#Joe Biden’s campaign abandons multi-million-dollar Facebook digital ad push

Joe Biden’s spend on Facebook advertising dropped an astonishing 65 percent last month after a costly push for elusive young voters saw the Democratic nominee pumping up to $1.4 million a day into the platform.

With less than 100 days until the election, the campaign slashed their entire digital spend by more than half between June and July, according to ad records from Facebook and Google.

Digital operatives speculated the campaign’s decision to cut their online drive, which came at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in early June, was because the ads were unsuccessful and failed to raise money for the septuagenarian candidate.

The Democratic nominee’s campaign quintupled spending in the first days of June from $254,000 on June 1 to $1.4 million on June 4, according to Facebook’s ad library.

Biden dropped $5.5 million in the first week of June on ads skewering the president for his response to protests in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd — accusing him fanning “the flames of white supremacy” and asking voters to donate and endorse Biden.

It was more than what the campaign had spent in the first 10 months of Biden’s White House bid.

Trump’s campaign by comparison spent about $1.27 million on Facebook ads in the same week.

A CNN report announcing the huge spend said the campaign was making an appeal to young voters with a digital ad about systemic racism running on Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and Google in swing states.

But just weeks later, Biden’s campaign dramatically pulled back their ad budget with the social media giant and shelled out just $41,300 for digital ads on July 18.

One veteran campaign digital director who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that figure was “embarrassingly low” with less than 100 days to the election.

“When something is working and performing well, you scale it, and if it’s not working, you pull it back,” he said, calling Biden’s June spending “really big” in terms of traditional presidential elections.

“If it’s working, you don’t stop doing it,” he added.

Biden’s Facebook spending fell 65 percent between June and July, while the Trump re-election campaign’s increased 46 percent, according to the platform’s ad library.

On Google, which includes YouTube, the Democratic nominee also pulled back spending by 35 percent, while the president’s team increased theirs by 73 percent.

Overall, Biden’s digital spending halved.

A spokesman for the Biden campaign did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.

Trump 2020 communications director Tim Murtaugh said the drastic drop highlighted Biden’s enthusiasm problem.

“People obviously just aren’t that into Joe Biden and there’s no enthusiasm for him. Nobody is excited about Biden and his drastic drop-off in digital spending is further proof,” he said.

The winding-down of the digital operation follows a report earlier this month, which revealed Trump’s re-election campaign had knocked on one million doors in the space of a week while Biden’s had visited zero.

Biden maintains his lead in the national and battleground polls but the president has been closing the gap in recent weeks, a trend his campaign attributes to the nightly coronavirus briefings.