Photo-Illustration: Intelligence Officer; Photo: Getty Images

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

I’m not actually talking about Twitter, though it’s worth acknowledging what’s happening there: a relatively small platform with enormous elite influence, once co-opted and used to great effect by a former president, banned for election-related misinformation, bought by its wealthiest user was taken. and has been turned into a decidedly pro-Trump platform. I’m also not talking about Republicans’ embrace of popular new media personalities and podcasters in pursuit of young voters, though that, too, is the sort of thing generally attributed to Democrats in the past. (In 2015, it was Obama against Marc Maron; in 2024, it was Trump against Joe Rogan.)

What I’m talking about is digital ad spending. After Trump’s victory in 2016, Republicans doubled down on social media, appointing Facebook guru Brad Parscale as campaign manager and pouring money into the platform (Parscale resigned before the election). As a result, in 2020 the Trump campaign (and affiliates) outperformed the Biden campaign on Facebook and Google, despite raising significantly less money overall. According to a study, the numbers look quite different in 2024 analysis It was published this month by the Brennan Center in partnership with OpenSecrets and the Wesleyan Media Project, and recorded more than $182 million in spending by or on behalf of the Harris campaign at Meta and Google. For the Trump campaign, the figure was just $45 million. The report explains:

Across the two digital platforms we examined, Democrats and their allies spent more than three times as much as their Republican and pro-Republican counterparts in federal races… The pro-Democrat spending advantage at the presidential level on these two platforms stands in stark contrast to past elections. Donald Trump relied heavily on digital spending on widely used platforms like Facebook.

There are some warnings here; The report is based on figures released by Meta and Google, and there is a lot of uncertainty around dark money spending in digital media, and the report is limited to spending before September, when both campaigns were ramping up.

Still useful. Meta and Google are by far the largest digital advertising companies selling political ads (TikTok bans them, while spending on Snap and X is relatively small). The report’s findings are also consistent with other evidence of a major shift. Times reported In September, following the debate, Harris’ campaign outpaced the Trump campaign 20 to one on Facebook and Instagram; In Pennsylvania alone, Harris spent $1.3 million that week to Trump’s $22. thousand. Difference from September 23 to October 6, according to the Wesleyan Media Project collapsed but it remains huge: More than $48 million was spent on Meta and Google by Harris and more than $15 million by Trump.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise that Democrats are more willing to spend on Google and Meta in 2024. Trump’s massive investment in Facebook in 2020 did not pay off, and the platform suspended Trump’s account after January 6 (the suspension was later lifted). The Harris campaign, meanwhile, is being run by people who might reasonably believe it, even though they spent less on the platform than their peers in 2020. swing-state Facebook and Instagram ads It helped them win. The campaign also has more money; More money is spent on almost everything else, too.

But the magnitude of the difference also points to a simple difference in strategy: One campaign thinks Meta and Google are much more valuable than the other. A number of factors support the Trump campaign’s theory, including Apple’s new restrictions on app developers that have made it harder to target certain types of ads. A little more difficult. Since 2020, both Facebook and Instagram have also changed significantly; the first has been scrubbed of most visible political content, bundled into dedicated groups, and brimming with surreal AI; The second has been completely revamped to look more like TikTok. If the strategy hasn’t succeeded before, there’s no clear argument that it will work any better this time.

In support of the Harris campaign’s theory, lots of people are still using them, targeting is still much more specific than traditional media alternatives, and overall ad spending is still trending in that direction – a position that would be counter to the de-emphasis of digital platform ads in 2024. . Google, too, may be a largely unrecognizable mess than it was four or eight years ago and faces unprecedented threats to its business, but it’s still most commonly used website is by far the United States, with YouTube coming in second. (Trump’s campaign reportedly It has focused its limited spending with Google on YouTube, where TV ads can be repurposed.)

We won’t have a sense of which strategy worked until after the election, and even then it will be difficult to draw definitive conclusions; Most of that money will be wasted, as is often the case with campaign spending. But from each campaign’s perspective, the difference is startling: Unlike TV ads, where candidates pile as many ads as possible into the same few spaces, both sides seem to think they know something about the campaign. Internet that the other one doesn’t.