In October 2020 I wrote a piece for The Conversation asking which presidential candidate was engaging more people on Facebook. The answer was Trump, by a mile. But while I was pulling that data I was also following a set of other pages around the two candidates, and one of them didn’t fit the story at all. It was a page called Ridin’ With Biden, and on Facebook it was beating Joe Biden.
I’ve now gone back to that data properly. The paper is Outdrawing the Candidate: A Campaign-Linked Page and the Facebook Campaigns of Trump and Biden in 2020, free on Zenodo.
The preprint
Open access, free to read, share and cite. 9 pages, 3 figures. Not peer reviewed. Weekly totals by page are in the record.
Cite as: Hotham, T. (2026). Outdrawing the Candidate: A Campaign-Linked Page and the Facebook Campaigns of Trump and Biden in 2020. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23298393
Trump’s page was in a different league
From June to late October 2020, Trump’s own page drew 386 million likes, comments, shares and reactions. Biden’s drew 49 million. That’s almost eight to one. Trump had about 30 million followers; Biden had two to three million. Donald Trump Jr.’s page on its own drew more engagement than Biden’s.
The page that outdrew Biden
Ridin’ With Biden wasn’t Biden’s page. It was set up in spring 2020, and after the election it was reported that its founders, who also ran Occupy Democrats, had worked with the Biden campaign. Over the same five months it drew 84 million interactions. That’s more than Biden’s own page, and more than half of all the engagement on the Biden-side pages I followed.
What made it different was sharing. On Trump’s and Biden’s own pages, shares were about a tenth of all interactions or less. On Ridin’ With Biden they were half. Its posts were shared 41 million times, more than Trump’s own page managed. It supplied 85% of the shares on the Biden-side pages I followed. It grew from about 190,000 followers in June to over a million in October, and its posts drew far more engagement per follower than any of the official pages.
And it was mostly about Trump. Nearly two thirds of its posts mentioned him, and half ended with the same line asking people to follow the page to defeat Trump.
Did attacking the other side pay?
Posts that mentioned the opponent drew more angry reactions on both sides. That part is clear. Whether they drew more engagement overall is not. On Biden’s side it depends on how you count mentions, and on Trump’s side it went up on some pages and down on others. An independent review of the first draft pushed me hard on this, and the honest answer is that the evidence is weak.
The caveats
These are the pages I happened to follow in 2020, not every page on each side. I tracked five Trump family pages but no big pro-Trump fan pages, and there were plenty. So the mix of each side depends on what’s in the list. The comparison between the two candidates’ own pages, and the story of Ridin’ With Biden, don’t. Engagement also isn’t reach or votes: Biden won despite all of this.
The wider point is one I keep coming back to in this series. If you only look at the official pages, you miss a lot of the campaign. I found the same with Momentum and Labour in 2017.
Read it
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.23298393
Related: What does a satellite campaign do? and the 2020 Senate candidates on Facebook.
The views in this post and the paper are my own.
