2020 Presidential Elections Analysis

Tahmid Ahmed

View the Project on GitHub TahmidAhmed2000/Gov1347

10/11 - Analyzing the Effects of Social Media on Political Campaigns

Overview

Presidents have been using numerous of advertisements to engage with the American people. One type of ad that presidential candidates have been using greatly is social media ads. Social media ads were not always so popular back in the day because not everyone was on social media. Now, however, social media has become so ingrained in society that candidates will look at any opportunity to get their name on services like Facebook and Twitter. For the purpose of this blog, we will look at how much political campaigns spend on social media advertisements and social media’s influence on elections.

How much do political campaigns spend on social media advertisements?

Figure 1.

Sourced from the Wesleyan Media Project, Figure 1 indicates the comparison in spending between President Trump and Presidential Candidate Joe Biden on Facebook advertisements. While there are other social media that both candidates use to promote their campaigns, such as Twitter and Instagram, Facebook is generally the most popular social media for advertisements. There are three key pieces of information we can gather from this figure:

While Biden has spent more on advertisements on Facebook than Trump, Trump is a more active user on social media. It would be interesting to argue if Trump’s presence on social media can be looked upon as a form of advertisement in itself. It possibly may be the case that Donald Trump has spent less than Biden on social media advertising because the president already knows his tweets and posts do enough to solidify his political base.

Social media’s influence on presidential elections

Let’s analyze the effects of social media on presidential elections. We can look at the 2016 election to get an estimate of how the election might pan out in 2020.

Figure 2.

According to Figure 2 (sourced from a Medium article), it can be seen that Trump’s #MAGA became very popular as the election neared.

How social media may influence the 2020 election?

To understand how social media may influence the 2020 election, we can look at the 2016 election.

Even though Trump paid for more social media ads in 2016, Biden is currently outpaying him. Trump seems to be more vocal on social media, however, which can play to his advantage. Trump constantly tweets everything that is going on, and this may help him connect with his supporters more. However, the strength of using ad spending on social media as a predictor of the 2020 election seems to have its pitfalls: