By all accounts, the outcome of the 2020 election is historic.

President Trump became only the fourth elected incumbent in the last century to lose, while not one of the 166 Republicans seeking reelection to the House of Representatives lost.

Despite the enormous impact of Biden’s win, it is ushered in by fewer votes than Trump’s shocking win in 2016. If roughly 60,000 Americans in three states made different choices, Donald Trump would have earned 278 electoral votes and still be president. This holds true despite the highest turnout since 1900 and the popular vote margin expanding by about 5.5 million votes in Biden’s favor.

This election also saw the fewest state house switches since 1946, and for the first time since 1884, a Democrat president will take the oath of office without the benefit of a friendly Senate and is governing with the narrowest majority in the House for either party since 1919.

With that in mind, we did an analysis of Senate delegations to predict future trends and understand the true impact of polarization on both elections and governance at the federal level.

To view the interactive map and make your own analysis – click here.

Our analysis looked to discover if senate delegations had senators from the same party or different parties and how that changed over time. The results are fun to sift through and, in many ways, reflect changing regional partisan trends across America.

Here are some interesting facts:

• Our current Senate is the most partisan senate since World War 2, with just six states having bipartisan delegations. The last time the country experienced this level of political uniformity was in the 1950s.
• Since World War 2, the Senate has seen more Democratic leadership than Republican with 67% of the 42 Senates being Democrat. From 1939 to 1981, Republicans controlled the Senate only twice for a total of just four years in the majority.
• The 116 and 117 senates are historically conservative. Their nearest comparators are the 109th Senate in 2005, during the second half of the Bush Administration, and the 84th Senate during the second half of Eisenhower’s first term.
• Split ticket delegations peaked in the late 1970s and were common throughout most of the 1980s. GOP representation was most consolidated in the 1980s when their single delegation strength peaked.
• Of the 33 seats up in 2022, 19 are Republican. Trump only won two states with split delegations and neither of them will be on the ballot in ’22.

Politico will publish its list of top fundraisers from Q2. Will you be in it?

For some campaigns, their end-of-quarter push can account for more than one-third of their total fundraising in that quarter — for some, it’s even more.

That’s why end-of-quarter is make or break time for campaigns. No matter how ‘good’ of a district you’re running in, it’s fundraising excellence that truly separates top-tier candidates from the rest of the pack.

CDI Ads was the top buyer of political acquisition and fundraising advertising in 2020, placing more than $20 million in media. We dove into our data to reveal what made our most successful end-of-quarter campaigns exceptional.

Here are four checks you can do today to maximize your end-of-quarter success with ads:

1. Use Video: If there’s an undeniable king of creatives on Facebook, it’s video. Authentic, selfie-style video was our top driver of donations — which makes sense! Marketing data shows:

• Almost half of Facebook advertising earnings comes from mobile-first video ads.
• Compared to a static post, users will spend 5 times more on a post that contains a video. And don’t forget to add captions — they boost viewing times by up to 12%.

2. Have Clear Calls to Action: Ads with clear CTAs have substantially higher click-through rates compared to ads that did not.

Use direct action-oriented terms:

• Donate Now
• Take Action
• Chip In

But beware — Facebook penalizes engagement baiting in post text! So save those action-oriented phrases for images and find novel ways to identify motivation to click inside your post text.

3. Avoid the Learning Phase: Facebook uses machine learning to optimize the delivery of your campaign through a process it calls “the learning phase.”

What is the learning phase? During this period, Facebook is testing:

• Audiences
• Delivery times
• Placements
• Creatives
• And more

…all using your money. When an ad set reaches roughly 50 optimization events within a seven-day period, the learning phase ends, and the CPA stabilizes.

We found the best ways to avoid learning phase problems are to hold off on significant changes (which reset the learning phase), and limit your ad sets.

4. Use Look-a-Like Audiences: Custom audiences were by far the most productive source of donors for our campaigns. Facebook uses algorithms to create highly targeted audiences whose demographics and interests are similar to those of your existing page followers or of an upload list, like previous campaign donors. Letting Facebook identify targets you wouldn’t ordinarily reach with your regular ad targeting is an easy form of optimizing your media spend that anyone can do.

What end-of-quarter tactics will you focus on?

If you don’t know where to start or aren’t getting the results you think you deserve, let CDI Ads have a try! Email us at info@cdiads.com and we’re happy to design and launch end-of-quarter ads for your campaign