“Breitbart was really the first national outlet to cover the race,” said Mule, noting that his candidate was written about a few times and also appeared on Breitbart radio.
Jason Miller, a former senior aide on the Trump campaign, said that Breitbart was “absolutely” a good place for McCarthy to be targeting for that type of support.
Breitbart’s traffic declined in May for the seventh straight month, according to comScore metrics, bringing the site to its lowest level of readership since January 2015, and half of what it was a year ago.
Since the ouster of former executive chairman Steve Bannon in January, the site has been forced to search for a new identity, and, like other ideological publishers, has been pinched by changes to Facebook’s algorithms in January. Its current slide began in November, though, three months after Bannon was forced out of his top adviser role in the White House, but two months before he left Breitbart.
In May, Breitbart registered 6.4 million unique visitors, according to comScore, compared to 12.1 million in May 2017 and 13.7 million as recently as November.
A Breitbart spokeswoman said that the site’s traffic is actually up recently: "Over the last month, our traffic is up in every metric we measure, from page views to unique readers to time on site to new readers," she said.
Breitbart declined to share those numbers.
Web traffic is notoriously difficult to measure, and different services often provide differing results. Alexa, a web-tracker owned by Amazon, for instance, has Breitbart’s web ranking pitching up until January, but sliding since then. It lists Breitbart’s “global rank” as 317, a 44 spot decline over the last three months. According to comScore, Breitbart’s traffic declined from 6.6 million unique visitors in April to the 6.3 million in May.
In the world of more traditional conservative media, where Breitbart was seen as an early alt-right disrupter, critics were quick to cite the readership figures as signs of an overall decline in influence.
“I never hear about them, anymore,” said conservative commentator Matt Lewis, in an email. “Nor do I have a sense that they drive the debate or the discussion-or that anyone is worried about them writing something negative about them.”
Lewis, who writes columns for The Daily Beast and appears frequently on CNN, has been critical of Breitbart in the past, as well as the direction of the conservative movement in the age of Trump. He said that he believes the departure of Bannon is in large part to blame for the site’s traffic loss. “Nationalism and populism always requires a charismatic leader,” he said. “The ideas are not persuasive enough to work without a cult of personality.”
Even as millions of readers have peeled away, though, Breitbart has appeared to maintain a hold over core Trump supporters. The sites’ traffic remains significantly larger than that of most other conservative sites, according to comScore, like The Daily Caller (4.2 million unique visitors in May) and The Daily Wire (3.8 million in May).
Breitbart was instrumental to the victory of Katie Arrington, the pro-Trump Republican congressional candidate from South Carolina who knocked off incumbent Mark Sanford in their primary on Tuesday, according to Michael Mule, a general consultant on her campaign.
“Breitbart was really the first national outlet to cover the race,” said Mule, noting that his candidate was written about a few times and also appeared on Breitbart radio. “Every time they covered it we got strong support from across the country, financial and otherwise,” he said.
With its falling traffic numbers, but lingering grassroots support, Breitbart seems to be transforming from a site that had designs on conquering American politics to one that is increasingly focused on maintaining its conservative base.
In a May interview with NPR, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly included it in a list of publications he reads daily. And on Wednesday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy published a column at Breitbart arguing that tech companies are biased against conservatives-a fairly clear attempt to curry favor with the farther right elements who could be key to supporting his bid for speaker of the House.
Jason Miller, a former senior aide on the Trump campaign, said that Breitbart was “absolutely” a good place for McCarthy to be targeting for that type of support.
“I’m not close with McCarthy, so I can’t proclaim to have special insight, but that clearly shows that McCarthy is thinking about this a lot and it was a smart move,” he said.
Richard Hernandez, a spokesman for pro-Trump Nevada congressional candidate Danny Tarkanian, who also won his primary on Tuesday, said that he felt Breitbart was influential within the pro-Trump movement.
“Breitbart is very diligent in covering races of importance to the country and of particular interest to the MAGA movement,” he said in an email.
Whether Breitbart will continue to play any sort of role as primaries turn to general elections remains to be seen.
“It’s the conservative base,” Mule said. “Conservative base, that’s how I’d characterize it.”