Former President Donald J. Trump has made courting younger voters — and younger men in particular — a public pillar of his 2024 campaign. But he is conspicuously absent from one platform where they gather in large numbers.
Mr. Trump has not bought a single advertisement on Snapchat, effectively ceding the popular digital messaging platform to Vice President Kamala Harris, whose campaign has spent more than $5.3 million on ads there, according to the company’s disclosures.
Ms. Harris has used the uncontested space to highlight Mr. Trump’s anti-abortion record and to portray herself as a candidate for the future. Several of her ads are scored to the pounding rhythms of her theme song, Beyoncé’s anthem “Freedom.” Others are framed as “back-to-school assignments,” urging college-aged voters to do their homework on Mr. Trump’s right-wing policies.
The former president’s refusal to spend money on Snapchat — a turnaround from his previous campaigns — comes after a long-running feud with its California-based parent company, Snap, which banned his personal account shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol.
Unlike other major tech platforms, Snap has not lifted the ban on Mr. Trump’s personal account, which has drawn angry pushback from his campaign. Despite not allowing Mr. Trump to post personally, the company has said it would sell his campaign political advertisements, which must all go through an internal fact-check.
With the election a dead heat, both the Trump and Harris campaigns have intensified their efforts to reach Gen Z and millennial voters who get their news through social media rather than traditional outlets and are unsure about whether they will cast a ballot in 2024. Turning those voters out could help either side eke out a narrow victory.
“If young voters are as important of a demographic as both campaigns say they are, then they should be using every possible means at their disposal to reach them,” said Kyle Tharp, a former Democratic strategist who now writes a newsletter called FWIW about digital politics. “Snapchat seems like an obvious choice.”
Before he dropped out of the race, President Biden spent almost $1.5 million on Snapchat ads.
Snap says it has more than 100 million users in the United States, roughly 80 percent of whom are 18 or older and can therefore vote. The platform has a higher percentage of users under 30 than other major tech apps.
Even while Mr. Trump was banned from posting by Facebook on his personal account, he was still buying advertisements on the social network in 2021. But he has not resumed his spending on Snapchat.
In July, the Trump campaign blasted Snap after the company offered to sell it advertising while maintaining that its terms of service did not allow Mr. Trump to return to the platform.
“Snapchat REFUSES to reinstate President Trump’s account — but then shamelessly asks the Trump campaign to advertise with Snapchat,” the campaign wrote on X. “Big Tech is all in for Kamala!”
Snap declined to comment.
Still, Snapchat is not the main battleground on which the campaigns are fighting for young voters. The scale of political spending on Snapchat pales in comparison to spending on other tech platforms like Facebook and Google, where the two presidential campaigns are investing tens of millions of dollars. And the gap between Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris on Snapchat also reflects a wider disparity in digital advertising: She has vastly outspent him on online ads as her fund-raising has outpaced his.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said Ms. Harris was needlessly burning her campaign cash.
“Silly Snapchat ads are not going to make up for the fact that her terrible economic policies have robbed young people of the American dream,” Ms. Leavitt said.
And she pointed out that Mr. Trump was reaching younger voters through a series of interviews with popular online personalities, including the Nelk Boys and “Bussin’ With the Boys,” as well as organic videos on TikTok. Mr. Trump joined TikTok himself this year after previously resisting the platform, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
But digital strategists say Snapchat is an important tool because people use it to communicate with their friends, making it a more personal platform than some of its competitors.
The platform, created in 2011, allows users to send disappearing messages. The ephemeral style of communication quickly caught on with college and high school students, who sometimes used it to exchange racy photos and memes.
Since then, the company has demonstrated an ability to reach Americans interested in politics. In 2020, it said it worked with the nonpartisan group TurboVote to register roughly 1.2 million people to vote. TikTok, another popular app with many young users, does not allow political advertising, making Snapchat a seemingly ideal place to influence millennial and Gen Z voters.
“While Trump appears only willing to talk to voters in his base and who make him feel good about himself, we’re ceding no ground in building a broad and diverse coalition, talking directly to the voters who will decide this election,” said Seth Schuster, a spokesman for the Harris campaign.
Despite Snapchat’s popularity with young people, its user base is far from a liberal monolith. Roughly 51 percent of its users identify as Democratic or leaning that way, compared with 41 percent who favor Republicans, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.
Larger platforms like Facebook and YouTube lean more to the right, making them more favorable terrain for Mr. Trump. And 60 percent of Snapchat users are female, Pew found, another disadvantage for Mr. Trump. Young women are supporting Ms. Harris in large numbers, polls show.
Mr. Trump spent some money on Snapchat in his two previous presidential bids, although not large amounts. His campaigns in those years were far less publicly focused on winning over younger voters.
Before a debate against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Mr. Trump paid Snapchat for a feature that allowed users to post photos with a frame that said: “Debate Day: Donald J. Trump vs. Crooked Hillary.” And in 2020 — the first presidential election in which Snap began publicly tracking political spending — his campaign spent less than $300,000 in total, compared with a roughly $3.8 million investment from Mr. Biden.
One of Ms. Harris’s most widely seen ads on Snapchat shows Mr. Trump repeating the phrase “and I have every other part of your body” on loop next to news headlines about his and his allies attempts to crack down on abortion.
Another contrasts Mr. Trump’s glowering mug shot, beneath which he is described as a “criminal,” “predator,” “fraudster” and “cheater,” with a smiling photo of Ms. Harris and the words “former prosecutor,” “senator,” “vice president” and “next president of the United States.”
And a third features a close-up vertical video of her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, telling students to “Google Project 2025,” which he describes as Mr. Trump’s “insane plan for what he wants to do for America” and one that is supported by “extremist weirdos.”
Jack Lobel, the press secretary for Voters of Tomorrow, a Gen Z-led youth voter outreach organization that has endorsed Ms. Harris, said Mr. Trump was making a strategic mistake in spurning Snapchat’s ability to reach young voters.
“Trump is putting personal vendettas over logic,” Mr. Lobel said. “He can’t even keep grudges out of his digital strategy.”
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