Right-wing accounts begin to take hold on Instagram
Conservative accounts are popping up to reach younger audiences with red meat, anti-Biden content
📣 This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Civic Shout.
If there is one topic that has dominated the 2024 election conversation for the last several months, it’s this: Democrats are worried about young people. While the vast majority of younger voters identify as left-leaning or progressive, there is a not-insignificant portion of young people who embrace conservatism and buy into MAGA messaging. And those young conservatives have found a home on Instagram, where several right-wing accounts geared towards Gen Z and Millennials are growing rapidly. But first…
By the numbers
FWIW, political advertisers spent just over $7.6 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Rep. Katie Porter is making her bid for Senate in California’s jungle primary in March. She is in a tricky messaging position, polling third behind Rep. Adam Schiff (D) (and his very strong fundraising game) and Steve Garvey (R). This past week, Team Porter ran ads on Facebook and Instagram nationwide, sounding the alarm and calling out “well-funded opponents backed by corporate dollars.”
Meanwhile, the Women’s March is gearing up for its Bigger Than Roe Weekend of Mobilization and running new Facebook and Instagram ads that include an *unexpected* and pretty clever way to support marchers…
Meanwhile, political campaigns spent $2.3 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Money from entities supporting Nikki Haley continues to pour in ahead of the New Hampshire primary. This week, Nikki Haley’s campaign, as well as the Koch Brothers’ AFP Action and two PACs associated with Team Haley, SFA Inc. and SFA Fund Inc, were all among the top spenders for Google + YouTube ads – with AFP Action spending a whopping $768,000.
Meanwhile, the special election in NY-03 to fill George Santos’ seat is less than a month away, and things are heating up. The House Majority PAC is running new ads in support of Democrat Tom Suozzi and attacking Republican Mazi Pilip on her anti-abortion stance.
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Your 2024 digital dispatch
FWIW, here’s how weekly digital ad spending compared between the Trump and Biden campaigns in 2024, as well as MAGA Inc, a super PAC supporting Donald Trump, and Future Forward USA, a super PAC supporting President Biden.
Specifically, in the past week of data we have (which covers 1/6-1/13), Team Biden spent a huge $997,000 on digital ads on Facebook & Instagram and Google & YouTube. In comparison, Team Trump spent $113,000 on digital ads and the super PAC affiliated with Team Trump spent $47,000 for a total Trump spend of just $160,000.
From around the internet:
Donald Trump had a decisive victory in Iowa on Monday night… but it’s worth bearing in mind that only about 14% of GOP Iowa voters showed up (which means that Trump carried the day with 8% of Republican Iowans voting for him). Check out this new piece from The Bulwark on how Trump is “dominant, but vulnerable.”
In his desperate (and probably misguided) quest to make X/Twitter a “video-first” platform, Elon Musk has recruited Mr. Beast to help him try to lure creators to the site.
Political prankster duo The Good Liars presented Ron DeSantis with a participation trophy in Iowa… which DeSantis then refused to take.
The DNC unveiled its new logo for the 2024 Convention, which will happen this August in Chicago.
“We saw over 200% ROAS in two months!”
Digital Directors are talking about Civic Shout—the new list-growth platform that’s quietly becoming the industry standard. See for yourself >>
Right-wing accounts begin to take hold on Instagram
If there is one topic that has dominated the 2024 election conversation for the last several months, it’s this: Democrats are worried about young people. The nation’s two youngest voting generations – Gen Z, who were born between 1997 and 2012, and Millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996 – turned out in droves during 2018, 2020, and 2022 and have been an essential voting bloc for Democrats. But as this pivotal election year kicks off, there are growing concerns that young people have become disillusioned with the Dems and with politics as a whole.
Young people – especially Gen Z – are increasingly frustrated by issues like climate change, gun violence, and the war in the Middle East and feel that President Biden and Congressional Democrats are not addressing them sufficiently.
And while the vast majority of younger voters identify as left-leaning or progressive, there is a not-insignificant portion of young people who embrace conservatism and buy into MAGA messaging. For example, a survey in 2023 found that a whopping 25% of US male high school seniors (most of whom will presumably be able to vote this year) identified as conservative or very conservative. Moreover, Gen Z males were far less likely to identify as feminists than other generations, and support for same-sex marriage shockingly dropped from 80% in 2021 to 69% in 2023 amongst Gen Z-ers. Similarly (although not as dramatically), some reports claim Millennials have also begun to shift rightward.
