This year, Ozean’s top staff will be presenting their own “Year in Review of 2020” comprised of their top takes in three areas: Digital Media, Political Research, and Political Data.

This is Ben’s review of 2020 in political digital media, research, and data.

Political Digital Media

It is no surprise that digital advertising is becoming increasingly important to political campaigns. In 2020, amid COVID-19, lockdowns, protests, and – finally – the most divisive presidential election in modern politics… digital media became NECESSARY for political campaigns.

Instead of knocking on doors, campaigns shifted to virtual canvassing. Rather than recruiting volunteers to phone bank from a central location, campaigns utilized decentralized phone systems or P2P texting applications. Boots on the ground campaigning at every level turned into virtual campaigning.

THE BIG SURPRISE: Despite the importance of digital media, social media platforms – such as Facebook – placed stringent restrictions on political digital ads in the final week of the 2020 November election. Almost two months later, now in late December, Google and Facebook are STILL banning political ads, except for ads focusing on the Georgia Special Senate Election. This ban has restricted the ability of political organizations across the U.S. to get their message out.

Political Research

The Pollster Comeback

In 2016, political polling took a shot to the ribs. In 2020, many of the same folks in the media are saying that political polling failed us yet again because pollsters underestimated how well Donald Trump would perform, despite his loss. Looking back at the 2020 election polling…  these folks are, for the most part, wrong.

At the state level, although some polls underestimated Trump’s performance, they were pretty damn accurate – often falling within a 4-point margin of error. Using Real Clear Politics polling averages as a barometer, Trump overperformed outside of the margin of error in a few states, such as Florida (+4.2), Texas (+4.5), Ohio (+7.2), and Wisconsin (+6). In other states, such as Arizona (+0.6), Pennsylvania (+0.0), North Carolina (+1.2), Michigan (+1.4), and Georgia (-1.3), polling predicted results to a tee.

Taken as an average, polling data correctly predicted the winner or fell within the margin of error in 49 of 50 states. The ONLY state that pollsters got wrong (and was outside the margin of error) was Florida.

Although some polls were particularly embarrassing to look at – like the mainstream polls that had Biden +10 to +15 in some battleground states – polling was rather accurate in predicting the 2020 results.

Find the Real Clear Politics results here.

Political Data

My biggest political data story of 2020 brings us down to my home state of Florida – Republicans in Florida have far outpaced Democrats in voter registration. I blogged about this trend in 2019, citing that if Republicans keep it up, Trump is in good shape to win Florida in 2020 and that Democrats have a shot if they push their registration lead to 500,000 (Obama-era levels).

In 2020, Republicans further closed the gap and are only behind Democrats by 116,950 registered voters. This is BIG DEAL for Florida Republicans and the Presidential election results reflect this with Trump winning the state by 2.3%… a blow-out by Florida’s standards. Not only did Florida vote for Trump yet again, but Republicans were also able to flip two Democratic Congressional seats in South Florida.

If this voter registration trend continues, the future is bright for Florida Republicans.

This year, Ozean’s top staff will be presenting their own “Year in Review of 2020” comprised of their top takes in three areas: Digital Media, Political Research, and Political Data.

Digital Media

The year of the virtual campaign. 2020 was…unique and forced change into how campaigns are run. It hastened the world of dispersed technologies for volunteers and staff (phone banks, text banks), temporarily changed response rates in polling, and hastened budget swings towards digital outreach.

I think we will look back at the 2020 campaign cycle as the cycle digital media came of age.

This year, digital media spends accounted for less than 75% of total political ad spend; however, digital media experienced explosive growth (most of it in smaller donor solicitations).

As digital marketers continue to experiment with using digital in persuasion messaging, we expect digital marketing budgets to continue to grow.

Political Research

In the journal of Political Psychology, an interesting experiment caught my eye this year.

The Influence of Identity Salience on Framing Effectiveness: An Experiment conduct by Emily P. Diamond of Duke University. 

DOWNLOAD STUDY

This was an interesting online experiment beginning the explore frame effects of messaging on highly polarized topics. In this case, the author explored framing effects of identities on climate change. Specifically, if a parental identity is primed before asking about climate change would it have an effect on political behaviors?

As the study concludes, “communicating messages when partisan identities are highly salient is likely to increase polarized responses, while communicating while nonpartisan identities are salient may be helpful in depolarizing responses.”

This gels with my belief that when an issue(s) is highly polarized, going directly at it in any partisan manner will likely get you nowhere – especially if you are attempting to persuade or change behaviors.

While, there is still much work to do this in this area such as researching how long these effects linger, if at all. I mean, as soon as a partisan identity takes over – you may be back to square one.

But for now, if you want to talk about highly partisan issues with an eye to persuade or change behaviors, you may need a trojan horse, ie or a different frame.

Political Data

Google announcing the phase out of third party cookies is my data story of the year, and it was announced at the beginning of 2020. 

At the beginning of 2020, Google announced their timeline for phasing out third party cookies from Chrome.

Third party cookies are the little bits of data that companies put on your computer to “make ads more relevant” to the user….also known as “tracing them”. It is these little bits of data that allow digital agencies to target users on in individual manner.

While third party cookies have also been banned by Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla, Chrome is well over half the browser market, so this is a major change to the entire digital landscape.

The death of the cookie has been whispered about for years, and we all kinda knew it was going to happen….just not exactly when.

Now we know: Google says it is a phased approach not to take full effect until 2022.

What does this mean for digital advertising? It means first-party data is at a premium, and this move is likely to strengthen the hand of the “walled gardens” of ad tech – like….google, facebook, microsoft.

But for now, we continue to monitor the changes and watch closely how the advertising industry adjusts to a soon to be cookie free world.