Tracking Facebook political ads in Kansas
Let's find the top political ads on Facebook in Kansas from a recent week
FWIW is a great online newsletter to see weekly what’s happening nationally with digital ads on several platforms including Meta (Facebook & Instagram), Google & YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and Snapchat.
FWIW publishes weekly “top 10” national lists, such as this recent list for Meta, along with some spending insights.
As Democrats have done in previous cycles, the Harris campaign has begun running partner ads on Facebook with noteworthy brands. Glamour Magazine ran a partner ad in support of VP Harris, describing her as the “Freedom” candidate. The ad was largely targeted at women 65 and older in states like New York, Florida, Illinois, and Texas.
— FWIW
Where does FWIW get this data?
How can we view a similar list of political ads for Kansas?
The notes below shows examples from a recent week of data, to enable anyone to monitor Facebook ads in Kansas (or any other state).
Kansas ads on Meta
Meta’s data show individual ads, so often multiple ads need to be aggregated for the total for a given advertiser’s “disclaimer,” which is often the name of the organization buying the ad.
We can find the “Top 10” Kansas ad list for a recent week online, and can download a file with data for all the ads for analysis.
[See the section at the bottom for how to view and download the data.]
“Top 10”
So what is known about this recent “top 10” Kansas list of Facebook advertisers?
There seems to be three categories:
Kansas ads matching national political ads
Six ads on the Kansas “top 10” match with four on the national “top 10”:
#1 national (Kamala Harris) matches #3 and #4 Kansas (Harris Victory Fund).
#2 national (Donald Trump) matches #5 Kansas and #10 (Trump National Committee JFC)
#4 national (AFP Action) matches #8 Kansas (Americans for Prosperity)
#7 national (The Daily Wire) matches #9 Kansas (Matt Walsh/The Daily Wire)
Commercial ad
One of the Kansas top ads was from a commercial business selling patriotic materials, with interest piquing during the election season.
#6 Kansas, Proud Patriotic American (BS Promotions LLC), is a private company that sells patriotic materials.
Kansas “political” ads
The remaining three ads appear to be “political.”
But these ads are from nonprofits, two leaning left and one leaning right, based on research about the organizations or their donors.
There is no disclosure of these ads on Kansas campaign finance reports. These organizations will be required to file IRS 990s perhaps a year after the election.
#1 Kansas, Bluestem Kansas (Bluestem Foundation). Bluestem Foundation for Economic Freedom is a left-leaning, 501(c)(4), nonprofit with directors including Howard Bauleke (originally from Lawrence, former Chief of Staff for Democratic Congressman Dennis Moore, former administrative assistant for Democratic Congressman Jim Slattery ), Paul Davis (former Kansas Democratic House Minority Leader; Candidate for governor against Sam Brownback in 2014; Congressional Candidate in 2018), and Vicki Buening (former personal staff of Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as her Director of Constituent Services).
#2 Kansas, Commit to Seniors is a project of American Commitment, a Virginia-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit, whose mission is to “shed light on AARP’s public policy positions, actions and inactions, and AARP’s advocacy and political engagements, and how they impact both their members and their financial partners.” Free market advocate Phil Kerpen is the president.
#7 Kansas, One Small Step Wichita is a project of 501(c)(3) nonprofit StoryCorps. “One Small Step brings strangers with different political views together to record a 50-minute facilitated conversation—not to debate politics, but to learn more about who we are as people.” The assessment by Influence Watch: “While StoryCorps claims its mission is to create a world with greater compassion, its areas of focus align with left-of-center perspectives especially on identity-related issues.” Influence Watch says left-of-center groups fund StoryCorps.
Meta provides a way (see below) to get the complete list of 2849 advertisers targeting Kansas that ran that week, but $100 or more was spent only by 218 advertisers.
Top 25 from complete list by
This list of 25 Kansas Meta ads from a recent week was extracted from the Kansas “region” file, which can be downloaded (see below).
At least two of the ads (Barack Obama and Daily Wire) could be aggregated with the existing top 10 Kansas list.
Some of these ads are likely not political, including AARP, USAA, and the Kansas Department for Children and Families.
One ad, Lucas Kunce for Missouri, appears to be served by Facebook to some Kansas residents, possibly while in Missouri, or perhaps near the state line where geolocation may not always be precise.
How to view and download Meta ad data for Kansas
Start on the Meta Ad Library Report page.
This page has several sections:
Spending Tracker
Advertising data by date range
Spending by location
Download a full report
Top 10 list
Search for “Kansas” or find “Kansas” in the Spending by location section (3 separate screens).
Click on the Kansas line to see a popup of the top 10.
This list is not restricted to political ads, but in an election year most of the entries have election connections.
Without additional information, sometimes the “disclaimer” may be difficult to interpret, without viewing the ad.
Download files
Near the bottom of the page there are options to download a full week — of all Meta data.
This downloaded report is one giant .zip file of over 4 MB, e.g.,
FacebookAdLibraryReport_2024-09-24_US_last_7_days.zip
The regions folder can be extracted from the .zip. In that folder find the Kansas file:
FacebookAdLibraryReport_2024-09-24_US_last_7_days_Kansas.csv
Open this .csv file of nearly 3000 lines in Excel or other analysis tools to filter and sort.
Use the Page ID to form a URL to view a page for the advertiser and their ads.
For example, for BlueStem Kansas with Page ID = 298271003840760, put this URL in your browser:
As of this writing the page shows new ads that started on Oct. 1:
You should now be ready to explore Facebook ad data!
