Follow the Money in Virginia’s Election

Irene Tollinger
Nov 6 · 3 min read

Time, money and energy poured into Virginia and I wondered how much money exactly and who was behind it based on publicly available data only. This analysis was inspired by the work that @anotherAcronym has been sending out in their FWIW newsletter.

The following is total spending in Virginia thanks to Facebook’s political ad query tool/API (here).

The Republicans seem to have given up on Virginia at the state level with Trump still doing a smaller ad buy though pointedly not visiting. Here’s the breakdown of the groups focusing on Virginia (specific page).

We wanted to look at all the money spent, not just digital, to compare Democrat and Republican candidates in the Virginia State Senate to see how the sides matched up.

Democrat = $10,918,084

Republican = $7,429,685

Here’s how spending breaks down by race the Virginia State Senate (per Virginia department of elections site). We looked at the most competitive districts identified by EveryDistrict (Legislative District Index which represents party learning based on past elections). In each of the following races, Dems outspent republicans but it didn’t seem to be a deciding factor as three candidates still lost.

The bright blue/red (and a check mark next to the candidate’s name) represent wins.

These numbers seem to be incredibly high compared non-competitive races (pulled a few safe districts and saw ranges from ~100–300K)

Next we compared digital spend by for the same candidates above and saw that despite raising more money, democrats are spending less on digital. The following is Facebook data through we checked google and saw zero spend for all the candidates we tracked.

We were left with more questions than answers like what drives a lower ad buy on the Dem side? There isn’t a pattern here and it’s worth noting that these campaign ad buys are tiny compared to the state level ad buys done by outside groups which don’t include data on how their ads were targeted.

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