RealClearPolitics

What you're reading

RealClearPolitics is a Chicago-based political website founded in 2000 by John McIntyre and Tom Bevan as a polling-average and news-aggregation site. It is owned by RealClear Media Group, which has expanded the brand into a family of vertical sites — RealClearMarkets, RealClearDefense, RealClearScience, RealClearEnergy, RealClearEducation, RealClearReligion and others — plus an investigative unit, RealClearInvestigations.

The core RealClearPolitics product at realclearpolitics.com runs daily curated links to political reporting and commentary from across the US press, the widely-cited RCP polling average, plus original commentary and reporting. The polling average was the site's original distinctive product and remains its most-cited offering — the RCP average is a standard reference point in US political coverage. Audience runs in the tens of millions of monthly visitors, especially during election years when the polling page becomes a daily reference for political journalists and operatives.

Ownership & funding

RealClear Media Group (private). Funded primarily through ad-supported.

Ad-supported as the primary funding model on an aggregation-heavy site means traffic and ad CPMs drive the economics, and the polling page is the single highest-traffic asset — which keeps it carefully maintained and methodologically transparent because errors there would damage the brand. RealClear's broader vertical-site expansion has been funded partly by conservative donors (the parent group has acknowledged donor support including from Robert Mercer-connected funds), which raises donor-influence questions about original RealClearInvestigations and commentary content even while the aggregation and polling products are not obviously shaped by them.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places RealClearPolitics at Lean Right with a factuality rating of Mostly Factual.

nwsly places RealClearPolitics at Lean Right because the site's news aggregation, original commentary lineup and RealClearInvestigations work consistently tilt toward conservative and centrist-conservative voices — the daily link list reliably surfaces center-right and right-leaning analysis at higher rates than left-leaning analysis, the original opinion roster (Charles Lipson, Frank Miele, Carl Cannon) sits center-right to right, and RealClearInvestigations has done original reporting that has substantially served conservative narratives around the 2020 election, Hunter Biden and the FBI. The aggregation choices themselves are an editorial act.

Where the pattern breaks: the polling average is genuinely nonpartisan and methodologically transparent, and the news-link aggregation does include New York Times, Washington Post and other Lean Left outlets in significant volume, so the site's daily front page is genuinely closer to a mixed feed than to a fully right-aligned product. The Mostly Factual factuality rating reflects accurate polling-average methodology and largely accurate aggregation, but some original RealClearInvestigations pieces have drawn factual challenges from peer newsrooms that have not always been fully resolved by corrections.

Editorial vs news side

RealClearPolitics blurs the news/opinion split by design — the product is curation plus original commentary plus the polling page, with the aggregation deciding what readers see and the commentary explicitly arguing positions. There is no separate news desk in the daily-paper sense. The polling product is the closest thing to a neutral feature; everything else is editorial in either selection (aggregation) or content (commentary, RealClearInvestigations) terms. For the bias rating, the composite reflects the whole product.

Why we include them in nwsly

Politics aggregator and polling-average site with commentary.

RealClearPolitics gives nwsly the Lean Right aggregator slot plus the canonical polling-average feed, which together cover a function no other outlet in the lineup performs. The site reveals what the center-right and right are reading and talking about on any given day, and the polling page is the standard reference for US political-race state of play. It complements Reason and the WSJ-news desk by surfacing the broader Lean Right commentariat and the polling state of play in a single source.

Recent nwsly briefs citing RealClearPolitics

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