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.
To run ads on Facebook, advertisers must connect their ads to a particular Facebook page that they administer. However, Facebook does not limit advertisers to running ads from a single Facebook page. For example, the Trump campaign has been running ads from over 20 different Facebook pages so far this year. Several of these pages are targeted at specific demographics. This is a deep dive of the month-by-month breakdown of how Donald Trump has utilized demographic-specific Facebook pages to run ads.
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.
Text messages and emails from political campaigns are pouring into Americans’ phones and inboxes right now. This is because campaign operatives believe that the more messages they send, the greater the odds that you will act. Each time you act, the campaign gets insight on what types of messages seem to work with you. They’ll learn from your responses, and send you more messages, in the hopes you’ll stay involved and that they can eventually secure your vote.
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.