The DNC returns with a blast
Taking stock of a wild week on social media
FWIW, this week’s newsletter is sponsored by Civic Shout
👋 I’m Eric Coffin-Gould, taking over for Kyle and Lucy this week. I’ve spent the past four years tracking the online conversation about politics and the election at CAP Action, and this week my team looked at how the DNC performed across social platforms.
The Democratic National Convention this week was…a lot. It’s been eight years since the last real convention, and many may have forgotten just how many speakers, events, parties, and content opportunities there are.
Whether it’s watching on cable, streaming (in a host of formats, including vertical video and Spanish), following live on Twitter, or catching clips the day after on TikTok, there are more ways than ever to follow the convention – and it’s clear that some big moments are breaking through. But who actually saw all this content? And which moments drove the conversation?
Comparing (virtual) crowd sizes
Traditional media views have been substantial. According to Nielsen, more than 20 million people tuned in to each of the first three nights of the Democratic convention, peaking on the second night. Those marks are significantly higher than the RNC in July, where 15-18 million viewers tuned in for each of the first three nights.
But social views seem to be winning the day. Across platforms, progressives generated at least 1.5 billion views this week — with the total likely being much higher. Through the first three days of the convention, the high mark was Tuesday night, with Michelle and former President Barack Obama speaking. Progressive pages generated 460 million views across platforms on the day — followed closely by 420 million views for Governor Walz’s night on Wednesday and 350 million views on Monday.
This is a huge shift. For most of this year, posts from progressive and conservative pages have tracked pretty closely on impressions and engagements, but the political social media environment was supercharged by the events of July and early August. The chart below shows daily engagement totals combined for the top 50 progressive- and conservative-leaning pages across six major social media platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X/Twitter, and Threads). While progressive engagements during the DNC haven’t reached their own peaks of late July and early August yet, they are still owning far more of the conversation than their conservative counterparts.
What broke through
The Obamas drove the most viral moments of the convention to date by delivering clippable moments and stark contrasts to Donald Trump. Two of the most widely-viewed clips in the convention week were Michelle Obama’s “black jobs” line and President Obama’s “crowd sizes” joke, each getting tens of millions of impressions online. All told, content that mentioned either Obama performed 2.9 times better than expected based on the pages that posted it.
Below are the top 10 most-engaged posts from progressive pages through three nights of the convention. One common thread between almost all of them? A strong contrast message, usually to Trump. While there were a number of beautiful moments and speeches highlighting the stories of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, they rarely got the eyeballs online that contrast content did.
The top overall post was KamalaHQ’s TikTok post of the new “Freedom” video debuted at the DNC, which has over a million engagements and a whopping 7.5 million views as of this writing. (An aside on format: the contrast of the high-production value of the video itself with the all-lowercase caption, emoji, and the clash of horizontal/vertical formats is quintessential TikTok in 2024).
What else stands out?
Abortion stories: Kate Cox and Hadley Duvall’s powerful testimonies about life-saving abortions and reproductive freedom really resonated online
Michelle Obama: Michelle Obama’s clip from her speech praising Vice President Harris was the only Instagram Reel to crack the top 10
Stephanie Grisham: The former Trump staffer’s appearance in the top 10 here might be surprising, but the framing of her “spilling secrets” and providing a glimpse “behind closed doors” made the now-familiar appearance of an anti-Trump Republican much more compelling
Lil Jon and the Georgia roll call: Making a boring piece of ceremony fun and joyful was a stroke of genius
One note: while the above is mostly TikTok, Twitter had its moment too. But Twitter posts that did well were usually high-view count, low-engagement. In the Elon Musk era, we have consistently seen Twitter’s impressions count be somewhat misleading in terms of a post’s impact. For instance, while Barack Obama’s tweet thanking Joe Biden was the mostly widely-viewed progressive post of the week (35m impressions), it had half the engagement of his Instagram collab with Michelle Obama.
Conservatives flock to X, progressives dominate TikTok
For years, Twitter (now X) was the rapid response platform of choice for Democrats and progressives, the place to follow along and watch speech clips go viral. Much of that still took place this week, but on a smaller scale. In 2024, the platform’s algorithm is much more friendly to conservatives, and progressive pages have seen greatly diminished reach. By contrast, TikTok is much more progressive-leaning — and especially in the Harris era, engagement has soared.
