Smerconish
One Thousand Days of News: 1,000 Daily Newsletters
When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually say it is delivering spoken word – on radio, television, and before live audiences – but a more accurate answer would be that I read for a living.
-Michael Smerconish
Michael Smerconish is a longtime columnist, author, speaker, radio host, and TV host best known for his daily SiriusXM program and his eponymous weekly Saturday morning CNN show. As someone who is in front of an international live audience fifteen hours a week to talk about the news, he has a pretty good grasp on the news of the day. Almost always tuned into what is happening in the world—and having an opinion about it all—he runs some pretty engaging programs. One of his best products, though, is his free, daily newsletter.
The Newsletter
Starting in the throes of COVID-19 in 2020, Michael Smerconish launched a newsletter and committed himself to continuing the project through the duration of the pandemic (and in April of 2021 he continued, “which I never expected to be this long.”). Now, he calls it his “passion project,” draws attention to it daily on his flagship SiriusXM program, and encourages CNN viewers, weekly at 9a, to subscribe to his “free and worthy” newsletter. He has called it his own personal “daily read-in” because it is meant to encapsulate the news of the day.
Smerconish’s daily newsletter has a subscriber base of more than 140,000 readers and, according to Michael in April of 2026, has an open rate of 78.84%. In the newsletter world, that is exceptionally high. Mailchimp, for example, estimates the average open rate of newsletters to be around just 35%. Even double that rate would still lag behind Smerconish’s daily newsletter. (For another comparison, The Morning Briefing by the NYT boasts “only” a 60% open rate.)
You might be thinking that the Smerconish newsletter open rate is a fluke so that number will drop off precipitously at some point. But Michael bragged in 2023 that the open rate was 72.98%. So it has actually gone up with more subscribers. The same can be said for overall subscribers.
Here are some more numbers sourced from the Smerconish’s claims over the years (from social media and the daily newsletters themselves):
The following analysis looks at roughly 1,000 daily newsletters. That is 2 years and 9 months of emails. Why this time frame? Because I didn’t become a newsletter subscriber and start receiving the daily newsletter until September 2, 2023.
Centrist Perspective
♩♫♫♩
Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you
That is not only the theme song for the radio program, but a mantra of Michael Smerconish who prides himself on being a political centrist and, famously, an independent in the swing state of Pennsylvania. A “Regan Republican” when he was younger, he worked in George H.W. Bush’s administration, left the Republican party in 2010, voted for Obama in 2008/2012, and has publicly remained an Independent since.
For many, he’s too far to the right. For others, he’s too much of a liberal. But according to Ad Fontes Media, a respected sources for rating media bias, Smerconish’s programs are almost as center as you can get.
Sources
All of that backstory is for the purpose of framing the newsletter, its political bend, and its sources. Every day’s newsletter contains at least 10 direct links to the news of the day (not including his Ground News partnership).
There are clear, go-to sources for the world’s most important news. And 51% of the news stories in the newsletter come from the top 13 (by count) sources. In the timeframe of this analysis, the nonprofit, wire news service AP leads with more 600 stories. Smerconish’s second home (for at least 1 hour a week), CNN follows with 523 sourced news articles. All of the usual suspects are included here including the biggest names in print (WSJ and NYT) and the big three broadcast networks.
But the other half of this wheel is just as important. In close to three years of newsletters, Michael has managed to include 1,000+ unique sources. A champion of smaller news organizations, Smerconish frequently includes in the newsletter sources that are closest to the news at hand.
When Paul Ryan, the former Speaker of the House, announced from his home in small-town Wisconsin that he would not vote for Trump in 2024, did Smerconish use the story from The Hill or CNN the next day? No, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel got some clicks instead. (It has been used in the newsletter 10 different times.)
After Hurricane Milton destroyed homes in Florida, instead of a generic article from the Weather Channel on cleanup efforts, Smerconish turned to the local Tampa Bay Times for coverage (which has gotten 3 shoutouts in the newsletter).
Has your local news been used in the Micheal Smerconish newsletter? Try the search on the chart below.
What’s in the News?
With such a wide array of sources and perspectives, it’s easy to think of the Smerconish Daily Newsletter as a bellwether for the news landscape as a whole. And so that’s what we’ll do for this next part.
With links to ten major headlines in every newsletter, it’s fairly easy to follow the news trends generally over 1,000+ days. For example, below is a line chart mapping news headline mentions of the 2024 Presidential Election candidates.
In late 2023, then President Biden was actually in the newsletter less than, at the time, former President and 2024 candidate Trump. It’s very easy to see at a glance when he bowed out of the race. Similarly, Kamala Harris’ name in the headlines predictably increased significantly once she became the nominee. In the six weeks that followed her ascendancy to Presidential nominee, Harris was mentioned in headlines of 81 different articles in the newsletter vs. just 59 mentions for Donald Trump.
