Donald Trump Magazine Covers Draw More Readers Than ‘Typical Issues’

Love him or hate him, you’ll probably read about him.

Results of a study released by the consumer research company GfK MRI Thursday found that more readers of various ages and income levels checked out magazine issues with Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump on their covers than they did other issues, the firm said in a statement. Among the readers especially attracted to Trump coverage were men and people with annual household incomes of less than $50,000.

“While our data do not suggest who will or will not end up voting for Trump, he certainly has the power to make specific magazine issues very appealing,” Mickey Galin, GfK’s executive vice president of research development, said in the statement. “This ‘Trump bump’ is exactly what publishers want.”

The so-called Trump bump extended across a number of brands, including Esquire, Forbes, New York Magazine, People, Rolling Stone and Us Weekly. His influence was weak among adult women, but people with incomes from $50,000 to $75,000 were 15 percent more likely to pick up issues with Trump on the cover than issues without Trump on the cover, GfK MRI reported.

The media’s reporting on Trump has been almost as widely discussed as his campaign platform. Critics such as the Week have argued that the news “created Donald Trump — and now he can’t be stopped.” Over the course of the billionaire businessman’s campaign, he has been given almost $2 billion worth of coverage by broadcast, online and print outlets, a New York Times analysis found last month.

Although the GfK MRI survey of covers between July 2015 and February 2016 indicated magazine readers were interested in stories about Trump, other Americans may be tiring of him. Three-quarters of the respondents to a Pew Research Center survey in March said they believed the media had covered Trump “too much,” with only 18 percent saying they had done “about the right amount.”

Trump, who has been leading the GOP presidential-nominating race for months, had the support of about 47 percent of his party’s voters nationwide Thursday morning, according to the HuffPost Pollster. And, as of the same time, he had locked up 845 of the 1,237 delegates needed to secure his party’s nomination this summer, RealClearPolitics reported.