helping journalists cover social media in the presidential campaign
As a swing state with 6 electoral votes, Nevada was integral on the path to winning the 2020 election. Here we take a deep dive into how the official Biden and Trump campaign pages targeted voters within the Silver State.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.