Digital Advertising in U.S. Federal Elections, 2004-2020

Abstract

Digital advertising is now a commonplace feature of political communication in the United States. Previous research has documented the key innovations associated with digital political advertising and its consequences for campaigns and elections. However, a comprehensive picture of political spending on digital advertising remains elusive because of the challenges associated with accessing and analyzing data. We address this challenge with a unique dataset (N=3,639,166) derived from over 13 million expenditure records reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2004 and 2020. Employing a machine learning model to classify expenditures into nine categories including digital ads and services, this paper makes four key observations. First, 2020 was a watershed election in the growth of digital campaign spending. Second, there are clear partisan differences in the resources allocated to digital advertising. Third, platform companies play a central role in an otherwise partisan market for digital ads and services. Fourth, digital platforms and consultants occupy a distinct ideological niche within each party.

Understanding the Modern Election Campaign: Analysing Campaign Eras through Financial Transparency Disclosures at the 2019 UK General Election

“…Fieldhouse and Cutts 2009). However, there is a relative dearth of work that analyses official campaign spend data to examine the resources that parties dedicate to different campaign activitiesand the work that does this tends to be largely US-focused (Limbocker and You 2020;Sheingate et al 2022). This is because much publicly available data, even in countries with the most transparent financial reporting systems, are often insufficiently detailed to allow differentiation of spending by campaign activity.…”