Digital climate ads that boosted Dems to victory this week
Midwestern Democrats, with help from pro-climate outside groups, had an excellent Election Night
Welcome to Climate Monitor, a weekly digest of the digital tactics and strategies polluters and climate-action groups use to shift public opinion and move legislation. We’ve examined political ad spending on social media platforms, as well as what’s trending on social media. Tell your colleagues to subscribe here!
TL;DR:
Democrats in MI, MN, PA, and WI had a clean sweep this week - holding key governorships, flipping a Senate seat in PA, and establishing a trifecta in MI for the first time in decades. These big wins were in no small part thanks to major ad spends by climate groups in each of these states.
While candidates themselves largely avoided running digital ads supporting clean energy or climate action, huge investments in multiplatform digital ad campaigns from groups like NRDC Action, Climate Power Action, LCV Victory Fund, and well-funded state-based groups focused on getting out the youth vote may have made a big difference.
By all appearances, social media discussion in the past month connecting climate action to this week’s elections was minimal. On the other hand, right-wing, climate-skeptic pages have been laser-focused on using social media to make President Joe Biden’s energy policies as unpopular as they could manage.
Postmortem: Climate + energy ads in 7 key states
Groups were banned from running new Meta ads after November 1st, but they could still invest in ads that were already active. So, here were the top 25 spenders nationwide on climate and energy-related ads on Meta platforms nationwide:
Overall, here’s how much climate groups and polluters each spent in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the three months leading up to Tuesday:
In the three months leading up to Election Day - e.g. in the three months since Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act - climate groups disproportionately targeted Pennsylvania with digital ads. Climate Power Action and NRDC Action Fund made up the bulk of that spend, together dropping more than $380k targeting the Commonwealth with ads like the one below. In the end, it appears good that they did; Senator-elect John Fetterman stopped running digital ads about climate change in late 2021, and ran almost no digital ads about energy - clean or otherwise - instead focusing on other issues like abortion, marijuana, gun violence, inflation, and Dr. Oz’s carpetbagging.
Climate-related messaging may have also helped juice turnout for Democrats in other Midwestern states. Democratic Govs. Tim Walz of MN, Tony Evers of WI, and Gretchen Whitmer of MI all won re-election with comfortable margins, and Josh Shapiro crushed his GOP opponent in PA. None of these candidates ran a single ad about climate change or energy, but every one of them had a local pro-climate group spending big on digital ads. Climate Vote Minnesota spent $265k online in the final months; Wisconsin Conservation Voters spent nearly $600k; Michigan LCV spent nearly $125k; Commonwealth Communications spent around $20k on Snap ads in PA - but more on that below.
We found a similar trend in yet-to-be-called races in the Sun Belt. In Arizona, Sen. Mark Kelly and Katie Hobbs both largely avoided running digital ads about clean energy or climate change. From what we can tell, Kelly ran just one ad mentioning climate change, and it was to fundraise nationally right at the end of the race. (We did hear his radio ads calling for more drilling though!) And in Nevada, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto spent just $20k or so on digital ads promoting her support of clean energy back in August/September. Finally, in pro-climate groups’ other big target state, Georgia, Raphael Warnock also only ran a few ads about clean energy, like this one promoting a new solar panel plant in his state. At the same time, Herschel Walker and his supporting group 34N22 were relentless in blaming Warnock for high gas prices in digital ads all this year.
Pro-climate Snap ads that boosted Dems in key states
In the weeks leading up to Election Day, pro-climate groups also ramped up their Snap ads targeting young voters in AZ, GA, PA, and WI. Climate Power Action spent more than $56k promoting the Inflation Reduction Act to these states, and Climate Power similarly spent $47k targeting young adults in key states and appealing to their desire for climate action. LCV Action Fund spent $28.2k using the IRA to support Sens. Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock, and at the gubernatorial level, Wisconsin Conservation Voters and Commonwealth Communications ran ads attacking the GOP candidates in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, respectively.
