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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

Am I reading this wrong or does it seem like the majority of these are for Harris/Democrats?

When one campaign raises 3 times as much money as the other campaign, that tends to happen.

Interesting that money is considered to have a large influence on US elections, one side has a lot more money, and yet the race is incredibly close.

The polling may be close, but we really won't know if the election is close until the final numbers come out.

Money is a lot in US politics, but Michael Bloomberg will tell you himself that it isn't everything. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg_2020_preside....

Money has an influence but it's not decisive. In the 2016 presidential election, the Clinton / Kaine campaign spent about twice as much as their opponents but still lost. Could they have won with even more money? Maybe?

In my view, money might once have, but the number of persuadable voters is quite low. If someone has decided to vote for Trump, it's unlikely they will change their mind. And if someone is undecided, they'll probably vote for Trump, because let's face it, most people voting for Harris aren't voting because they like her platform - they're voting because they dislike Trump. If you don't dislike Trump, Harris's platform is nothing world-changingly new or different.

> most people voting for Harris aren't voting because they like her platform - they're voting because they dislike Trump

That seems to be a popular conclusion by people who are on the Trump side. I see little evidence for it in real life. Many factors go into a political choice, and sure, disliking Trump is one of them, but most Harris supporters would not be voting R in any case because they do not agree with that platform.

True. But if you look at Harris's platform, it's not very ground-breaking, honestly. It's mostly just par for the course. A fair portion of the reason my family is voting for them is because Trump is a danger to democracy. Frankly, I'd barely looked at her platform - I just knew Trump had tried to destroy American democracy, and that is all that matters.

I don't know how many people are genuinely enthused about her platform. Mostly it feels like it's fueled by hating Trump's platform and Trump (which, to be clear, is a valid reason!). I guess I should have been clearer - I meant that they're voting Harris not because her platform is great (honestly it seems about average for Democratic candidates), but because they dislike Trump's platform and Trump himself. They don't really care what Harris is proposing, as long as it's vaguely reasonable.

Well, I don't like her and her platform is alright compared to trump's, but that just words. Tim Walz is alright tho. I still voted for her. My sample size is definetly biased and small, but that is the sentiment I get from her voters that I know.

Yes remember when billionaire money interfering in election campaigns was considered a bad thing?

I suspect that the given the different demographics of the voting population, the republican side probably advertises more on Facebook.

Or day time TV, yeah.

What do you think the demographics are of Google ad viewers vs Harris / Trump potential voters?

But also, yes, the Harris campaign has spent about 2x as much in aggregate: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/elections/kamala-harri...

I'd expect the demographics of google ad viewers to be more or less "the internet at large, minus a few markets like China were Google is much less prevalent, and a few groups techy enough to disproportionately run adblockers"

If I were in the Trump campaign I'd be targeting Facebook over Google by a fair margin. A lot of older folks live on there.

"Facebook users" or "Google users" are way too broad for a political campaign ad to target. Party A's ad will go to too many of Party B's users and vice versa. They need to be much more carefully targeted to be effective.

The purpose of a political ad is not to convince undecided people to vote for [party]. The number of undecideds is vanishingly small, so there's no ROI there. The purpose of a political ad is to convince people who have already picked a side to actually vote vs not voting. So you need to carefully target your "go vote" message to your own team.

> more or less "the internet at large"

Right.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...

Older voters are less likely to use the internet (and those who do use it probably use it less). And there's a small urban/rural divide still.

You’d be amazed. A surprising number of people, particularly older people, do not use the internet as such all that much; they use Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, or YouTube.

I was completely shocked to find out how many people use search in those apps to query open questions rather than 'search the web' via something like Google

At least YouTube is Google...

Heh, interesting, the lords of the Attention Economy is Zuck, Google and TikTok. And Musk, but he's busy burning his kingdom.

I bought a Kagi subscription when I discovered that Google was de-indexing Covid podcasts that it didn't like. I doubt that the population who moved on from Google is demographically neutral.

> I doubt that the population who moved on from Google is demographically neutral.

They are however, a relatively small group. I suspect more people have moved to ChatGPT than to Kagi.

You are reading it right

Keep in mind it is only google. Trump has been developing his comms channels for a decade with a core base composed of people who hate 'the media' in every form. And he has gotten pretty good at using those channels. It's also the case that everyone has heard of him now (you may recall that he was recently The President).

Harris was put into candidacy at the last second and needs to speedrun building a president's worth of goodwill from scratch against a guy who functionally already has it. That means her marketing base is 'the entire country' and you need to hit that as hard as possible as fast as possible, which is expensive.

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