The Strategic Goals of US Election Ads on Social Media

A Descriptive Study of the 2022 Midterms

Abstract

Election campaigns increasingly pursue their strategic goals online, using digital advertising not only to persuade voters but also to raise funds, mobilize supporters, and collect data. These varied objectives reflect how campaigns operate within broader networks of candidates, parties, and outside groups. The extended party network forms the strategic backbone of modern U.S. campaigns, yet its internal division of labor in paid advertising has remained largely unmeasured. By classifying the goals of over 377,000 Facebook and Instagram ads from the 2022 US elections, we provide empirical evidence about the strategic behavior of candidates, parties, and outside groups. To this end, we build on previous work to extend and refine a taxonomy of nine goals for online election ads: acquisition, contact, donate, event, learn, persuade, poll, purchase, and vote. We analyze how advertisers allocate spending across goals and show that some — notably persuasion, donation, and learn — receive far greater spending than others. We also show that different types of sponsors often pursue different goals. For example, candidate advertisers devote a much higher share of their ads to fundraising than non-candidate advertisers, highlighting the costs of running for political office in the US. We also find that ad goals vary depending on the timing of the ad, the type of sponsor, and the characteristics of the targeted audience. Together, these findings offer the first systematic multi-sponsor account of how digital advertising reflects a functional division of labor within the extended party network that structures contemporary U.S. campaigns.