Roundup of Republican Presidential Candidate Digital Spending
DeSantis and Trump lead the field in spending while political outsiders try to build name recognition
The recent flurry of campaign announcements solidified the major contenders in the 2024 Republican primary race. With the initial Republican field set, the Cybersecurity for Democracy team delved into the state of digital advertising by Republican Primary candidates on Meta and Google-owned platforms in these early days of the Primary race. We found meaningful differences in which candidates are using digital ads, and how they are using them. The analysis below reviews ad spending and targeting data over the 90-day period from March 9, 2023 to June 6, 2023.
Ron DeSantis leads the field with $434,382 in spend, after a huge six-figure spending push on Google keyword ads the day of his announcement. (Tim Scott followed this same post-announcement strategy at a smaller scale). Donald Trump’s spending remains focused on Meta-owned platforms. He appears to have returned to his 2020 strategy of using Facebook to show ads to his existing audience and Facebook’s ‘lookalike audience’ feature to expand his reach to other audiences similar to that existing base. Nearly all of Trump’s ads are about himself and his recent indictments.
After the two front-runners, the next biggest digital advertisers in the Republican field are the political outsiders Perry Johnson and Vivek Ramaswamy. These two candidates have spent $260,086 and $209,098 over the last 90 days, with ads that aim to raise these candidates’ profiles and build their mailing lists. In order to qualify for the Primary debates, candidates must demonstrate support in polls and by receiving donations from at least 40,000 people — something that is particularly difficult for candidates that have never run for office before and lack existing donor bases. Many ads from Ramaswamy and Johnson ask for donations as small as $1 for the explicit purpose of getting the candidate on the debate stage.
So far, the other establishment Republicans have spent far less on digital advertising, with Mike Pence spending nothing at all. Of course, Primary season has only just begun, so much of this may yet change.
Big Differences in Where (and How) Candidates Spend Ad Dollars
In total, the Republican candidates have spent more than $1,502,925 in digital advertising during the 90-day period of analysis. Their aggregate spending was allocated relatively evenly between Meta and Google, 56% to 44%, respectively. However, the allocation between the two differs widely on an individual basis. Trump invested 100% of his spending into Facebook, while DeSantis put 87% of his spending towards Google.
The Meta Ad Library shows detailed advertiser-specified targeting criteria for political advertisers going back 90 days. The candidates rarely used age, language, or gender targeting. Haley was the only one to use gender-targeting, allocating 1% of her spending specifically towards women. No one advertised in languages other than English, and all spending skewed older, reflecting the ethnic and age breakdown of Republican voters.
Trump had the most diverse location targeting. He earmarked no more than 2.4% of his spending on any one state within the US. Iowa and New Hampshire are the top locations for spending for most candidates. The exceptions to the rule are Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, whose focus spending on their home state, South Carolina, and Ron DeSantis, who used no location targeting at all.
Every candidate, except Ron DeSantis, heavily used detailed targeting, which displays ads to users based on interests and demographics. The table below shows the Jaccard Similarity, a measure of similarity between two lists based on their overlap, for each pair of candidates’ target lists. All candidates had a pairwise similarity of 0.1 or below except for Scott and Haley, who have a score of 0.73. This means that they have three out of every four targeting search terms in common, including activities like “trophy hunting” and “Cub Scouting (Boy Scouts of America)”, television programming like “SEC network” and “TLC (TV network)”, voting issues like “tax law” and “school board”, and more. In more ways than one, these two candidates appear to be targeting very similar voter profiles.
DeSantis was the only candidate who spent more on custom audience exclusions rather than inclusions (90% vs 74%). Custom audiences are groups of people based on activity across Facebook, third-party apps, or candidate websites (e.g. people who shared a candidate’s post or visited their website multiple times). Exclusions can help candidates avoid wasting money on people with predictable donation or voting patterns. By contrast, Donald Trump did not use any custom audience exclusions. These choices more reflect targeting strategy than targeting intent.
The Google Ad Transparency Center also provides advertiser-level impressions data. Taken together, the candidate’s ads were shown to users 16 million times. Perry Johnson contributed the most to this total at seven million, followed closely by DeSantis. Nikki Haley and Tim Scott did not crack one million.
From this, we can derive the impressions per dollar of each candidate to see whose spending goes the furthest. Nikki Haley and Perry Johnson have an impression-per-dollar rate 2.5x the field’s average at 67. Tim Scott trails the group at 11 impressions-per-dollar. This might indicate that the ad serving algorithm favors Halely and Johnson’s ads or that Google prices their target audiences lower than the other candidates’.
Ad Content Strategies focus on Personality over Issues
Twenty-three of Donald Trump’s ad creatives in this time period received more than 100k views. Seven of the top 10 mention his indictment, phrasing it as a “witch-hunt” out to get him.
Nikki Haley’s only video on Facebook with at least 100k impressions is an ad attacking Biden.
Tim Scott’s most viewed ad, with more than 1 million impressions, is a video announcing the creation of his presidential bid exploratory committee. In this video, Scott, a Black man, pledges to push back against the “radical left’s’“ use of race to divide the country. Similarly, his top Google ad was his official announcement video.
Ron DeSantis’s top ads did not discuss the issues like the other candidates. Instead, they solicited donations: $47 for the “47th president of the United States”.
Ramaswamy had the highest number of viral ads. He had 35 creatives with more than 100k views, with three reaching more than one million. Two of those three employed transphobic rhetoric calling the “trans cult” a “mental health epidemic”. Both Ramaswamy and Johnson had high-performing ads which promoted new media: a podcast in Ramaswamy’s case and a reality television series in Johnson’s.
As the primary season nears, we will continue to monitor new entries to the field and highlight key changes in political advertising behavior.
Methodology
The data was pulled from the Meta Ad Library Reports page and the Google Ads Transparency Center’s public BigQuery database from March 9, 2023 to June 6, 2023. The targeting lists were collected from the individual candidates respective Meta Ad Library pages. The visualizations were created using Plotly. The data and code to produce this blog can be found here.
About NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy
Cybersecurity for Democracy is a research-based, nonpartisan, and independent effort to expose online threats to our social fabric — and recommend how to counter them. It is a part of the Center for Cybersecurity at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
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