The United States is just a few months away from the crucial 2022 mid-term election. Campaign strategists know the news cycle and media consumption strongly influence election results and are interested in learning:

- What are the important issues in the media around election time?
- When is a good time to start playing up these issues?
- Which news outlets could give maximum exposure to your ideas?

Knowing the answers to these questions would help shape public opinion, election results, and the country's direction.

To answer these questions, we found the dominant political stories of 2018, quantified when they first began to gain prominence and measured which publications are most amenable to spending a disproportionate amount of time covering a single topic.