In 2016, the Trump campaign blew nearly its entire digital advertising budget on Facebook, working closely with the social media giant to micro-target rural voters, Reagan Democrats, evangelicals—the entire spectrum of potential Republicans that ultimately comprised the Trump coalition. The strategy in 2020 appears to be similar. According to The New York Times, Trump has already spent nearly $5 million on Facebook ads so far this year—about five times as much as his closest competitors, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. Yet the Democratic field is beginning to catch up, collectively overtaking Trump earlier this spring. Leading the field is Joe Biden, one of the last Democrats to enter the race, who has aggressively ramped up his digital spend in recent weeks, outpacing the president on Facebook in three of the last four weeks.

Those numbers, which come courtesy of Bully Pulpit Interactive, suggest that Democrats have learned from Trump’s digital playbook. That worries some political analysts, who say Democrats may be chasing older Facebook users at the expense of reaching new voters. “For a long time, Trump was running an intensive campaign that no one was paying attention to,” Mike Schneider, a partner at Bully Pulpit Interactive, told the Times. “And while Democrats have picked up their efforts, they’re fighting over the same group of supporters while he’s broadly expanding his base.”

Of course, Facebook holds a unique appeal for Trump, whose campaign is currently spending about half of its Facebook budget on anti-immigrant ads targeted at Americans aged 65 and older. “We assume Trump is making a huge play to hold an advantage he had in 2016 with older white voters,” Ben Coffey Clark, another partner at Bully Pulpit Interactive, told Axios last month. Other ads are more self-aggrandizing—and deviously clever. According to the Times, the Trump campaign has used Facebook to heavily promote the president’s upcoming birthday, which doubles as a data-gathering operation. “Digital list-building efforts like birthday cards are a great way to re-engage supporters, to refresh your email list and to grow a more personal relationship with your existing donor base,” said Michael Duncan, a Republican digital strategist. (The ads erroneously say Trump is turning 72; in fact he’ll be 73. But who’s keeping track?)

Democrats including Biden, Harris, and Pete Buttigieg are looking to cut in on some of that action. According to Axios, a major chunk of Biden’s early fundraising haul came from the web, with videos featuring the former veep playing a prominent role. So far, Trump still seems to hold a solid advantage online. His campaign’s polarizing ads, many of which deal with immigration, play well with Facebook’s algorithms, firing up supporters who like and share them. (“A lot of this is Trump supporter red meat,” as Schneider put it to the Times.) In stepping up their spending, Democrats, and Biden in particular, are hoping to best Trump on his own turf.

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