This dichotomy played out online this week. Progressives found the best bang for their buck on TikTok, where they generated 42 million engagements on just over 1,500 posts — an average of 26,000 engagements per post. By contrast, they posted over 8,000 times on X for a total of 24 million engagements —an average of just 2,900 engagements per post, or about 1/9th of what pages saw on TikTok.
While there was a period of time when conservative pages were gaining ground on TikTok, that has evaporated in the last month. It has become by far the most progressive-leaning of the major platforms: 6 of the top 10 most engaging political accounts in the past 30 days are progressive, and no conservative page cracks the top 10.
The chart below shows the trendline over the past few months for all of the major platforms — where positive values mean progressives generate more engagement, and negative values mean conservative pages do.
One other platform to watch: Instagram. While it’s a tricky platform for rapid response moments, it’s also nowhere near as progressive-leaning overall as you might think and ripe for improvement. For those who can’t get their principal on TikTok or are having trouble cracking the TikTok algorithm, Instagram could be the next most-important place to invest in.
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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:
FWIW, political advertisers spent just over $20 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
A DC-based comms shop called Ditat Deus (which translates to “God Enriches”) had a small spend on a (pretty graphic) video ad that seeks to exploit divisions in the Democratic party over Israel’s disastrous war in Gaza. The ad is only running in Michigan and is potentially targeting Arab Americans.
In other news, we are officially entering GOTV season. The Voter Participation Center dropped ~$136,000 on these fun graphic ads targeted broadly telling people to get registered and research their vote-by-mail options.
Meanwhile, political campaigns spent $17 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Right-wing outside group One Nation spent ~$446,000 last week on YouTube ads blaming battleground Democratic Senate candidates like Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, and Sen. Jacky Rosen for “rising crime.” It’s the same exact playbook One Nation used in 2022 Senate races (in most cases, it didn’t work out for them).
On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $9.1 million on ads year to date. Here are the top spenders:
…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $8.5 million on ads year to date. Here are the top spenders:
Duty and Honor, a nonprofit affiliated with Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC, is climbing up the ranks of the Snapchat top political ad spenders in 2024 with a new, 15-second video ad about how Sen. Brown (D-OH) is fighting Shrinkflation.
Your 2024 digital dispatch
FWIW, here’s how weekly digital ad spending (Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube) compares between the Trump and Harris (formerly Biden) campaigns year-to-date:
This past week marked the highest digital ad spend from the Trump campaign to date, clocking in at $3,245,104. However, the Harris campaign spent more than double for a total of $7,758,718 – which is actually their lowest weekly spend in the past four weeks.
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What’s happening on TikTok?
Kamala Harris’ campaign continues to ride a wave of good vibes on TikTok, with a large majority of external posts about her candidacy being positive, compared to mostly negative content about Donald Trump.
More from around the internet:
In an effort to engage more younger voters online, the Harris campaign has launched a Twitch channel, according to WIRED.
The Harris campaign generated more small dollar donors in 11 days than the entirety of the Biden campaign, per Bloomberg.
Influencers and creators have gotten the VIP treatment at the DNC this week, including their own box with a prime view of the stage in the United Center. Some of the legacy press hasn’t been happy about it.
Far-right influencer and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk has not gotten a warm welcome at the DNC this past week.
That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 22,832 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on Twitter or Threads? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.
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I watched much of the Convention’s official feed on Twitch. The viewership was about 70 for the first two nights, 140 during the third, and 230 on the last one. For reference, pro-Harris streamers in the Center such as imreallyimportant typically garnered about 300 viewers, while party critic Hasan Piker garnered about 51,000 viewers, though that reflects their built-in audiences more. While I can’t really offer any points of comparison with YouTube, I can attest about 2/3 of the official feed’s chat was flooded with pro-Palestinian and anti-police emotes, a sign of who tends to dominate political spaces there. Almost none of it was related to the content of the speeches, or of the issues that polling consistently reveals are at the top of voters’ minds (such as inflation, jobs, housing, healthcare and immigration).