Hi everyone! We’re Sofia Garduno Araujo and Bethanie Olivan, NextGen America’s digital organizing team. NextGen is dedicated to educating and empowering young people to organize, vote, and lead on the issues that matter most to them.

Sofia brings a decade of experience — from field organizing and immigration advocacy to leading NextGen’s digital voter contact efforts and distributed volunteer team for the last six years. Bethanie has nine years of experience in distributed organizing, spanning presidential campaigns and state parties, and has managed NextGen’s text program and volunteers for the last five.

For today’s FWIW, we’re talking about our Pulse Check project: a peer-to-peer (P2P) text campaign focused on identifying the issues currently affecting young people the most. Building on our 2025 work, we expanded outreach in Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, where our volunteers have contacted over 1 million people ages 18-29. We’re thrilled to share what we’ve learned.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $15 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Move over, Nate Silver and The New York Times’ Election Needle — Kalshi has devised a new way of messing with mind, body, and soul this cycle. After holding steady near the top of Snapchat’s spending charts this year, the prediction market came out swinging last week (or at least relative to the waning California spend) with a series of Meta ads, largely promoting their new American Power Index. The new feature tracks the current distribution of political power between Democrats and Republicans and who it thinks ‘will hold them next.’

Political advertisers spent around $13.9 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

On Tuesday, Senator Lindsey Graham secured the Republican nomination as he pursues a fifth term in Congress’ upper chamber. His primary victory — 57.6% of the vote to Mark Lynch’s 28.3% — was perhaps aided by super PAC Palmetto Action’s 41 Google & Youtube ads last week. Gotta love a good intra-GOP fight at the top of the charts.

Skipping X (formerly Twitter) once again, but over on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $2.5M in 2026:

Organizing young people via text still works…you’re just doing it wrong

After the 2024 election, it became clear young people did not feel represented by either major party. Rather than voting for a candidate they didn’t like or feel inspired by, many chose to opt out entirely and stay home.

Combined with the fact that a majority of young people identify as politically independent, we realized traditional voter contact methods — transactional asks at the eleventh hour — can no longer be the norm. Young people aren’t swayed by empty promises. They need to see results and a real commitment to fighting for the issues they care about.

After attending many research debriefs (s/o Analyst Institute!) and analyzing our own 2024 data, we identified the root cause of their frustration: they feel like no one is actually listening to them. This led us to build a deep canvassing call program into Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania to understand how to better advocate for them and rebuild trust.

We started by asking young people to tell us what was impacting them most from a set list of issues and were completely blown away by how much people were willing to share with us over the phone. Our contact rate remained very high throughout the call campaign (averaging 9%, with some days getting as high as 14%), and we collected hundreds of meaningful stories.

Encouraged by those results, we set out to see about scaling through texting. We tried out some smaller text campaigns in those same states, adding Virginia to the mix, and were fascinated by how consistent the results were with the calls. With two successful campaigns under our belt, we set out to make this the flagship effort of the first half of 2026.

Going into this, we were often told that texting was no longer an effective way to reach young people. Calling? Forget about it. P2P’s reputation has taken a hit, mainly due to fundraising spam. Campaigns have spent the last few years overwhelming people with fundraising texts and wondering why their response rates are so low. Young people are sick of receiving asks for money as they watch the economy work only for billionaires and their tax dollars fund yet another war.

The Pulse Check campaign proved that it’s not the tactic — it’s how you use it.

We asked open-ended questions like “What issue is affecting your life the most right now?” to allow recipients to take the reins and have more agency in the conversation.

Across all campaigns, we averaged a 5.8% response rate, with some getting as high as 6.9%, higher than our initial test campaigns in 2025 and a remarkable response rate by any industry standard.

We knew the economy would be a big topic for folks, so rather than a single economy-focused response, we divided the topic into four categories — Rent/Housing Market, Jobs/Wages, Inflation/Groceries, and a general Economy bucket — to try to pinpoint the specific pressures causing the most distress.

