8 takeaways from new digital survey

We all know digital campaigning is a core skillset that your campaign must have – or as we like to say, there is no digital campaign: there is just your campaign.

Recently a conservative organization, the Center for Campaign Innovation, released a nationwide post-election survey of 1,200 voters, with data weighted to match the election results. Plus they included an oversample of 541 donors to political campaigns and organizations.

Some key takeaways:

1. Persuadable voters were more likely to seek out political information using a search engine than partisans. 57% of persuadable voters used search engines to get information about elections and candidates, compared to 47% of Democrats and 37% of Republicans.
2. Donors are far more engaged online than average voters, despite donors skewing older than the typical voter. A majority of donors (52%) reported signing an online petition in the last two years and one in three (32%) shared content online through social media.
3. During the 2020 election cycle, more voters reported receiving text messages than phone calls from political campaigns. Phone banking has been a staple of political campaigning since the 1960s, but text messaging has now overtaken the tactic in terms of reach and scale. This growth is largely due to the advent of peer-to-peer (P2P) texting which enables campaigns to text voters at scale. Bernie Sanders’ campaign pioneered P2P texting in 2016.
4. Donating primarily happens online. 62% of donors surveyed reported giving online, compared to 37% reporting having mailed a check, 11% sending their credit card information in by mail, 8% via in-person event, 4% from a text solicitation, 4% by online event and 3% over the phone.
5. Low propensity voters are more likely to see online video ads than high propensity voters. 54% of low propensity voters have seen these ads, compared to 37% of high propensity voters.
6. When asked about news sources to get information about government, politics, and current events, older voters (65+) were more likely to rely on local TV news (84%) and national broadcast TV news (62%) than the average voter on a weekly basis. Conversely, younger voters aged 18-34 favored social media (72%) and search engines like Google (60%).
7. One in four voters (23%) are “cord cutters” who do not watch traditional TV, instead using streaming services or not watching live TV at all. Cord cutters are younger, with half (48%) of voters aged 18-34 and one in three (31%) voters aged 35-49 comprising this category.
8. Among young voters aged 18-34, nine social media platforms saw daily usage in the double digits. Facebook was the most popular, with 70% reporting having an account, followed by Instagram (63%), YouTube (62%), Twitter (45%), Snapchat (35%) TikTok (26%), Reddit (24%), Twitch (17%), Pinterest (16%).

In 2020, all of these platforms placed restrictions on political advertising, including total prohibition by some.

Read the full report here: National Post-Election Survey Toplines

– Dean