Democratic Digital Advantage? Not in Terms of Spending: McConnell vs. Grimes edition
Democrats are widely assumed to be leading in the digital space, so one could be forgiven for assuming that they are setting the pace in terms of overall spending on digital generally, and digital advertising specifically.
You’d probably be wrong, though.
While I’ve not done a comprehensive review of all 2014 races, I did take a look at the Kentucky Senate campaign, and my analysis shows that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has outspent his challenger, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, on digital by more than three-to-one as of the June 30, 2014 campaign finance reports.
Now, fundraising and spending do not correlate well with winning political campaigns. So, please don’t take this as any kind of handicap of the race. You should check out The Monkeycage or FiveThirtyEight for that kind of coverage.
Back to the digital spending data.
There’s no hard-and-fast rules about how much a marketer (either commercial or political) should spend online — but overall, digital ad spending in 2014 is estimated to comprise 22.5% of the total global ad spend. So, there’s that.
And, it’s gotten to the point that Acura feels strongly enough about digital to launch the biggest campaign it’s ever done, without any primetime broadcast TV — and the digital spend is more than one third of the total buy.
And, even the National Republican Congressional Committee — they who get facecrushed on the reg by the online fundraising juggernaut that is @BrandonEnglish and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — are recommending that their candidates spend at least 10% on digital ads, with some spending as much as 30–40%.
Back in political consultant school, they taught us that campaigns SHOULD spend about 70% of their money on voter contact, nearly all of that on TV, radio, and direct mail (Hey — it was 2002–2003). So, if you’re expecting a $15 million dollar race, a decent back-of-the-envelope budget would be to budget $10.5 million for voter contact, and if you wanted to divide your spending up like a commercial marketer, you’d earmark about $2.3 million of that for digital.
How do the competitors in one of the hottest Senate races in the country stack up? Poorly, it turns out.
Overall, as of the June 30 FEC reporting deadline, the McConnell campaign has spent $12,049,221.26. Of that, by my count, $1,700,408.48 was spent on the digital campaign.
According to the same reports, Grimes has spent $6,453,525.59 in total — $508,326.32 on digital.
It is not surprising that McConnell would be outspending Grimes in absolute terms. He’s the sitting minority leader of the Senate, and has been in the Senate for 29 years. What IS surprising, however, is that he’s outspending her proportionally by nearly a factor of two.
Hard to imagine the campaign that inadvertently launched the hashtag #McConnelling with its ham-fisted attempt to get b-roll in the hands of super PAC ad folks is going twice as hard in the digital motherfucking paint than his younger, Democratic challenger, but here we are.
I’ll be taking a more comprehensive look at Senate races later this fall, but from what I’ve seen poking around after the first quarter reports came out, it’s not uncommon to see the GOP campaigns outspending their competition in both absolute and relative terms.
Also, just to further caveat the above, the proportions could change dramatically as we get closer to elections — when additional media buys will be reported — however, significant money has already been spent by both of these campaigns on all media, so I don’t expect to surprising shifts in their media mix as the election draws near.
I’d love to you hear your thoughts. You can find me tweeting about online politics, whisky, and cephalopods at @SteveOlson — and if you liked this post, I’d appreciate you clicking the “recommend” button below. Thanks!