The top five issues identified were Economy (28%, with Inflation/ Groceries being most prevalent), Democracy/Rise of Fascism (19%), Multiple Issues (13%), Foreign Policy (12%), and Immigration (6%). A central throughline across all issues was corruption. Whether it’s billionaires buying our elections, this administration pardoning their buddies, or foreign influence on our government, young people’s trust in institutions is extremely low.

Here’s a breakdown of the issues:

You can also see how the top issues changed per week:

Overall, the biggest thing we learned is that young people are not apathetic or disengaged. They are extremely knowledgeable and understand how their lives are directly affected by the actions of the Trump administration. From the attacks in Iran and Gaza to the cuts in healthcare, they clearly see how interconnected all the issues are, and they are angry, anxious, and frustrated.

If you’re planning on conducting similar text outreach, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Be anticipatory, not reactive. You don’t have to start from a blank slate; use polls, the news cycle, and social media to inform your writing. Your script will likely be longer than you’re used to, but that’s what will keep you from scrambling to answer complicated questions mid-shift or combing through responses that don’t fit neatly into any category. That said, you can’t anticipate everything, so flexibility and a willingness to add or edit responses are key.

• Engage with care. It’s important to do this outreach authentically. We do this because we care and we understand the people we text are facing real issues. Centering the respondents and their situations, particularly when they’re struggling, should be top of mind, so we included two ‘Needs Assistance’ responses for Economy and Healthcare, linking folks to public assistance and resources.

• Train your volunteers! This one is a given, but there will likely be a gap between them and your audience, whether by generation, race, or class. Provide a deep-dive training before each text shift, with multiple examples volunteers can access and reference throughout. Knowing Pulse Check would be more involved than a standard click-and-send campaign, we limited our efforts to seasoned volunteers, and you should do the same. This allowed us to have more nuanced conversations and send large lists with minimal strain on capacity.

So, once you’ve collected all this info from folks who were not only willing to respond but also trusted you with their stories, it’s your job to pore over the data and uplift their stories to advocate for them better.

Knowing what’s top of mind for your base means you’re able to make better strategic decisions in the future and build a stronger relationship with your list. Whether you want to post a social media series highlighting some compelling stories or name the issues they picked in your future text outreach, this type of campaign will improve how you organize digitally.

There will be subsequent phases of Pulse Check later this year. If you want to know more, stay tuned on our Substack!

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Hi everyone — Patrick Stevenson here. Last summer, I wrote a couple of issues for FWIW about how Democrats are navigating the digital landscape — who’s doing it well, and who isn’t. I used to oversee creator engagement programs at the Biden White House and the Democratic National Committee, and in the past year, I’ve been working with creators directly at Palette Media. The creator space continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, so let’s check in on what’s working and what isn’t.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $18 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Pete Buttigieg is calling — are you answering? Last week, an old familiar made his way onto the list of top spenders through his Win The Era PAC. Among the ads running are clips of Buttigieg dialing grassroots donors to thank them for their support.

But if you’re not ready to think about 2028 yet, there’s another trend worth watching: Ballot measure campaigns are starting to put down serious money. After Alliance Against Corporate Abuse showed their muscle on Meta, Uber seems to be flexing back on Google and YouTube (see below). As a reminder, the rideshare giant is backing a California-based measure aimed at limiting its liability when customers are harmed.

That was the biggest swap on a spending chart that looks — for perhaps the last time (sad!) — similar to what we’ve been seeing week over week. Otherwise, political advertisers spent around $18.4 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

We’re skipping X (formerly Twitter) yet again until there’s new data to share and closing out with Snapchat. To date, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $2.4M on Snap ads in 2026:

Please take our money…

We’ve actually heard this before, and you’d say this too if you finally found an ethical list-growth platform that helped you turn $1 into $2 like clockwork. Join over 900 groups like Everytown, Amnesty International, and Mercy Corps that have found a better way to nail their fundraising goals. Learn more >

Why Your Creator Program Isn't Working

The third annual Trending Up conference wrapped this week in DC, bringing together 270 creators from across news, politics, and lifestyle to connect with progressive organizations and figure out how to drive impact on the issues they care about.

