The race to define MAGA Mike online
The unknown Speaker of the House was immediately celebrated on the Right, as liberals sharpened their arrows
On Wednesday, after several weeks of unprecedented chaos, Congressional Republicans finally found their new leader. His name is Mike Johnson (yes, really), and all you need to know is that no one had really heard of him before this week.
As Democrats and Republicans alike started to look into this guy, a quiet race to define the new Speaker of the House began. In this week’s FWIW, we’ll break down how both sides have positioned Speaker Mike Johnson online. But first…
By the numbers
FWIW, political advertisers spent just over $10 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
In 2021, Virginia Democrats were caught flat-footed by a wave of advertising focused on “parents' rights.” So this year, groups on the Left are trying to push back on those narratives in the Old Dominion State.
We the People for Education, a Virginia-based pro-public education group, dropped $19,000+ on Instagram and Facebook ads last week reaching voters across the state. The ads call out extremist education agendas and book bans and urge voters to support pro-public education school board candidates.
Similarly, Red Wine and Blue, a grassroots group that “channels the power of suburban women,” is also running ads on Facebook and Instagram that attack extremist agendas in education and advocate for school board candidates. Their ads are focused on races in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia.
Those efforts are welcome news, as the top spender in Virginia on Facebook over the past 90 days has been the Republican Party of Virginia. The state GOP has spent over $200,000 tying local candidates to “Biden and The Squad,” while launching a full-court press to bank votes via early or absentee voting.
Meanwhile, political campaigns spent $2.7 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Ahead of Election Day in New Jersey, the New Jersey Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee is running new GOTV video ads aimed at completing the often difficult task of getting voters to turn out during an off-year election. The party called in Danny DeVito to help.
…and on Snapchat, political campaigns and organizations in the United States have spent around $2.2 million on advertising in 2023. Here are the top ten spenders YTD:
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Your 2024 digital dispatch
FWIW, here’s how much money the 2024 presidential candidates have spent on Facebook + Google ads to date (1/1 - 10/21):
…and here’s how weekly digital ad spending compares between the Trump and Biden campaigns:
Team Biden is running several Spanish-language ads nationwide on Google and YouTube.
Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) is launching his presidential campaign today.
From around the internet:
Tech journalist Casey Newton thinks Twitter is dead and Threads is thriving
The Republican Party of Virginia is reportedly mailing voters sexually explicit photos of a female Democratic candidate in a hotly contested state legislative race.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) joined Substack on Thursday and has already amassed 100k subscribers. Meanwhile, the top Congressional Substacker, Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC), used the platform to announce he’s running for NC Attorney General.
The Biden administration plans to release a highly-anticipated Executive Order on AI usage next week.
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The race to define MAGA Mike online
On Wednesday, after several weeks of unprecedented chaos, Congressional Republicans finally found their new leader. His name is Mike Johnson (yes, really), and all you need to know is that no one had really heard of him before this week.
As Democrats and Republicans alike started to look into this guy, a quiet race to define the new Speaker of the House began. Here’s how both sides have positioned Speaker Mike Johnson online:
On the Left, Democrats were eager to brand Johnson as an extremist, running with the label “MAGA Mike.” Dan Pfeifer called him “everything voters hate about the GOP…Paul Ryan’s economic policies + Mike Pence’s views on abortion + Donald Trump’s dangerously wacky views on the 2020 election.” Others flagged his record of wanting to criminalize homosexuality and his bizarre remarks tying abortion to social security.
On the Right, Johnson was greeted as a liberator. MAGA pundits praised the new Speaker and celebrated the party’s (at least temporary) re-unification.
According to Crowdtangle, Facebook posts mentioning “Mike Johnson” and “Speaker of the House” received over 1.46 million interactions on Wednesday. By historical standards, that’s not a lot of engagement, but it was more engagement than posts mentioning “Biden” or “Trump” received in that same period.
Generally, the top-performing posts came from conservative pages celebrating Johnson’s election. Only two of the top 10 most engaged posts about Johnson on Facebook didn’t come from Right-wing pages.
On Instagram, the picture was similar. Non-video feed posts mentioning Johnson received 1.8 million interactions on Wednesday, and the top performers were mostly from far-right accounts. The most-liked post mentioning Johnson on Instagram is a really stupid sexually explicit meme shared by Donald Trump Jr, which we won’t share here.
But on TikTok, the new Speaker has been constantly savaged for the past 72 hours. Popular creators have published dozens of videos introducing the Speaker and his extremist record to their audiences. These three videos focused on his anti-abortion and anti-gay record have each received over 1.2 million views and hundreds of thousands of interactions.
In terms of paid media, there have not been many ad campaigns focused on Johnson’s extremism just yet. One exception is Courage for America, a progressive advocacy group, which announced it would run these ads targeting vulnerable Republican members of Congress in New York for supporting Johnson’s Speaker bid. The group's ads launched on Facebook yesterday:
Political conventional wisdom on Twitter and in the press says that Republicans having an election-denying, homophobic abortion extremist as their standard bearer would be unhelpful to their chances of holding onto the House next year. I would probably agree with that assessment.
However, it’s important to remember that many Americans don’t know or care who the Speaker of the House is. It’s on Democrats to continue to explain who Johnson is and why his role is so important and to lay out the stakes for 2024.
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