U.S.|Read the document
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/24/us/identifying-gaps-in-democratic-digital-investmentsdocx.html
Advertisement
Priorities. To: Interested Parties Re: PROGRESS NOW Identifying Gaps in Democratic Digital Investments (September 19, 2024) Summary As the most recent public polls indicate, the presidential race is statistically deadlocked. This analysis obscures the fact that there are consequential gaps in support for Vice President Harris among key constituencies including voters of color and young voters. Together, Priorities and ProgressNow are sounding the alarm: the path to victory for Harris goes directly through these communities, but programs to communicate with and mobilize them remain alarmingly underfunded. Since the start of August 2024, only 15% of digital communication has been targeted to voters of color. While there are six weeks to Election Day, across the country voters are already casting ballots. Strong digital programs rooted in community are critical right now as: 1. The path to victory goes directly through key constituencies where Harris has to consolidate her vote. 2. These voters primarily get their news and information online. 3. Culturally competent digital programs are most effective at engaging and mobilizing these voters. As organizations that lead and collaborate on digital coordination, we have unprecedented visibility and data into partner and state programs. There are many groups who are part of the solution, who do this work well and who are rooted in these communities. We hope this analysis of key states, audiences, and key digital gaps drives investment to those groups and wins this election. Young Voters And Voters of Color Are Critical To The Path To Victory Progress Now has been fielding tracking surveys in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin since January 2024. The latest numbers – from September 12 – reinforce the Harris campaign’s assertion that they are the underdogs in this race. Across those battleground states, Harris is either tied or slightly trailing Trump. While the data shows an increase in Harris vote choice and enthusiasm since she entered the race in July, to close the gap and surpass Trump, Harris has to consolidate traditional Democratic base voters as well as win swaths of persuadable voters who are now open to voting for her. Both groups’ winnable voters are disproportionately young and/or voters of color. 2020 Group Biden 2024 Harris 2020 to 2024 Total 51 50 -1 Black 91 88 -3 Latino 61 59 -2 18-29 60 57 -3 According to internal polling, a comparison to historical performance numbers finds Harris trails both Biden levels of support with Black, Latino, and young voters. If not for just 42,918 voters in three states, Biden would not have won 270 electoral votes. We cannot tolerate any loss of support and hope to win. Without an immediate investment in communication to these groups that is commensurate with their power in the electorate, electing Harris in November will become harder. 1
Culturally Competent Digital Communication is Imperative to Win Communicating online, through paid, influencer, and organic programs, is critical to reaching these audiences. Without investment, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are not a neutral playing field – they are shaping how these communities view Vice President Harris and former president Trump. Younger and diverse audiences are disproportionately online and an essential share are totally unreachable by traditional media: . Only half of Black, Latino, Gen Z, or Millennial voters in battleground states watch broadcast TV in a week, but 85% use YouTube, 73% use Facebook, and 65% use ad-supported streaming, according to Priorities’ media consumption research. When they engage in politics, it’s online. For example, only 27% of 18-34 year olds watched the September 10th debate on traditional TV, while 51% streamed it or watched clips on social media. Mode and messenger also matter. Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer found that “circles of trust have become more local” with large swings in trust from “outsiders” and towards those with whom they share a closer community connection. That swing is reflected in our research in how best to reach and persuade voters online. Research by Equis, Priorities, and others shows that in-language ads often perform better with Latino and Asian voters than English-only ads. ProgressNow has repeatedly tested the persuasion impact of ads made by local creative teams versus vended consultant teams and finds locally-responsive ads, messengers, and stories simply resonate more. In other research by Priorities, ads designed for Black voters by Black operatives were more mobilizing than broadcast ads. Broadcast-style advertising alone is insufficient to reach, persuade, and mobilize these voters. Large-scale broadcast buys, where the message and messenger are the same from state to state and audience to audience, are not sufficient to move key groups of voters to where we need them to be. They must be complemented by an investment in targeted, culturally competent, and locally-specific communication that speaks to voters like the people that they are. The need to prioritize this investment is exacerbated by Trump’s investments in wedging and peeling off these voters, starting with working-class Latinos and Black men under 40. Republican MAGA infrastructure has set its sights on courting a diverse coalition across battleground states, including Latino voters in Nevada, Black voters in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and promoting high profile AAPI surrogates including Elaine Chao, Vivek Ramaswamy, and most recently, Usha Vance. In short, the GOP is actively recruiting these voters and others, and is resonating. We have to rapidly fill targeted spend gaps to earn their support. Topline Spending Obscures Key Gaps In Youth and Voter of Color Communication The gaps in spending are obscured by looking at topline spend only. Aggregate spending on digital (Streaming TV, YouTube, Google Search + Display, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, & X), as pulled from Priorities’ AdHawk digital tracking, paints a picture suggesting progressive and Democratic spending is outpacing Team Trump on digital persuasion and overall mobilization across the battlegrounds. Priorities and ProgressNow have partnered to analyze spending plans across the battleground states, corroborated by data from AdHawk. Those results suggest Democrats are not investing a large enough share of our digital communication to reach these key constituencies. 2
Our analysis found that Democrats’ spending advantage is overwhelmingly going to general market communications where we are likely talking to many of the same broad swath of voters over and over again. Furthermore, we determined that not nearly enough is being invested in programs that specifically target the voters we know we need to win with the messages we know they need to hear. Since the start of August, only 15% of Democratic digital persuasion and mobilization spend in battlegrounds was targeted toward voters of color. Less is specifically targeted to 18-34 year olds on platforms, including overlap with voters of color. Again, our goal is to sound the alarm and encourage donors to increase the share of the overall digital investments towards efforts that prioritize reaching the core constituencies Democrats must win. The same coordination efforts that underlie this analysis also make it clear that there are many organizations with well laid plans and deep expertise, ready to sprint toward the finish line. We strongly encourage you to invest in their work immediately. Early voting has already begun. Time is running out. 3
Close ×