helping journalists cover social media in the presidential campaign
Earlier in the summer, Donald Trump consistently had a lower spend per 1000 views than Joe Biden. However, in many of the final weeks before the election, it was Joe Biden’s ads that had a lower spend per view.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump have heavily focused spending in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state in the November election.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden enter the final full week of the campaign with an increased focus on swing states and spending records.
In a week that ended with President Trump announcing that he had tested positive for COVID-19 and being admitted to the Walter Reed medical center, for the first time the Trump campaign outspent the Biden campaign on messages related to COVID-19.
An analysis of how Donald Trump’s campaign uses smaller ad buys to target specific subsets of people.
An analysis of how Joe Biden’s campaign uses smaller ad buys to target specific subsets of people.
While Joe Biden ran plenty of convention-specific advertising during the DNC, Donald Trump’s campaign still outspent him in the week from Aug. 17-23.
Illuminating is a computational journalism project that empowers journalists covering US political campaigns. The Illuminating data helps journalists see patterns and changes in how candidates address communicate to voters over time. If candidates are spending millions of dollars to micro-target voters on digital media, then someone needs to improve transparency and hold them accountable, explains Dr. Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Principal Investigator of the project.