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, banned him for election misinformation, got purchased by its richest user, and has been turned into a decidedly pro-Trump platform. Nor am I talking about Republicans’ embrace of popular new media personalities and podcasters in pursuit of young voters, although that, too, is the sort of thing broadly attributed to Democrats in the past. (In 2015, it was Obama on Marc Maron; in 2024, it’s Trump on Joe Rogan.)
What I’m talking about is digital ad spending. After Trump’s victory in 2016, the Republicans doubled down on social media, installing Facebook guru Brad Parscale as campaign manager and piling 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 significantly less money overall. In 2024, the numbers look wildly different, according to an 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 the Trump campaign, that number was just $45 million. The report explains:
Across the two digital platforms we surveyed, Democrats and their allies spent more than three times their Republican and Republican-aligned counterparts on federal races … The pro-Democratic spending advantage at the presidential level on these two platforms is in stark contrast to past elections, when Donald Trump relied heavily on digital spending on widely used platforms, such as Facebook.
There are some caveats here — the report relies on self-disclosed figures from Meta and Google, and there’s a lot of fuzziness around dark money spending on digital media, and the report is limited to spending before September, after which both campaigns ramped up.
Still, it’s useful. Meta and Google are by far the largest digital advertising companies that sell political ads (TikTok prohibits them, while spending on Snap and X is comparatively minuscule). The report’s findings are also consistent with other evidence of a massive shift. The Times reported in September that, after the debate, the Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign on Facebook and Instagram 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 shrunk but remains enormous: more than $48 million spent on Meta and Google by Harris, and over $15 million by Trump.
That Democrats are keener to spend on Google and Meta in 2024 shouldn’t be a huge 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’s spending more on almost everything else, too.
But the vastness of the difference also suggests a simple difference in strategy: One campaign thinks Meta and Google are worth a lot more than the other. In favor of the Trump campaign’s theory, a number of factors, including new limits imposed by Apple on app developers, have made targeting certain kinds of ads somewhat more difficult. Since 2020, both Facebook and Instagram have also changed substantially, the former purged of most visible political content, herded into private groups, and brimming with surreal AI slop, while the latter has been gut-renovated to look more like TikTok. If the strategy couldn’t deliver before, there isn’t a clear argument that it would work better this time around.
In favor of the Harris campaign’s theory, well, lots of people still use them, the targeting is still far more specific than traditional media alternatives, and overall advertising spending is still moving in their direction — deemphasizing digital platform ads in 2024 is the contrarian position. Google, too, 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 widely used website in the United States by far, with YouTube in second place. (The Trump campaign has reportedly focused its limited spending with Google on YouTube, where TV ads can be repurposed.)
We won’t get a sense of which strategy paid off until after the election, and even then conclusions will be hard to definitely draw — most of this money, as is usually the case with campaign spending, will have been wasted. As it stands, though, from the perspectives of each campaign, the gap is eerie: In contrast with TV advertising, where the candidates are piling as many ads as possible into the same few slots, each side seems to think they know something about the internet that the other doesn’t.
