Election season is a busy time for any newsroom. In the second quarter of 2026, some nonprofit newsrooms saw their coverage of the primaries — especially voter guides — pay off in both interest and traffic.

In Nieman Lab’s quarterly ranking of nonprofit news outlets, four news outlets saw a bump in traffic thanks in part to their coverage of primary elections in May and June. We bring you four of these each quarter, looking at four different market segments: for-profit local news sites, local newspapers, nonprofit news outlets, and public media stations.

The 51st

Worker-led news cooperative The 51st attributed its uptick in site visits (from 120,000 in May to 179,000 in June) to its coverage of the Washington, D.C. primary election. The primary included high-profile races and the launch of ranked-choice voting, which The 51st cofounder Maddie Poore speculates led to increased readership of its voter guide, candidate profiles, and other stories.

Poore said the voter guide got 50,000 pageviews, and overall election coverage helped pull in 6,000 new newsletter subscribers. The 51st doesn’t have a paywall, but asks readers to register with their email addresses. Most of the traffic came from organic search.

“We found this heartening, in a time when many experts are writing eulogies for clickthrough from search engine results pages,” Poore said. “With our voter guides, profiles of candidates, and nuanced fact-checks, we’re providing information here that can’t be broken down at Google’s summary length. People still have to click through! Doing this successfully requires being super clear on your community’s information needs.”

CalMatters

In May, CalMatters topped our growth chart, receiving an estimated 3.8 million site visits. That’s up from 1.9 million in April. Editor-in-chief Kristen Go said the California gubernatorial primary drove readers to CalMatters’ voter guide, which often has record-breaking audience reach. But the impact of the voter guide extended beyond pageviews.

Read the full article about surges in search traffic for nonprofit news outlets by Hanaa' Tameez at Nieman Lab.