Microtargeting before the #Insurrection: Georgia’s U.S. Senate Runoff

• In Event: The Effects of News and Ads on Participation

Abstract

The State of Georgia has been a focal point for U.S. politics since the 2020 November election, when Facebook banned political ads on the platform shortly before the vote until after the Electoral College certified Joe Biden’s win in December. From Dec. 16, 2020, Facebook allowed political advertising to start again, and political ads then focused on the four candidates in the two U.S. Senate races in Georgia that would determine the control of the U.S. Senate. After a brutal three weeks of thousands of microtargeted political ads aimed at Georgia voters, two GOP incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, lost to two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Rev. Rafael Warnock.

We report findings from our analysis of all campaign ads shown between Dec. 16 and Jan. 5th, that mentioned the candidates. Ads were downloaded from the Facebook Ad Library.

Votes were counted the evening of Jan. 5, 2021. It was a highly charged negative campaign that was quickly forgotten because of the insurrection the following day on Jan. 6, 2021.

This study draws on the wealth of literature on U.S. political advertising, and candidate characteristics on gender and race found in that literature, to discuss the potential impacts of negative advertising. Negativity was measured on a 7-point scale taking into account the number of negative comments and positive comments about each candidate mentioned in each ad, so that each mentioned received a score. Topics were also scored. We discuss the negativity of the Democrat and Republican campaigns with examples from the ads in the database. We then measure the effect of ad negativity, topic, and timing (early voting), as well as the age, and gender on the ad reach (the number of people seeing the ads in Georgia) using mixed-effects regression models.

Our findings will shed light on what to expect from negative advertising the fall 2022 mid-term U.S. Senate race in Georgia which is expected to be between two black male candidates Senator Rafael Warnock and Herschel Walker, the likely GOP candidate who is Trump’s favorite.

Authors

• Kiran Arabaghatta Basavaraj, University College London

• Holli A. Semetko, Emory University