The truth about campaign digital spending
Team Trump's flagging TV ad impressions, the value of outliers, the right way to look at early voting, the switch to "likely voters", male influencers ranked
No. 332 | September 27th, 2024
🇺🇲 2024
The averages:
Silver Bulletin: Harris +3.0 (H+0.2)
538: Harris +2.7 (H-0.2)
NYT Upshot: Harris +3 (NC)
The Hill/DDHQ: Harris +4.0 (H+0.4)
RCP: Harris +2.0 (H+0.1)
Cook Political: Harris +2.4 (H+0.2)
VoteHub: Harris +2.7 (H-0.2)
RacetotheWH: Harris +3.5 (H-0.2)
Average of the Averages: Harris +2.9 (H+0.1)
The fundraising disparity is becoming increasingly apparent on the airwaves, as more Harris ads are airing than Trump ads. Harris hasn’t increased her paid TV presence; Trump cut his by around a third starting on Labor Day—so, pre-debate.
One silver lining for the Trump campaign is that they’re airing more spots relative to their spending than the Harris campaign — $471 per airing compared to $737 for Harris/Walz. And of course, the main SuperPACs are paying far more — thanks to candidates getting the lowest unit rate. Pro-Harris FF PAC is paying $1,520 per spot while pro-Trump MAGA, Inc. is paying $1,668.
Where the resource disparity is really apparent is online. Harris is everywhere while Trump has largely disappeared.
“The difference was especially stark on screens across the most contested battlegrounds in the week surrounding the debate. In Pennsylvania, Ms. Harris spent $1.3 million on Meta’s platforms, compared with $22,465 by Mr. Trump. In Michigan, she laid out $1.5 million, while he spent only $34,790.”
“The lopsided spending — $12.2 million to $611,228 on Meta’s platforms, according to company records — was hardly an outlier. Ever since Ms. Harris entered the race, her campaign has overwhelmed the Trump operation with an avalanche of digital advertising, outspending him by tens of millions of dollars and setting off alarm among some Republicans.”
As a former digital guy, I find most coverage of digital ad spend extremely frustrating. It’s covered as though this is what campaigns are spending to persuade voters, when in fact the large majority of it is spent to raise money (to spend on TV ads, which are what’s actually used to persuade voters). Total spend is dictated by how much money the ad makes back, or by the fancy-sounding marketing metric known as ROAS (“return on ad spend”).
Some campaigns are willing to tolerate low returns on ad spending — campaigns that barely eke out a profit — figuring that future donations from newly recruited donors will make up the difference in future months and years.
Trump 2016 and 2020 largely operated under this model. Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale (Trump’s ‘16 digital director turned for-a-time 2020 campaign manager) were very digital-forward.
The drop in Trump digital spend can probably be attributed to a more traditional campaign structure this time around — Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — reinforcing Trump’s native TV-first instincts.
And as the Ruthless Podcast’s Michael Duncan has pointed out, most spending on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snap are to recruit new donors. Existing donors are primarily reached via email and text, not online ads. This being Trump’s third campaign, he realistically has fewer new donors he can recruit than Kamala Harris, who is a new nominee.
This is the point the media largely misses: digital spending is not (mostly) a reflection of digital savvy but of the profitability of online fundraising programs. If a campaign is spending less, that could be because:
Leadership demands that programs be highly profitable so that returns can be plowed immediately into TV ads. This becomes more of an imperative the deeper you get into the cycle — but being too cautious about this can indicate that top leadership doesn’t “get it.”
You’ve recruited every single donor you’re realistically going to get from showing ads to people not already in your orbit, and what you really need to do is spend on email and text marketing to get them to give again and again. (Tellingly, few Republicans are complaining that they’re getting too few text messages.)
There’s lower ambient enthusiasm for the campaign, which could genuinely be a red flag for diminished voter enthusiasm. A good environment means that all programs — organic and paid — will work better, and some paid programs that were unprofitable will become so, making them a no-brainer to spend on.
Don’t trust pollsters who don’t show divergent results from time to time, says Nate Silver.
Lately, the Times/Siena surveys — the second-highest-rated outlet in the Silver Bulletin rankings — have also been defying expectations, although this time in a way that isn’t so welcome for Democrats. Their last two national polls showed Donald Trump ahead by one point and then a tied race, making them one of the few high-quality outlets with such mediocre numbers for Kamala Harris in the popular vote. Despite that, Harris was 4 points ahead in their survey of Pennsylvania. The good news for Democrats ends there, however. Trump led by 2 to 5 points in surveys of North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona that the Times released on Monday morning.
The polls had less of an effect on our model than I’d expected. Partly that’s because Harris was already narrowly behind in our projections of these states — and none of them are necessary for her minimum viable pathway to an Electoral College victory, which runs through Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Those states, plus the 2nd Congressional District of Nebraska — like Kansas 3, urban, white and well-educated — would suffice to give Harris 270 electoral votes. (A last-minute Republican push to revert Nebraska to a winner-take-all system looks to have fallen through.) And partly it’s that the Times/Siena Sunbelt polls were offset by a Wisconsin poll that showed Harris ahead by 6 to 7 points in the Badger State, which also came from a highly-rated firm, MassINC.
Always good to see something we’ve also found confirmed by folks on the other side: third-generation Latinos are more pro-Trump.
Longtime readers will know of my skepticism of early voting analysis, especially in the last few cycles, as partisan adoption of various voting methods has see-sawed thanks to the pandemic. But @MichaelPruser is a must-follow on X if this is your thing, and benchmarking early vote turnout to voters’ past vote history is very smart.
FiveThirtyEight has battleground Senate polling averages.
Nate Cohn asks whether the Republican Electoral College advantage has withered this cycle. My take: we won’t really know until Election Day as this is highly contingent on what the tipping point state is and what the polls happen to show in that state that week. As we’ve seen over the last few weeks, idiosyncratic 1-2 point shifts in the averages in single states are pretty common which can cause measurement of electoral college bias to be not that precise.
Pollsters make the shift to likely voter screens in August.
J. Miles Coleman with a must-read on counties to watch in the Rust Belt.
Can voter turnout make Blexas a reality?
Handy guide to which third party candidates are on the ballot in the swing states:
📊 Public Opinion
Must-bookmark on which male personalities are most popular among men men via Evan Roth Smith and Blueprint.
Joe Rogan is well-known and liked but most “manosphere” influencers elicit a shrug of the shoulders.