These young conservatives or MAGA acolytes need a home online – and a few interesting efforts on the Right are trying to build an audience among them. Specifically, we wanted to note a few massive conservative Instagram accounts for young conservatives that have grown in recent years.
@republicans.genz: 639,000 followers
@republicans.genz, whose bio reads “Generation Z is the future of the right 🦅” is doing something that’s not so easy these days: growing on Instagram. Over the last 6 months, they’ve maintained an average of ~12,000 new followers a month, and their regular posts (about 13 per week usually) receive 15,000 likes on average. Notably, however, the account only follows 22 people (mostly conservative figures like Candice Owens and Ben Shapiro), indicating that there’s a pretty small web of people who have a lot of influence over young Republicans online. You can check out their growth chart below:
And what exactly are these GOP Gen Z-ers posting? Pretty hardcore MAGA content. For example, this account very clearly favors Vivek Ramaswamy’s extremist chaos energy over Nikki Haley’s more measured, GOP establishment approach. Additionally, despite Donald Trump being about 60 years older than Gen Z, these Zoomers seem to share a… similar sense of humor (and support his antics). Here are some of their top-performing recent posts, most of which fall in an anti-woke, anti-Biden, “own the libs” Trumpian vein:
And it wouldn’t be a popular conservative social media account without some kind of scammy merch scheme. Here are examples of a few Trump merch ads that the account ran on their Instagram stories in winter 2023. Something that is quite notable in this political climate is, of course, a “Trumpinator grenade” that people are supposed to “throw toward the nearest liberal”...
@millenial_republicans: 1.3 million followers
Similar to @republicans.genz, @millennial_republicans is also growing quickly and steadily on Instagram. They are averaging a whopping ~24,000 new followers per month and an average of 32,000 likes per post on the ~18 posts they put up per week. It cannot be understated how strong this growth is – take a closer look here:
This account has a bit of a less troll-ish tone than its Gen Z counterpart (the two accounts are an excellent case study of Millennial vs. Gen Z humor). In general, many of the posts are pro-Trump, anti-migrant, anti-trans, and anti-”wokeness.” All of them are very in line with Trump’s MAGA talking points, demonstrating that while we often think of a Trump voter as someone in their 60s, MAGAism has taken root amongst younger people too. Here are examples of some of @millennial_republicans’s top-performing content in recent weeks:
@students4trump and @todayisamerica: Followers: 1,121,000
Another notable pair of accounts comes from several Gen Z-ers who have been highly involved in GOP politics. @todayisamerica is linked to a business also called Today Is America that was founded by Camron and Liam Rafizadeh, brothers who often use the power of social media to amplify right-wing messaging and candidates. Liam also ran the infamous Republican Hype House TikTok account before it was taken down in 2020 for spreading disinformation. The CEO of the company is also a fellow prominent pro-Trump Zoomer: Bo Hines, a 28-year-old who is running for Congress in North Carolina in 2024 after being defeated in 2022.
@todayisamerica has also been experiencing very healthy follower growth on Instagram and averages ~10,000 likes for their ~7 weekly posts. Check out their trajectory here:
@todayisamerica also routinely cross-posts with an account called @students4trump, which has over 800,000 followers and seems to have been acquired by Today Is America. These posts (which appear on both accounts) follow a similar formula: very MAGA, red-meat content that would fit in perfectly in a Fox News segment. Here are some of their most popular recent posts:
It must be noted that these two linked accounts demonstrate a fact that’s only just now starting to get attention: that some (and perhaps many) Gen Z-ers actually like and support Trump.
Why this (really) matters
When it comes to online outreach and young people, there is a common assumption that Republicans have ceded the field entirely. That’s mostly been true, but over the past year or two, we’ve seen more efforts like these accounts trying to buck the trend.
@millennial_republicans even states in its bio that they are “stopping the stereotype that every millennial is a leftist.” And while @republicans.genz and @millennial_republicans are some of the biggest accounts of this kind, there are many others with growing audiences, like @unwokeinc, @poplitics, @quickconservative and @blakereynolds.22.
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