Democrats are massively outspending the GOP on social media

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

Among the many strange and unexpected dynamics of the 2024 election cycle, one stands out as both under-recognized and under-explained: On social media, Democrats and Republicans have traded places.

I’m not really talking about Twitter, although it’s worth acknowledging what happened there: a relatively small platform with immense elite influence, once favored and used to great effect by the former president, when banned for electoral disinformation, was bought by the most its rich user. and it was turned into a pro-Trump platform. Nor am I talking about the Republicans’ embrace of popular new media personalities and podcasters in their pursuit of young voters, although that is also the sort of thing generally attributed to Democrats in the past. (In 2015, it was Obama for Marc Maron; in 2024, it’s Trump for Joe Rogan.)

What I’m talking about is digital ad spend. After Trump’s 2016 victory, Republicans doubled down on social media, installing Facebook guru Brad Parscale as their campaign manager and raising money into the platform (Parscale resigned before the election). As a result, in 2020, the Trump campaign (and affiliated entities) outspent the Biden campaign on Facebook and Google, despite raising less money overall. In 2024, the numbers look very different, according to a analysis published this month by the Brennan Center in partnership with OpenSecrets and the Wesleyan Media Project, which recorded more than $182 million in spending on Meta and Google by or on behalf of the Harris campaign. For Trump’s campaign, that number was just $45 million. The report explains:

On the two digital platforms we surveyed, Democrats and their allies outspent their Republican and Republican-aligned counterparts in federal races more than three times… The advantage of pro-Democrat presidential spending on these two platforms is in stark contrast to past elections, when Donald Trump relied heavily on digital spending on widely used platforms like Facebook.

There are some caveats here – the report is based on self-disclosed figures from Meta and Google, and there’s a lot of ambiguity around dark money spending on digital media, and the report is limited to spending before September, after which both campaigns have grown up

Still, it’s useful. Meta and Google are by far the biggest digital advertising companies selling political ads (TikTok bans them, while Snap and X’s spending is relatively tiny). The report’s findings are also consistent with other evidence of massive change. The Times reported in September that after the debate the Harris campaign outnumbered the Trump campaign on Facebook and Instagram by 20 to one; In Pennsylvania alone, Harris spent $1.3 million that week to Trump’s $22 thousand. From September 23 to October 6, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, the difference has DECREASE but it remains huge: over $48 million spent on Meta and Google by Harris and over $15 million by Trump.

That Democrats are more willing to spend on Google and Meta in 2024 shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Trump’s big investment on Facebook in 2020 didn’t pay off, and the platform suspended his account after January 6 (the suspension was later lifted). Meanwhile, the Harris campaign is run by people who, despite spending less on the platform than their counterparts in 2020, might reasonably believe that swing-state Facebook and Instagram ads helped them win. The campaign also has more money – it spends more on almost everything else.

But the vastness of the difference also suggests a simple difference in strategy: One campaign believes Meta and Google are worth much more than the other. In favor of the Trump campaign’s theory, a number of factors, including Apple’s new limits on app developers, have made targeting certain types of ads somewhat more difficult. Since 2020, both Facebook and Instagram have also changed substantially, with the former purged of the most visible political content, grouped into private groups and full of surreal AI slop, while the latter has been revamped to look more like TikTok. If the strategy failed before, there is no clear argument that it will work better this time.

In favor of the Harris campaign theory, well, a lot of people still use them, targeting is still much more specific than traditional media alternatives, and overall ad spend is still moving in their direction – emphasizing digital platform ads in 2024 is the opposite. . Also, Google might be a largely unrecognizable mess compared to four or eight years ago and facing unprecedented threats to its business, but it’s still the most used website in the United States by far, with YouTube in second place. (The Trump campaign has according to reports has focused its limited spending with Google on YouTube, where TV ads can be repurposed.)

We won’t have a sense of which strategy paid off until after the election, and even then, conclusions will certainly be hard to draw — most of the money, as is usual with campaign spending, will have been wasted. As it stands, though, from each campaign’s perspective, the gap is odd: Unlike TV advertising, where candidates cram as many ads as possible into the same few spots, each side seems to think it knows something about the Internet that the other doesn’t. he has it.