters learn more about their candidates + highlights the Ballotpedia pageviews of Democratic presidential candidates   Welcome to the January 29, Brew. Here’s what’s in store for you as you start your day: Ballotpedia’s New Virtual Debate Platform: Candidate Conversations Sanders leads Democratic candidates in Ballotpedia pageviews for third straight week Filing deadline roundup Ballotpedia’s New Virtual Debate Platform: Candidate Conversations What if you could ask a candidate running for office a few questions that would help you get to know them better as a person? What if you could ask those questions of every candidate on your ballot and watch their responses side-by-side before going to the polls? Ballotpedia and EnCiv are excited to announce the launch of Candidate Conversations, a new tool to help voters get to know their candidates. Candidate Conversations is an online platform that allows voters to see their ballot-qualified candidates participate in a virtual conversation with the goal of letting voters get to know their candidates as people. Ballotpedia and EnCiv began testing the Candidate Conversation platform in November 2019 after a year of talking to voters, candidates, and other nonprofit organizations about how we can best help voters feel confident that the candidates they choose on their ballots are the ones that align with their values. EnCiv is an organization whose mission is to improve society by improving democratic discourse. Ballotpedia and EnCiv previously worked together on improving the questions we ask candidates in our Candidate Connection survey by hosting discussion groups in Iowa and Chicago. Astute readers of the Brew may remember when we announced the first race to take advantage of this platform during our beta testing: those in the four-person San Francisco district attorney's race held on Nov. 5, 2019. That conversation can be viewed here. All candidates running for a federal and statewide election in 2020, in addition to those elections within the 100 most populated cities in the United States, will be invited to join the conversation for their race. Interested candidates should reach out to Ballotpedia at editor@ballotpedia.org for more information. Learn more         Sanders leads Democratic candidates in Ballotpedia pageviews for third straight week We are less than one week from the Iowa caucuses, followed soon after by three more nominating contests in February—New Hampshire on Feb. 11, Nevada on Feb. 22, and South Carolina on Feb. 29. For more than a year, we’ve tracked and reported the number of views each candidates’ 2020 presidential campaign page received to show who is getting our readers’ attention. It's been fascinating to watch their pageview statistics ebb and flow with the dynamics of the race. Bernie Sanders led all Democratic presidential hopefuls in Ballotpedia pageviews for the week ending Jan. 25. It was the third consecutive week that Sanders led. As was the case the previous week, Joe Biden’s page had the second-most pageviews and Michael Bloomberg’s page was third. All Democratic candidates received fewer pageviews this week relative to last week. Bloomberg had the smallest decrease from last week at 0.1%. Tom Steyer saw the largest decrease in Ballotpedia pageviews—40.2%—relative to the prior week. Andrew Yang remains the leader in overall pageviews with 164,835. He is followed by Pete Buttigieg, Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Sanders. The following chart shows each Democratic presidential candidates’ Ballotpedia pageviews over the last four weeks—since Dec. 28, 2019. Learn more→ Filing deadline roundup The filing period for congressional and state candidates ended in two states last week—Jan. 24 in Maryland and Jan. 25 in West Virginia. The next approaching candidate filing deadlines are in Indiana on Feb. 7 and Pennsylvania on Feb. 18. Candidate filing deadlines have passed in 11 states, which is under a quarter of them. We’ve only just begun the long march through the 2020 filing deadline cycle. Here are the total number of offices for which filing deadlines have passed so far: 8 U.S. Senate seats 168 U.S. House districts 36 state executive offices 1,042 state legislative seats 104 state supreme court and appellate court judgeships Learn more→