The Year of the Youth Vote: How Candidates are Targeting 18 to 24 Year-Olds Through Advertising

Young adult holding a "SAVE OUR FUTURE" sign. Other people appear behind the young adult, one of whom is also holding a sign with a picture of the globe.

Historically, youth voters (ages 18-29) have had the lowest voter turnout when participating in national and local elections. With 23 million eligible Gen Z voters this year, almost 16 million more than could vote in the 2016 election, this large but historically inactive voting demographic is a challenging yet necessary group of voters that presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump have targeted using Facebook and Instagram advertisements. Using the Illuminating Data, we are able to break down how each candidate is tackling the younger portion of this demographic (ages 18 to 24). Both candidates have different strategies on how to reach young adults, but employ these strategies in a way that targets social issues young Americans care about in attempts to mobilize this age group.   

Trump’s slow summer climb in the Florida polls

President Trump staring at the camera with an American flag in the background.

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.

Exploring Illuminating’s 12 topic categories for the 2020 Presidential Election campaign ads

Exploring Illuminating’s 12 topic categories for the 2020 Presidential Election campaign ads

Due to the sheer magnitude of the Facebook and Instagram ads run by 2020 presidential campaigns, the Illuminating 2020 Project developed Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to automatically classify ads by message topic. This post breaks down the topic classifications used by the ML model to understand how the Trump and Biden campaigns attempt to persuade the public.

An Introduction to the Illuminating Project

Screenshot of the Illuminating 2020 Dashboard.

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.