Abstract
On Facebook, a presidential campaign is carried by more pages than the candidate's own. I compare 17 pages on the two sides of the 2020 United States presidential campaign: the candidates', running mate's, campaign and party pages, several Trump family pages, and a campaign-linked page and a handful of supporters' pages on Biden's side. The data are 14,634 posts between 1 June and 25 October 2020, collected through CrowdTangle. Trump's own page drew almost eight times the engagement of Biden's (386 million interactions against 49 million). On Trump's side, his page drew 73% of the engagement of the pages I tracked and his family's pages 19%. On Biden's side, his own page drew 31%, and one page drew 54%: Ridin' With Biden, an unofficial page whose founders were reported to work with Biden's campaign. It drew more engagement than Biden's own page, supplied 85% of the shares on the Biden-side pages I tracked, and grew from about 190,000 to over a million followers. Its posts were built to be shared: shares made up half its interactions, against a tenth on the candidates' pages, and half its posts ended with a prompt to follow the page "to defeat Trump". Posts that mentioned the opponent drew more angry reactions on both sides. Whether they also drew more engagement depends on how mentions are measured, and the evidence is weak. The findings show how much of a side's presence can sit outside its official pages, and how much depends on which pages one tracks.Provenance and AI use. The data were exported from CrowdTangle in October 2020 for my doctoral research. This paper builds on my doctoral thesis (Hotham 2021, University of Bath). Early descriptive results were published in The Conversation during the campaign (7 October 2020). The analysis and writing were completed in 2026. The analysis code and drafts of the text were prepared with the assistance of an AI system (Claude, by Anthropic), which was also used to review drafts. I checked the analysis and the text and take responsibility for both. Version 2 added this statement to the paper, and version 3 changes only the date on the title page; the findings are unchanged.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Outdrawing the Candidate: A Campaign-Linked Page and the Facebook Campaigns of Trump and Biden in 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23298392