But after Election Day, the news about Harris ended—and quickly. Conversely, it would almost be too difficult to say with any degree of certainty where on this chart Trump won the election were it not for the X-Axis telling us the dates (or by comparing to Harris’ falloff).
The VP candidates barely registered in comparison over these past 1,000 days, but it’s worth noting that the President has been mentioned in the headlines more times in the past month than J.D. Vance has been since Inauguration Day, 2025.
You can track certain world conflicts and affairs in this same manner.
The appearance of Iran in the newsletter has been an interesting case over the past 3 years. In 2023, these stories about tended to be about Iran as a potential regional agitator in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel. In April of the following year, after a targeted Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria, Iran launched its first ever coordinated aerial assault directly at Israel that included drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. The infamous “beeper attack,” the assassination of Hamas’ leader Ismail Haniyeh, and the subsequent Israeli-Iranian missile attacks made up for the fall 2024 news. The lead up to and the actual bombing of Fordow, the nuclear site in Iran, by US B-2 bombers put Iran on the front page, but then the newsletter (and to that extent, much of the news) hardly mentioned Iran in the months after until the US war with Iran went from a possibility to a reality.
The Poll Question
While it’s easy to argue that the articles included in the daily newsletter are more or less representative of what’s in the news generally, Michael Smerconish’s daily poll question is a bit more editorialized. It doesn’t make the poll questions necessarily less current or topical, though. Here’s a visual comparison of those top words used in articles vs. top words in poll questions. (The bigger the word, the more times it has been used.)
Poll Question Votes
With the help of The Wayback Machine, you can peak into the past a little to see the results of Smerconish polls and the total number of votes. Though the data is a little incomplete using this method (maybe Michael can fill in the gaps for us), it’s illustrative, nonetheless.
By using the available Wayback Machine snapshots of Smerconish’s “Past Poll Results” webpage over the same time period as analyzed above, there’s at least 620 poll results that can be pulled. Saturdays, when Michael Smerconish’s poll gets a lot more eyes due to his CNN morning show, the polls clearly tend to get more votes. There is a curious outlier over the past 1,000 days that garnered 251,409 votes. It could be an error, but it’s also possible it just got a lot of traction after a CNN show (and again, there is missing data so this amount of votes could have happened many more times and is not represented in the data). Regardless, if you remove that outlier, you get a much better view of this data over the past 1,000 days.
Dropping a trend line on this data (using the least squares method), there’s a clear upward trend of the amount of voters on the daily poll question!
And the question is…what is the question? Sometimes the poll questions ask readers to predict the future. Sometimes they ask what or when. But by far, Michael wants to know from his readers and listeners: should.
Michael’s Daily Notes
Beginning relatively recently, the daily newsletter now includes Michael’s Daily Notes which are just that: A bit of editorial opinion from Michael on the news of the day. This is a new feature that launched with his updated newsletter layout (and publishing platform) in April of this year. Typically just a few paragraphs in length (on average they are 323 words long), they sometimes tease a guest, sometimes are Michael’s thoughts on the top news story of the day, and sometimes set up the daily poll question.
Below is a word count of the most used words in these Daily Notes. (I filtered out the stop words and some other common words for brevity so it is not exhaustive.) Shockingly, you have to scroll all the way to page 4 in the chart below to find one of Michael’s favorite words: mingle.
Political Cartoons
Beginning in July of 2023, the Smerconish newsletter began to feature political cartoons to enhance the news of the day. Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Jack Ohman drew the first cartoon and has gone on to draw close to 150 cartoons that have been featured in the newsletter. Steve Breen (another Pulitzer Prize winner), Rob Rogers, and Scott Stantis have joined Ohman as the “regular" cartoonists.
The coffee table book, Smercomics 2024, chronicled the 2024 election cycle with those same cartoons and raised over $200,000 for the Children's Crisis Treatment Center.
Bonus: When the Newsletter Arrives
Traffic is a real thing when heading to work, and traffic is a real thing when sending and receiving millions of emails. The newsletter tends to hit my inbox around 7:45a (EST) most mornings, but emails server queues and intentional throttling to limit the number of emails sent can be seen below. (New Year’s Day 2025 when the newsletter didn’t arrive until almost 9:30a...maybe someone had too much fun the night before and forgot to hit send?)
Bonus Bonus: Metaconish
The last few years, there have only been two articles shared in the newsletter that are about Michael Smerconish himself. The first was an article on Barrett Media that was the transcript of an interview with Michael which was titled in the newsletter, “Smerconish Would Rather Talk Failures.” And the second was a more recent substack piece by Stu Bykofsky which was titled in the newsletter, “What Smerconish Gets Wrong on Iran.” Though Stu is slightly critical of Michael in this article, he writes:
The only thing Mike is carrying is a torch for truth and fairness, commodities in short supply.