helping journalists cover social media in the presidential campaign
The campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden together spent US $65.8 million on social media advertising between June 1 and Sept. 13. With these ads, which amount to about 30% of both campaigns’ spending, the candidates are trying to mobilize voters – find supporters and then spark them to get involved.
Biden has maintained a fairly consistent national polling lead of around 7 to 8% since mid June, but Trump’s standing in the race has tightened in certain key battleground states. For example, Biden had a polling lead of approximately 7% in Florida mid June, but his lead has dropped to 1.8% as of September 29. Has the Trump campaign changed its advertising strategies between mid June and September? By looking at the Illuminating 2020 data, we see that there is a re-balancing of ad strategy taking place, as both campaigns are trying their best to find their “sweet spot” of message type targeting potential voters in important battleground states.
By Brian McKernan On September 16 and 17, the Trump campaign started running ads from twelve state-specific pages, such as “Trump For Florida” and “Trump for Wisconsin.” These Facebook pages provide insight into what the Trump campaign considers their must-win
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.
Although Donald Trump’s re-election campaign traditionally spends more money towards civil ads, a drastic increase in incivility during the week of July 6th, led to 68.8% of that week’s spending contributing towards uncivil ads.
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.