This year, only three elected officials spoke: Gov. Wes Moore, Gov. Maura Healey, and Rep. Sarah McBride. And that was intentional. One of the biggest pieces of feedback the conference organizers got from creators last year was that there were too many politicians on the agenda. The response was more creators and more cultural voices.

In other words, building a conference explicitly for creators who want to engage with progressive politics means accepting that politicians aren’t actually the draw.

When a creator agrees to meet with an elected official, it’s rarely because they’re excited to film content with a politician. More often, they are looking to build a relationship, understand an issue better, or are just a political junkie freak (who can relate!). Too often, though, the product of these engagements is a stiff, two-shot iPhone video of the creator nodding along while some elected official (whom their audience has never heard of) recites talking points into a tiny mic.

The fix is simple: if you’re going to work with a creator, let them cook!

A reporter shows up to your event because it’s their job. Their company paid for their travel. They have a professional obligation to cover it. Creators have none of that. If a creator comes to your thing, that’s money out of their own pocket — and time away from their laptop, which is their actual business. A well-produced field video with a candidate can run $5-10k to make and will often underperform one where the creator is sitting on their couch talking about Trump.

When you invite a creator to your event, the creator incurs a financial and opportunity cost that journalists simply don’t.

According to a recent M+R analysis of the top 500 social media accounts covering politics and policy in the first quarter of 2026, creator accounts made up more than half the list. That’s the landscape organizations are trying to influence — and most of them are doing it without dedicated staff to navigate it. Instead, they continue to invest far more heavily in their own social media and traditional comms teams.

Chart via M+R

The DNC has dedicated creator engagement staff. The other major party committees do not. Across the ecosystem, many talented digital and comms staff are doing creator engagement work on top of their existing responsibilities, and they deserve credit for it. But doing creator engagement well requires dedicated staff.

Building real relationships means understanding individual creators’ niches, their audiences, their business models — and that doesn’t happen as a side project. Without proper resources, many organizations put creators on the wrong track — a weird “kind of press” track, where they get the same treatment as a Politico reporter: show up, get access, cover the thing. It doesn’t work because creators aren’t journalists.

There is no way to do effective political creator engagement at scale unless you have talented, reasonably senior staff who are resourced to spend most of their time building relationships with dozens, if not hundreds, of individual creators.

The proof of concept is right in front of us. Trending Up gets better every year — not because more politicians show up, but because the organizers understand what creators actually need and give them room to do what they do best.

Good creator engagement is structural — proper staffing, actual budgets — but it’s also simply knowing the creators you want to work with, and understanding how to let them cook. The campaigns that figure that out are going to have a significant advantage in the years ahead (and not for nothing, many of the people who seem to be running for president are on the right track…but that’s another post!).

People who get that creator work is its own thing are going to continue getting real dividends from it, and those who keep treating creators like journalists will keep asking why their creator program isn’t working.

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Please take our money…

We’ve actually heard this before, and you’d say this too if you finally found an ethical list-growth platform that helped you turn $1 into $2 like clockwork. Join over 900 groups like Everytown, Amnesty International, and Mercy Corps that have found a better way to nail their fundraising goals. Learn more >

The Future of the Democratic Party is on the Ballot

Join COURIER and MeidasTouch on Wednesday, June 10 at 7:00 PM ET for the NY-12 Primary Debate, featuring George Conway, Alex Bores, Laura Dunn, Nina Schwalbe, and Micah Lasher.

In one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races, candidates will debate the future of the Democratic Party at a moment of growing frustration, generational change, and political upheaval.

Candidates will debate the issues shaping the 2026 midterms, including affordability and housing, immigration, corruption and money in politics, democracy reform, climate, AI regulation, and American leadership in a second Trump era.

