No, Court Expansion Didn’t Cost Democrats Senate Seats

Amid an unprecedented pandemic, a painful reckoning over systemic racism, and a dangerous assault on American democracy, the 2020 election cycle was among the most tumultuous and most important in modern U.S. history.

When the dust settled, Democrats had taken control of the House, Senate, and presidency for the first time in a decade. Yet — due to sky-high expectations, slow vote reporting in some key states, and Georgia’s runoff system — politicos, activists, and pundits spent much of November searching for reasons the party did not secure a wider Senate majority. Some tried to pin that disappointment on the rapid surge in support for Supreme Court expansion after Republicans stole yet another seat following Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.

But does the perception of Court expansion’s role in the election line up with the reality? We scoured the Facebook Ad Library for answers, and the facts are clear: far from being the issue that decided races, Court expansion was barely a footnote in Republican Senate candidates’ campaign strategy.
Top-tier Senate campaigns are replete with data about what messages work and sophisticated about targeting those messages to voters, especially through paid digital advertising. Six of the nine races we examined rank among the top 10 most expensive Senate races in history. So to understand whether Republicans saw Court expansion (or packing, in their verbiage) as a strong point of contrast, we wanted to see if they put money behind the issue. We canvassed Facebook advertising for a number of highly-contested Senate races (more on specific methodology below). What we found was striking: Republican efforts to campaign against Democratic candidates on the issue of Supreme Court expansion were minimal at best.

* data includes ad buys in the 2020 Georgia Runoff Election, Dec. 16, 2020 - Jan. 5, 2021
†data includes all Facebook ads run by candidates beginning May 7 ,2018

We searched the top-tier Republican candidates’ and libraries for ads that included references to "court," "judge," "pack," or "expand”. We also manually reviewed all ads run in the last month of the general election (Oct. 3 - Nov. 3), as well as all ads run Dec. 16, 2020 - Jan. 5, 2021 by both Georgia runoff candidates (Facebook placed a moratorium on political ads from Nov. 3 - Dec. 16.) These periods were both the most critical time in the campaign and when Court expansion was most in the news.

In total, top-tier Republican candidates spent more than $16 million on Facebook ads in the 2020 campaign cycle. Ads about Supreme Court expansion comprised, at most, less than half of one percent of all money spent by these candidates in the 2020 election cycle. On an individual basis, the highest level of spending on ads related to court expansion was only around 6 percent of ad buys — and that was an outlier. In fact, only two of these top-tier candidates spent more than 1 percent of their ad buys to attack Democrats on court expansion. Even after the November election results supposedly showed expansion hurt Democratic candidates, Republicans didn’t focus on the issue in the Georgia Senate runoffs that determined control of the Senate -- a sure sign that even Republican strategists know that claims about expansion hurting Democratic candidates are baseless.  

The data speaks for itself. Whatever they said on Twitter or FOX News, Republican candidates — informed by extensive and expensive polling and research — did not believe Court expansion was a winning issue on which to spend their considerable but finite resources.