WordPress Powered Almost Every Contest in the US Elections
As everyone waited to find out the winners in last week's elections for US president and Congress, one winner was immediately obvious: WordPress.
Earlier in the election cycle, we saw the PublishPress plugin used by more than one presidential candidate. Even so, it was still surprising to see WordPress used in almost every 2020 race, from the presidency to Senate and House seats.
Although it's not technically a campaign site, it makes sense to start with the highest profile WordPress site. WhiteHouse.gov moved to WordPress in 2017.
The Democratic National Committee is the coordinating group for Democratic candidates across the country for local, state, and national office. Their WordPress site is Democrats.org.
Joe Biden's campaign used WordPress for JoeBiden.com. There is at least one Easter Egg on Biden's site: the main CSS file is called scranton-main.css. Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The site appears to use very few plugins, but it does use Yoast SEO, Autoptimize to improve the page load speed.
WordPress also powers the Biden / Harris transition website at BuildBackBetter.com. This site is hosted by Automattic and uses Jetpack and Ninja Forms. It was built by the Wide Eye agency who have used WordPress for several high-profile political projects, including for the UK's Labour Party.
Further down the ballot, you can find WordPress users across the political spectrum.
Let's start in Georgia. Because of the narrow margins in the first ballot, there will be two run-off races for Senate seats. Kelly Loeffler, the current Republican Senator, faces off against Raphael Warnock, who is the Democratic challenger. David Perdue, also a current Republican Senator, is going head-to-head with Jon Ossoff.
All four Georgia candidates are using WordPress!
In Iowa, the race was between Joni Ernst and Theresa Greenfield.
Both campaign sites are on WordPress.
Up in Michigan, it was Gary Peters versus John James.
Down in Arizona, it was Mark Kelly and Martha McSally.
You can guess what all these candidates are using!
I could go on with more examples of Senate and House races, but it's amazing to see the dominance of one open source platform.
When you consider the security and traffic demands, it's a strong vote of confidence to see WordPress used for so many key sites. We've seen no reported issues with the 2020 election's WordPress sites, but things didn't go well for a high-profile site using Expression Engine.
Finally, if I had to add another winner to this list, it would be Cloudflare. Almost every site on this list is relying on Cloudflare for a firewall, and DDOS protection.
Excellent post! Was the White House switch made in late 2017, by any chance? I’m compiling a list of musicians using WordPress… Stay well!