Among the many strange and unexpected dynamics of the 2024 election cycle, one stands out as both under-recognized and under-explained: On social media, Democrats and Republicans have traded places.

I’m not really talking about Twitter, although it’s worth acknowledging what happened there: A relatively small platform with immense elite influence, once favored and used to great effect by the former president, banned him for election misinformation, got purchased by its richest user, and has been turned into a decidedly pro-Trump platform. Nor am I talking about Republicans’ embrace of popular new media personalities and podcasters in pursuit of young voters, although that, too, is the sort of thing broadly attributed to Democrats in the past. (In 2015, it was Obama on Marc Maron; in 2024, it’s Trump on Joe Rogan.)

What I’m talking about is digital ad spending. After Trump’s victory in 2016, the Republicans doubled down on social media, installing Facebook guru Brad Parscale as campaign manager and piling money into the platform (Parscale resigned before the election). As a result, in 2020, the Trump campaign (and affiliated entities) outspent the Biden campaign on Facebook and Google despite raising significantly less money overall. In 2024, the numbers look wildly different, according to an analysis published this month by the Brennan Center in partnership with OpenSecrets and........

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