The Democratic National Convention, a traditional election-season event, is in full swing. However, this has been anything but a traditional election season. Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt and the presidential incumbent, Joe Biden, decided not to run for a second term—something that hasn’t happened since 1968. These events have been particularly seismic for the major parties’ communications narratives and have deeply impacted their advertising strategies. Now, with Kamala Harris’s ascendency as the Democratic nominee, the landscape has shifted again.
Through it all, our AI content platform Pluralytics has been reading and evaluating the language of digital political ads. Earlier this summer we published the following Pluralytics-generated insights, which provide an overview of the parties’ spending and messaging trends.
National Spend: Left vs. Right
In April, for example, the Left far outspent the Right on a national level by 2.5X overall ($5.79M versus $2.29M). Specifically, the Left spent $1.8M more on Facebook (3.92M versus $2.11M) and 10X more on Google ($1.82M versus $185K).
Hitting High and Low
Nationally, the Left and Right have used more negative sentiment in their messaging since March.
The Left was 52% positive, with negative sentiment at 11% (up 49%). The Right’s negative sentiment grew to 18% overall (up 68%), and positive sentiment dropped to 42%. In the swing states, the Right had 30% negative sentiment (up 98%) compared to the Left’s 12% negative sentiment (up 34%).
Hot Topics
In March, the top topics for each side are shown here. For the Right, most topics remain unchanged, but anti-abortion cracked the top 10 for the first time, at #7.
Our Messaging Dashboard
Our interactive dashboard allows marketers and communicators to find their own important insights in the data we collect and parse. Here is a topline of what the system analyzes monthly:
- How are the Left & Right speaking and what are they saying?
- How much is spent on issue ads, and who is placing them?
- Who they are reaching demographically (gender, region, age).
- How well the ad copy matches the narrative voice (word choice they use) to target the audience based on our precision language models.
- What tones of voice are being used and sentiment analysis.
- Key topic(s).
- Vocabulary cloud of words used.
Filters allow sorting by democracy topic ads, including Left, Right, and ALL; national targeting; swing state targeting; and more. The result is a unique and dynamic resource for communicators seeking to understand how organizations and campaigns are driving an essential aspect of the democracy conversation in this election cycle.
Interested in exploring your own messaging? Contact us today to get started.