NextGen America spent $53k trying to juice anti-GOP sentiments among young adults in these states to turn them out to vote.
Overall, here’s how much has been spent on climate, clean energy, and conservation ads on Snap so far this year:
Climate/energy social trends leading up to Election Day: What election?
Compared to other content on Facebook and Instagram, posts about climate change, clean energy, fossil fuels, electric vehicles, and related issues remained relatively low-profile for most of the past year, and that remained true in the 30 days leading up to Election Day. We analyzed the top 100 posts on each platform that mentioned relevant terms in a positive or negative light from the past month to see how this kind of content performed over time. As you’ll see, though, very little of it had to do with Tuesday’s elections. Here’s how that data breaks down:
On Facebook especially, engagement on content about climate change or energy remained relatively low throughout the past month, but there were a few trends we picked up on. First, among pro-climate pages, almost every spike in engagement can be attributed to just a handful of pages, primarily Heather Cox Richardson, President Joe Biden, and The White House, and in the last days of the election, Occupy Democrats. However, while Biden’s and the WH’s posts were more focused on clean energy and climate change, Richardson’s essay posts and Occupy’s #resistance memes mostly mentioned these issues tangentially.
Climate skeptics, on the other hand, drove Facebook engagement through a much wider variety of messengers, from political candidates to right-wing meme pages, and among all of them their messaging goals are also more clear: trashing Biden’s energy policies, making climate change a non-issue, making electric vehicles unpopular with their followers. The biggest day of engagement for their content was on October 21st, when SC GOP Chairman Drew McKissick and right-wing commentator Mark Kaye attacked Biden’s decision to release more of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The second-biggest day is attributable to “Trump’s favorite author” Nick Adams, who shared a meme mocking how expensive EVs can be, completely ignoring the fact that the Inflation Reduction Act goes a long way to negating that issue.
Overall, though, engagement on posts between the page categories was relatively even over the past month: the top pro-climate posts got 1,162,301 interactions while pro-fossil fuel posts got 1,018,678 interactions.
Engagement on the top Instagram posts about these topics from the past month was higher and more steady. Leonardo DiCaprio pretty reliably drove high levels of engagement whenever he posted about the ongoing effects of climate change, and other celebrities and activists including Malala Youfsazi, Mark Ruffalo, and Angelina Jolie also drove hundreds of thousands of interactions whenever they posted about climate change. The huge spike on October 30th came from DiCaprio celebrating Lula da Silva’s win over Jair Bolsanaro in last week’s presidential election in Brazil; that second spike was because of a post from Jolie raising awareness about ocean plastic pollution. Another significant messenger for climate action last month was Greta Thunberg, as the release of her new book drove pretty substantial engagement.
Unlike on Facebook, the most-engaged climate-skeptical Instagram posts came from just a handful of right-wing pages: Donald Trump Jr., Breitbart, Joe Rogan, and Fox News. Like on Facebook, many of these posts were solely dedicated to trashing the Biden administration and electric vehicles, but here on Instagram, vandalism by Just Stop Oil activists drove much more engagement among these pages. In fact, the two biggest spikes in engagement were because of Joe Rogan trashing these activists, driving nearly 1 million interactions on his own. The third significant spike in engagement came on October 28th, when right-wing pages swarmed Biden for incorrectly stating the price of gas from last year.
Overall, we found that the top climate posts far outperformed climate-skeptic posts over the past month, a trend that’s held true all year. Pro-climate posts earned 5,237,145 interactions, while the climate-skeptic posts we analyzed earned just 2,673,441.
Finally, a housekeeping note from Nick: this will be my last issue of Climate Monitor! Now that Election Day is behind us, I’ll be focusing on my studies for my Master’s in Public Policy (with a focus on environmental policy, of course) at University College Dublin. It has been such a pleasure to research + write this newsletter for you all over the past year and a half. From now on, Kyle Tharp will be taking over Climate Monitor, so if you have any questions or comments after this week, you can reach out to him at kyle@fwiwmedia.com. Thanks for reading! - NS