Google has a long history of interfering in American elections in favor of the most liberal politicians. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, like the most recent presidential debate, Google is giving Americans the rigged ABC treatment.
In the past, Google buried the campaign websites of Republican candidates. Now the search giant very clearly pads its search results about political candidates with leftist legacy news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and either neutral or favorable toward Democrats. Readers will have to sift through the biased news before they even see the organic results of their searches, let alone a candidate’s website.
MRC Free Speech America researchers conducted searches on Sept. 6 for “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024” to determine where Google Search would position each candidate’s presidential campaign website. In both searches, news from leftist-biased legacy outlets like CNN and The New York Times populated the top of the search results.
Google Search: “Donald Trump Presidential Race 2024”
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign website appeared sixth in search results for “donald trump presidential race 2024.” But before reaching Trump’s website, readers would see options to click on seven articles from left-wing sources. The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post were listed under the “Top Stories” panel.
Once MRC researchers reached the actual search results, Google displayed a link to an article from The Economist titled “Donald Trump v Kamala Harris: who’s ahead in the polls?” Additionally, the results showed CNN’s elections page along with a link to its live election updates. Google also displayed a link to NBC’s live election updates page.
MRC Free Speech America worked alongside MRC NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham who analyzed these articles for bias. He noted that not every story needs to show a blatant leftist bias to be problematic because Google credentials the news sources by elevating them in search results. “Google [is] telling the reader that the most reliable sources of campaign news are CNN, NBC, The Times, The Post, Politico and The Economist—liberal sources all.”
The Washington Post live updates page, which showed up in the results for both searches, featured slanted headlines in its list of articles about the election.
“This is not neutral, there are snotty headlines and opinion pieces,” Graham said. He cited headlines like: “Analysis: Trump’s sudden move to re-litigate sexual abuse claims goes off the rails,” “Hunter Biden’s tragedy and turmoil shadowed the Biden presidency” and “Nikki Haley says she’s willing to campaign for Donald Trump, but he hasn’t asked her.”
The New York Times live updates page also appeared in both searches. Graham added that the articles listed were similarly “not neutral, but not as bad” as The Post.
The Economist article titled “Donald Trump v Kamala Harris: who’s leading the polls?” included subtle but still evident bias.
“Averaging the polls seems fairly neutral, but the descriptions of the candidates can sound loaded,” said Graham. “Writers highlight negatives for both campaigns but suggest Harris is not an ideologue, and that Trump is very divisive. Apparently, Democrats can say the worst things about Trump and his supporters and it’s never viewed as divisive. It’s merely implied that it’s accurate.”
The election updates page for CNN’s Sept. 6 articles included a “fairly neutral list of stories on both campaigns,” according to Graham. Meanwhile, NBC live updates for Sept. 5 included a “headline that spotlights good news for each campaign,” he said. And Politico’s piece headlined “Trump is actually the most pro-trade candidate in the presidential race” was a “surprising piece, and not anti-Trump,” Graham noted.
Although each of these outlets propped up by Google featured neutral pieces, each has a history of leftist bias, as documented by MRC NewsBusters.
Google Search: “Kamala Harris presidential race 2024”
Unsurprisingly Harris’s campaign website appeared higher than Trump’s. Harris’s campaign website was third in the organic search results when prompted “Kamala Harris presidential race 2024.”
However, above Harris’s website were nine articles and all but one were from left-leaning news outlets. The news sources included The Hill (twice), The New York Times (twice), CNN, The Washington Post, USA Today and The Brookings Institute. And the one story from the more politically-mixed outlet, NewsNation, was an interview hosted by leftist broadcaster and former CNN host Chris Cuomo.
Nearly every article that appeared above Harris’s website in search results related to historian Allan Lichtman’s prediction that Harris will win the 2024 election.
or example, Graham pointed out, “Like other liberal journalists, USA Today hyped Lichtman correctly predicting nine of the last ten presidential elections (except Bush’s squeaker in 2000).” He added that Litchman has his own bias that went unacknowledged by USA Today and other outlets. “Like other liberal journalists, they don’t mention he ran for the Senate in a Democratic primary in 2006 and drew 1.6 percent of the vote. He also wrote the books, Repeal the Second Amendment (2020), and The Case for Impeachment of Donald Trump in April 2017!”
And even NewsNation reported the news inaccurately when former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo interviewed Lichtman.
“Right out of the box, Chris Cuomo inaccurately claimed Lichtman predicted 10 of the last 10 presidential elections,” Graham said. “Lichtman went right along, insisting he’s always right, and insisted that the Republicans have failed to pin any scandals on President Biden, and that Donald Trump doesn’t have ‘challenger charisma,’ because he has narrow appeal.”
A video of the Cumo-Lichtman interview was included again in two articles by The Hill, one of which cited new polling that claimed that support for Trump in Florida and Texas is within the margin of error.
The Times opinion piece, “Harris or Trump? The Prophet of Presidential Elections Is Ready to Call the Race,” included a video that treated him with a similar air of saintly adoration.
Graham called out The Times for its fawning over Litchtman’s methodology. “This produced seven-minute video filled with cheesy footage of Lichtman in an athletic tank top and shorts which runs through his ‘13 keys’ and ends with another boast-filled segment on how Harris wins,” he said referring to the criteria Lichtman examines when determining whether a candidate can win.
The MRC NewsBusters Executive Editor also noted that “On the ‘Scandal’ key, Lichtman boasts: ‘Republicans have been trying for years to pin a scandal on President Biden and came up empty. … There has to be at least some bipartisan recognition of actual corruption that implicates the president himself, and not a family member.’”
Although the left-wing think tank The Brookings Institute is not a news source, it appeared in Google’s news panel, with a commentary article titled: “Is Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump in the presidential race?” by Democrat academic William Galston (who served in the Clinton White House). According to Graham, Galston “is less sanguine that Lichtman: ‘The winner’s national vote margin will be modest, and the race will be decided by a handful of votes in a few swing states.’”
Although Google included stories from many of the top-20 most viewed news outlets, according to Statista, notably missing is the third most-viewed news site, Fox News Digital. Not a single Fox News article appeared among the first news options in either of the two searches MRC Free Speech America conducted.
This overt leftist bias is especially concerning considering that according to a November 2023 Pew Research survey, a rising number of American adults receive their news from search. The study found that 15 percent of U.S. adults prefer to get their news from search engines which is up from 13 percent in 2022 and 11 percent in 2021.
Additionally, the placement of Trump and Harris’s websites is worth noting. According to a 2023 study conducted by Search Engine Optimization expert Brian Dean and his company Backlinko, the sixth result (which was where Google placed Trump’s website) typically receives just under half as many click-throughs as the third result (where Google placed Harris’s website). The top three results combined receive approximately 54 percent of all search results.
This comes after a previous MRC Free Speech America study that prompted Google with searches about Kamala Harris found that Google favored leftist media outlets at a rate of 17:2 in Google Search and 19:2 in the Google News tab across four queries.
The search engine also repeatedly buried the presidential campaign websites of candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and nearly every Republican presidential candidate during the 2024 primary election cycle.
Methodology
For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Sept. 6 Google search results of the innocuous words “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies.
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