Deducing Strategy from Data
Polling data and past electoral performances can tell you a lot about how a may choose to allocate its resources, but there are many paths to victory and internal decision-makers have additional information the public doesn’t. To truly deduce a campaign’s strategy, we must look at its actions. That means taking note of its messaging, the stops the candidate makes on the trail, and how it spends its money. In this case, I’ll be analyzing how the Kamala Harris campaign spent its advertising budget, specifically on Snapchat.
I began this side project with the goal of collecting data from Snapchat and comparing the differences in spending between the Harris and Trump campaigns. However, to my surprise, I found that the Trump campaign did not spend ANY money on political advertisements on Snapchat. This may suggest a number of things about the Trump campaign’s strategy, such as…
- Targeting Gen Z and Millenials was not a key part of its strategy considering that the demographics of Snapchat’s user base skews younger.
OR perhaps more likely…
- There may be another platform that has proven to be more effective for them in reaching younger voters. In this project, I will only be looking at Snapchat data, but I may do a comparison in the future of the different platforms to see which one gets candidates more bang for their buck.
Without further ado, let’s jump in!
Daily Spending
Over the course of the campaign, the official Harris campaign spent a total of $33,307,846. Looking at the daily spending chart, we can see five distinct peaks: 1) Aug 30-31, 2) Sept 10-11, 3) Oct 1-2, 4) Oct 14-15, and 5) Nov 2-3. Some of these spikes in spending coincide with major campaign events - suggesting that the campaign is likely trying to utilize the extra attention on the campaign to get some messages across to younger voters.
September 10 was the first Presidential Debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, October 1 was the Vice Presidential Debate between Tim Walz and J.D. Vance, and October 16 was right before a major interview with Fox News host, Bret Baier. The final spike occurred likely as a last minute push before Election Day.
The ad placed right before the presidential debate contained Trump’s mugshot contrasted with a photo of Harris reminding potential voters of her past career as a prosecutor. The ad placed before the vice presidential debate featured Tim Walz asking viewers to research Project 2025 and highlighted pieces of it the campaign believes viewers would find unappealing.
Big Budget Ads
The ads launched on those dates can be found below and are in the order in which they were run. Clicking on them will lead to the Snapchat pages where the ad videos could previously be watched. It’s unclear if this will be possible again in the future.
Pro-Harris Advertisers
While Harris for President is the only official advertiser from the Harris campaign, a number of other accounts have been running ads with Kamala Harris listed as the candidate involved. Ads from the top advertisers determined by total amount spent can be found below. The last two seem to be dedicated only to selling merchandise related to the election.
Harris for President
Future Forward
Future Voice
For Michigan Action Fund
Won’t PAC Down
UFCW
Way to Win Action Fund
Spending by State
It should come as no surprise that the Harris campaign was heavily targeting the swing states that most polls and media focus on, like this article from NPR. However, New Hampshire is usually excluded from that sort of coverage, so it was surprising to see it at the number eight spot. Despite polling being relatively close to the 2020 outcome, the Harris campaign decided that it was worth spending $150k to mobilize young voters in the state. For context, Biden won the state in 2020 with around 53% of the vote to Trump’s 45%.
Biden also won Nebraska’s 2nd district in 2020 with similar margins and it appears the Harris campaign allocated $58k to ensuring they carry the district’s electoral vote as well.
Targeted Zipcodes
From this map, we can get a better idea of which parts of the swing states the Harris campaign was most interested in reaching. Just from a glance, we can see heavy clustering around urban centers of Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Michigan as well as the suburban areas around them. This is in stark contrast to Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, and New Hampshire where the targeting based on zipcode is far more dispersed.
Content Comparison
Aside from the “General/Other” category, the ad categories the Harris campaign has spent the most amount of money on so far are “Attack”, “Reproductive”, and “Personal”. Attack ads are those which focused on negative aspects of Trump or his campaign. Ads in the “Reproductive” category are those which focused on abortion, IVF, or anything else related to reproductive issues. This category had quite a bit of overlap with Project 2025 ads, as many mentioned both. Ads in the “Personal” category focused on the positive aspects of Kamala Harris as a person or were stories about her life or career.
Zip-Based Content Targeting
After plotting these ads we can gather a few insights. Ads about reproductive issues, healthcare, Project 2025, and personal stories (about Harris) all follow roughly the same pattern - hitting all the major swing states. Immigration ads are essentially nonexistent in the more northern states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The campaign ran them in Arizona and Nevada, although spending was miniscule ($3k). Tax-related ads follow a similar pattern but were also frequently run in North Carolina.
The ads identified as being about foreign policy were only run in one geographical area - the Detroit metro area (around Dearborn). This targeting may suggest there was an effort to reach Muslim voters with messages addressing foreign policy concerns in the key swing state of Michigan. However, in total, only $5k was spent on that category. Finally, ads claiming Trump stoked hate against Asian minorities during the pandemic were run in a handful of zipcodes in North Carolina, Georgia, and the Philadelphia suburbs.
IMPORTANT NOTE: An attempt was made to scale the opacity of the dots according to spend, but this was done with a logarithmic transformation so as to make sure they were all still visible. Please keep this in mind when examining a category like immigration which had a spend of only 3k compared to reproductive which had a spend of 604k.
Final Thoughts
The Harris campaign relied heavily on three primary types of advertisements on Snapchat in order to mobilize younger voters. Those three types of ads were: 1) general (reminder of election/name recognition), 2) attack ads against Trump, and 3) ads about reproductive rights and/or Project 2025. Among young voters whose top issue was abortion, 79% favored Harris, according to an AP Votecast Survey. Given these margins, the strategy seemed to overly rely on driving turnout of young people who agreed with the campaign’s stated positions on reproductive rights and who already felt negatively about Trump.
It is now clear that this combination of messages was not effective at driving youth voter turnout, considering that it was lower in 2024 than 2020. According to the aforementioned survey, the top five issues for young voters in order were 1) the economy, 2) abortion, 3) immigration, 4) healthcare, and 5) climate change. If we refer back to the content comparison chart, we see the campaign spent next to no money on messaging regarding immigration, despite it being in the top three issues for young people. Spending on messaging regarding healthcare and the economy was also relatively low compared to their respective levels of importance to young people.
In the future, I may look at ad spending on other social media advertisements by the Harris campaign to see how it compares. For now, thank you for reading!