Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) needs your help to keep the U.S. Senate in Republican hands. So blared a handful of Facebook ads that Cruz’s campaign committee purchased this month. But none of them were actually raising money for the Republican candidates in Georgia. Instead, every penny donated went directly to… Cruz.
The Cruz campaign bought 15 separate ads on Facebook over the past two weeks, each featuring a video of the senator dramatically hyping the need to hold two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia runoff contests.
“Gun-grabbing, tax hikes, open borders, and stacking the Supreme Court. That’s the radical Democrat agenda if they win the Georgia Senate elections,” Cruz declared.
Cruz is just one of a number of elected officials of both parties using the competitive—and extremely expensive—Georgia runoff contests to raise money for themselves. Increasingly, those officials are doing so on Facebook, where a political ad ban instituted in late October was lifted this month, but only for ads in Georgia.
That’s led to a rash of Facebook ads invoking the Senate contests in the state on behalf of out-of-state political candidates. On some occasions, the ads don’t even mention the runoff contests, but are targeted at users in Georgia in an effort to exploit Facebook’s state-specific political advertising policy.
The social-media giant’s advertising ban, designed to limit misinformation related to the presidential election outcome, temporarily shut down a mammoth political fundraising tool around and after the election. When the company eased the ban this month for ads in Georgia, campaigns jumped at the chance to get back into the Facebook advertising game. Last month, the National Republican Senatorial Committee encouraged its members to use grassroots donor enthusiasm surrounding the runoffs to help build their own fundraising programs.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has led the way for his caucus. His campaign has been sending some text messages and running Georgia-focused Google ads linking to a page on the GOP fundraising platform WinRed that says donations will benefit McConnell’s own campaign committee.
According to a source familiar with the arrangement, McConnell’s Georgia-focused fundraising efforts have actually served to cover the cost of using his massive email and text messaging lists to solicit donations that are split between the senator and the two Republican Senate candidates in Georgia. A McConnell spokesperson said that his post-Election Day fundraising efforts, subsidized by his direct Georgia-focused fundraising, have brought in more than $3.4 million for Loeffler and Perdue.
President Donald Trump himself has led the pack in using the Georgia Senate contests to raise money for his own political endeavors. His political team has been buying Google ads and sending out fundraising emails for weeks declaring the urgent need to hold the GOP Senate majority, and asking for contributions to his own political groups. But the fine print of those solicitations makes clear that a major chunk of the change will be going to Trump’s own committee and a smaller chunk to the Republican National Committee.
The tactic has spread even more widely since Facebook opened its political ads to Georgia-related appeals. Like Cruz, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has run a host of ads this month asking for donations on behalf of his Republican colleagues, Loeffler and Perdue.
“Democrats, with their radical agenda, seek to destroy our country. The center of that fight is now in Georgia. We must keep the Senate,” declare 10 Facebook ads run by the Lee campaign this month. “Join the fight by chipping in what you can.”
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