Trump-endorsed congressional candidates who spent on Facebook and Instagram ads focusing on the economy, Trump, and Ukraine fared better electorally in the 2022 midterms elections than those who focused on education, law enforcement, and abortion, according to a new analysis of the ad spending by topic of congressional candidates by NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D). Overall general election federal candidates spent $36 million on political ads on Meta.
C4D collects data on Meta political ad spending from a variety of sources, applies machine learning, topic modeling, and other types of tools to develop messaging insights on Ad Observatory. This includes analysis of political ad messaging by topic. This public dashboard is designed for journalists and researchers to have access to these insights to power investigations such as this midterms analysis. See Ad Observatory methodology. This analysis covers political ad spending on Meta from January 1, 2022 to November 18, 2022.
Spending by federal candidates on political ads on Meta was just one factor–and a relatively small one–of digital political ad spending in the 2022 midterms elections, estimated at $1.2 billion for Meta and Google combined, according to Kantar Media. (This includes spending on political ads by third party groups.) OpenSecrets estimated the overall political spending on federal races was $9 billion this cycle. However, Meta remains a significant focus for political advertising and little is known about its messaging content and tactics.