Older voters handed Donald Trump the presidency, and now his campaign is looking for a repeat. According to Axios, the president’s campaign is directing close to half of its Facebook ad budget at Americans 65 years old and older, far more than his potential Democratic challengers are spending on the same demographic. The campaign is reportedly targeting the group with “nativist language around immigrants”—an attempt, it seems, to exploit older Americans’ vulnerability to hyper-partisan messaging online. “We assume Trump is making a huge play to hold an advantage he had in 2016 with older white voters,” Ben Coffey Clark, a partner at Bully Pulpit Interactive, which provided data on the 2020 candidates’ Facebook spending, told Axios.

According to the data, the Trump campaign is spending 44 percent of its Facebook budget on older Americans—nearly double the spending of Democrats, whose base is younger and more diverse. And while Dems have largely focused their Facebook advertising on fundraising and other policy issues, according to the report, Trump’s campaign is using 54 percent of its ads to stoke fears about immigrants. Such nativist content may not hold much appeal beyond his base, but the campaign appears to be betting that appealing to older Americans, who tend to be more active in civic life, could once again deliver Trump a victory. “The one thing the Trump campaign has proven time and again,” said Zac Moffatt, C.E.O. of the conservative public affairs firm Targeted Victory, “is that they follow the results and optimize for outcomes and not the general consensus.”

As his rhetoric in recent weeks suggests, Trump seems to be planning a full-scale fear-mongering campaign in the lead-up to 2020, similar to his efforts ahead of 2018 midterms. But the campaign’s Facebook push also underscores the potential for older Americans to be led astray by misleading or sensationalist information online. According to a recent BuzzFeed News report, research suggests older Americans have “disproportionately fallen prey to the dangers of internet misinformation and risk being further polarized by their online habits.” Members of the 60- or 65-plus demographic, who have lower levels of digital literacy in general, appear “more likely to consume and share false online news than those in other age groups.” They’re also less deft at discerning news from opinion, gauging the reliability of online sources, and understanding of how algorithms factor into what they see on social media. At the same time, BuzzFeed noted, they tend to play a larger role in civic life.

“They’re alone, relatively wealthy, alienated, and stuck in places where they don’t know anybody and feel angry,” Kevin Munger, a political scientist who studies the online habits of older Americans and their effect on politics, told BuzzFeed. “And they have access to the internet.”

Trump, it seems, is looking to exploit that attitude, particularly on Facebook, whose demographic is trending older. Whether it works or not remains to be seen. Older white voters helped Trump to a surprise victory in 2016. But distaste for the president and his policies among younger voters delivered Republicans a number of losses in the 2018 midterms. If young Americans remain engaged at higher levels in 2020, that could bode poorly for the president on election day. “Voters under 45 moved decisively and overwhelmingly toward Democrats,” Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann told CNN in December after the midterm elections, “and I don’t know how you take it as anything other than a total rebuke of Trump and what he’s done.”

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