The five leading Democrats have used Facebook’s sophisticated targeting options to deliver millions of “impressions” — the technical term for when an ad appears on a user’s screen — to voters in Iowa. In the final days of their campaign, each candidate is driving a different message in the ads.
Estimates of Facebook ad “impressions” in Iowa, in millions
Source: Charts are based on Facebook data compiled and analyzed by Acronym.
Bernie Sanders has a favor to ask of Iowa residents: add your name to support his campaign against the one percent. Joe Biden wants Iowans to be concerned about America’s place in the world. Pete Buttigieg is focused on wages. And Elizabeth Warren is promising to rid corruption in Washington.
With less than a week left before the Iowa caucuses, a look at how these candidates have been mobilizing their digital followers reveals what messages make up their closing argument to supporters online, what level of sophistication they’re bringing to turn out caucus supporters, and how strategic the campaigns have been at tapping their online supporters for donations.
The New York Times analyzed nearly 60 days of digital advertising by the top five candidates competing for delegates in Iowa who are most likely to cross a threshold of viability in caucus rooms. Here’s a look at their key messaging in Facebook ads that made an impression on voters.
Sanders: Turning Out Voters and ‘Medicare for All’
Perhaps no campaign has shown as deep a digital get-out-the-caucus operation as Mr. Sanders. With more than 20 percent of his ads dedicated to making sure his supporters know where to go on caucus day, the Vermont senator’s campaign also has a digitally organized car pooling operation to make sure supporters have a ride to the caucuses.
The Sanders ads that are most frequently used in Iowa focus heavily on his pitch for Medicare for All, and a quote from a supporter from Clinton, Iowa, named Tom Blanchard, who describes Mr. Sanders as untainted by special interests from Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry or Hollywood.
Mr. Sanders does, however, heavily rely on a message from his political celebrity endorser, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is featured in about 20 different ads that appeared in Iowa from the Sanders campaign.
At times, however, Mr. Sanders’s Facebook ads could be mistaken for ones from the Trump campaign. Built upon a sense of grievance, they portray a rigged system aimed against Mr. Sanders. “We are winning with three weeks to go, and the Democratic establishment and the corporate media are throwing whatever they can at us to bring us down,” one ad, which ran about 50,000 times in Iowa, said.
Buttigieg: Closing the Wage Gap
Though Mr. Buttigieg is known for his broad appeals to hope and unity, his top ads in Iowa have been heavily focused on a single message: “People are not getting paid enough. We can do something about that, and we’re going to fix it.” It’s a message that left more than one million impressions in Iowa over the past 60 days, and redirected users toward his plan to address the wage gap.
A different plea getting almost as many impressions in Iowa speaks to a current struggle for the Buttigieg campaign: support among people of color, specifically black voters. Three of his top 10 Facebook ads in Iowa address the issue of racism and direct users to his “Douglass Plan” to address issues his campaign sees as central to black Americans.
More in line with his stump speech, Mr. Buttigieg also points to his “industrial Midwest” roots in the ads, using the phrase “in my part of the country” and elevating issues core to the midwest in many of his ads. While he ran a heavy rotation of climate change ads — just under 10 percent of his overall ads on Facebook — he frequently mentioned the role of the agriculture sector, a major industry in Iowa, in the same ad as he spoke about climate change.
Yet a message that is present surprisingly often in his Iowa rotation is a declaration to get rid of the electoral college. In both English and Spanish, Mr. Buttigieg has 10 ads that discuss the issue, and even offers supporters an “Abolish the Electoral College” campaign sticker.
Biden: Beating Trump
On Facebook, as on the campaign trail, Mr. Biden’s digital ads almost all turn back to President Trump. For example, an ad he ran on climate change simply said: “The first and most important part of my climate change plan: beating Donald Trump.”
His ads getting the most screentime in Iowa focus on Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, saying that every day of Mr. Trump’s presidency is “a dangerous day for both the United States and the world.” The former vice president uses the threat of Mr. Trump’s victory to also go after some of his rivals by name: “Polls show Joe Biden beating Donald Trump in key battleground states, while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders trail” wrote one fund-raising ad.
Mr. Biden also counts some of the most high-profile Iowa endorsements in the field, and he regularly reminds users on Facebook. His second most aired ad in the state is the video of the endorsement of Representative Abby Finkenauer, and about 10 percent of his ads reaching a majority of Iowans tout one of his endorsements.
Warren: Combating Corruption in Washington
In Iowa, the top 10 most frequently run ads from the Warren campaign dealt with a single issue: her plan to combat corruption in Washington. The ads made more than 2.3 million “impressions” in Iowa, and were often summarized with the tagline: “I’m not afraid to fight back.”
Like her multi-point policy plans, the senator from Massachusetts runs lengthy text with her Facebook ads, often broken out into multiple paragraphs, far longer than most other candidates. In Iowa, she focused on her health care plan and wealth tax, while often running separate ads with further details of how her plans would help minority communities.
Ms. Warren also targeted her rivals by name, noting in multiple ads that Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who’s also running for president, was among the first to attack her wealth tax, and that both he and Tom Steyer, the other billionaire in the race, have “been allowed to buy their way” into the election.
Another ad didn’t mention Mr. Buttigieg by name, however, her campaign ran multiple ads criticizing billionaires in “wine caves,” a reference to a criticism she laid on the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., for hosting a high-dollar fundraiser in California. The ads that mentioned wine caves were all fund-raising ads for Ms. Warren.
Her campaign also had the most individual ads running in Iowa, with more than 700 having significant audience in Iowa. A majority of those ads were fund-raising ads, as Ms. Warren, who is not holding fund-raisers, relies nearly exclusively on online fund-raising.
On Facebook, those fund-raising asks can take several forms: Many ads offer contests for a donation, such as a shirt signed by Megan Rapinoe, the star of the United States women’s soccer team, or a trip to meet Jonathan Van Ness of “Queer Eye.” And more than any other campaign, Ms. Warren directed supporters to her campaign swag store, including her dog, Bailey: “It’s time to put a very good boy back in the White House!”
Klobuchar: For the Voters ‘Stuck in the Middle’
As other candidates attempt to stake out more progressive positions, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has leaned into her record as a moderate, and her most aired ad in Iowa appeals directly to those voters, to those who feel “stuck in the middle of the extremes in our politics.”
Ms. Klobuchar, whose state shares a border with Iowa, also visited all 99 counties as part of her campaign, which she boasts about in three of her top 10 ads in Iowa. Her frequent campaigning in the state helped earn the endorsement of The Quad City Times, an Iowa newspaper, which was then also turned into an ad on Facebook.
But to help augment attendance at her meet-and-greets all around the state, Ms. Klobuchar ran an aggressive ad campaign to call attention to her events, with about 15 percent of her total ads designed to get people out to her events during her long stretches of campaigning in Iowa.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
