Eugene Vindman has spent more than $2 million on online ads according to the Brennan Center. Is it making a difference? Election Day will tell.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Route 3 in Spotsylvania County was sometimes a Trump Train raceway.
Supporters of Donald Trump would gather in elevated pick-up trucks with flags flying from the back and run up and down the busiest road in the county to show their support and annoy drivers who didn’t share their views.
Joe Biden and Abigail Spanberger, who was then seeking a second term in Congress representing the 7th Congressional District, both made canvassing a key part of their campaigns. The ground game paid off with record-high voter turnout, a comfortable win for Biden, and a razor-thin win for Spanberger.
With just two weeks to go before Election Day 2024, however, the antics and canvassers of the past two elections are hard to find. Also missing are the elevated passions of voters and turnout at the polls.
The evidence is in the Early Voter turnout, which has not matched 2020’s despite endless commercials, and a CD-7 race and presidential race that are each too close to call. (The Cook Political Report has CD-7 rated toss-up and FiveThirtyEight has the Harris-Trump race a dead heat.)
In Fredericksburg, voter turnout is running almost 35% below this time last year. Spotsylvania’s turnout is down 20.3%, and Stafford’s 18.5%.
Statewide, voter turnout compared with 2024 is down 26%.
At this point, it’s fair to ask where the enthusiasm has gone.
Trading Digital Ads for Shoe Leather?
The Advance contacted University of Mary Washington professor Stephen Farnsworth to get his take on the lower turnout numbers.
“Wow,” he began. “These declines raise questions about whether the parties are investing enough in getting out the vote efforts. With a very close congressional election in the region we should be seeing a lot of early votes locked in – not the declines we are seeing so far.”
Get-out-the-vote efforts take a range of forms, of course — mailers and TV ads and canvassing are three of the tried-and-true approaches. There is reason to suspect, however, that this year candidates may be leaning more on online advertising than in years past.
The Brennan Center has undertaken with OpenSecrets and the Wesleyan Media Project a “first-of-its-kind analysis” that uses “publicly available data from Google and Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram)” to shed “light on the scope of online spending this election cycle on the two largest online platforms.”
Though the study faces many hurdles, and the data is limited to Google and Meta, the Brennan Center has concluded that “it is clear that online spending is playing a significant and growing role in politics this election cycle.”
Unsurprisingly, the Brennan Center’s Top 20 list of campaigns that had poured the most money into online ads through August 31, 2024, were Kamala Harris’s ($182,146,990) and Donald Trump’s ($45,344,373).
Coming in at No. 15, however, was Eugene Vindman ($2,170,744), the only Virginia politician on the list.
Can we conclude that Vindman has swapped shoe leather for online ads? No. Candidates can walk and chew gum at the same time; so it’s entirely plausible that Vindman is knocking doors with all the vigor of Spanberger in 2020 and 2022 and also spending heavily on online advertising.
The question is, are the online ads proving effective?
Harris has a substantial financial lead over Donald Trump, and Vindman is raking in far more money than Derrick Anderson (See this story in the Wall Street Journal and this report in the Virginia Mercury.) Both are spending heavily on online ads.
And yet, both races are a toss-up at this point. More important, Early Voting turnout is down.
Correlation is not causation, but in the days after November 5, be sure that the impact of the money being spent online is going to draw considerably more attention from academics and journalists.
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