Mapping an Election Season Through Facebook Ads
Note: This post is part of a series, written by students of the Spring 2019 Data Journalism I course in the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Each week we have a Data Fest in which two of the class reporters present a data set, along with a brief critique and overview of what they did and discovered.
Facebook ads make up just a fraction of what a candidate for President might spend on his or her campaign, but they’re not small beans.
For my Data journalism class, I took a look at Facebook’s ad library data, a set of data pertaining to “ads related to politics or issues of national importance”, that starts in May of 2018.
Facebook allows the viewer to download the whole data set, from May 2018 to the present day, or to break it up to the last day, week, month, or three months.
I wanted to get an idea of how a presidential campaign’s Facebook spending might change over the course of an election. Joe Biden’s announcement for his presidential run just happened to fall in the week when I began this assignment. That first week, Biden’s team bought $406,860 in Facebook ads.
I wanted to get an idea of how a presidential campaign’s Facebook spending might change over the course of an election. Joe Biden’s announcement for his presidential run just happened to fall in the week when I began this assignment, so I looked to his numbers first.
That first week of officially campaigning, Biden’s team bought $406,860 in Facebook ads. For comparison, I took a look at a couple other candidates’ numbers for that week. The Pete Buttigieg campaign spent $55,992, and Elizabeth Warren’s spent $100,677. Buttigieg had not been in the race for very long at that point (he announced his candidacy on April 15, 2019) and Warren had announced almost four months earlier.
I then took a look at the data a month later. From May 16th to the 22nd, the Biden campaign bought $99,831 in Facebook ads, about a quarter of what it spent the week he announced. Actually, about 35% of its total spending on the ads to date as of the publication of this article were just from the week he officially joined the race. Biden has also outspent both Warren and Buttigieg — Warren trails by $135,321 in total spending for the year.
There is a long race ahead, and to get a better idea of how spending fluctuates through it, I would want to watch these numbers ebb and flow as polls change, primaries are won, and a Democratic candidate makes it to the actual presidential race.