Register now to watch live.

That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 25,828 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on X/Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.

Hi y’all - I’m Josh Levine, Co-Founder and CEO of Thorian AI. In a modern technology ecosystem that often frames AI as a zero-sum exercise, we deploy AI-powered data tools to reinforce the social contract between citizens, companies, and the institutions that serve them. Thorian operates under a framework of ‘Principled AI’, which guides us to build applications and pursue data projects that are net positive for society.

More on that below, but first…

Subscribe now

Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $16.8 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Team Steyer learned last week that everything’s bigger in Texas — including war chests (or at least how much a campaign might shell out any given week). James Talarico topped the Meta spending charts ahead of his official general election kickoff, happening today.

With attention starting to shift toward the November ballot, Alliance Against Corporate Abuse is gearing up for a showdown with Uber as the tech platform advances a ballot measure aimed at limiting its liability when customers are harmed.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $17.7 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Hey Siri, play “The Final Countdown” by Europe. With Californians headed to the polls (or very slowly returning the vote-by-mail ballots automatically sent to all active registered voters in the Golden State - yay democracy!) ahead of Tuesday’s primary, we’re entering the home stretch of charts that look like this.

And with June fast approaching, we’re starting to see one of the buzziest primaries (NY-12) start to gain some traction: Mike Bloomberg’s Stand for New York PAC supporting Micah Lasher, current New York Assemblymember and congressional hopeful, came in at number 7.

We’re fast-forwarding through X (formerly Twitter) until there’s new data to share and rounding out this week’s charts with Snapchat. To date, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $1.7M on Snap ads in 2026:

An AI ‘Archivist for Good’ Approach to the Epstein Files

President Nixon was impeached by the House of Representatives 52 years ago this summer. During the impeachment hearings, members of Congress reviewed evidence of the President’s crimes, concluding that his actions violated both federal law and the public trust. While Congress ultimately put the final nail in the coffin of the Nixon presidency, uncovering the administration’s crimes required the professionalism of law enforcement, the dogged pursuit of truth from investigative reporters, and a public that demanded accountability.

Conditions in our current democracy look a little different from the Nixon years: Institutions designed to protect the public from government overreach, like the FBI and Department of Justice, have become increasingly politicized, and control over major media organizations has consolidated in the hands of a small number of wealthy and politically-connected people.

On the other hand, access to information has never been more distributed. Technology now makes it easier than ever for members of the public to independently compile, analyze, and share information. When every whistleblower has a platform, and firsthand accounts of every event can reach millions through social media, total control over the public narrative is nearly impossible - as long as the public has a will to pursue the truth.

Of course, the modern information ecosystem has its downsides. The same systems that democratize access to information can also be distorted by fake expertise, AI slop, data tampering, and the sheer volume of content competing for declining attention spans.

With so much information at our fingertips, the ability to find patterns, see through falsehoods, and extract meaning has become both more difficult and more essential. Whenever possible, individuals, journalists, and companies can overcome this complexity by serving as archivists, maintaining an unvarnished, auditable record of the truth so the public can continue holding powerful institutions accountable.

In addition to traditional tools like interview notes and secure document rooms, modern archivists working in the public interest use data science, web scraping, and large language models to make information more accessible. The next Woodward and Bernstein may look very different from the reporters of the 70s.

Thorian AI, the company I co-founded, specializes in using technology to parse large and complex datasets. We partner with mission-aligned organizations to find data and make it accessible. Recently, we did exactly that in partnership with COURIER. We worked together to break down the Epstein Files, taking one of the biggest and most difficult-to-use public datasets in the current political ecosystem and making it accessible.

Why the Epstein Files

The DOJ’s botched release of the Epstein Files presents the perfect opportunity to leverage technology for archival work in service of the public.

Despite Congress’ passage of the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, which created a legal requirement for the release of the files, the DOJ has only partially complied. Roughly 1.24 million files have been made available for download through the DOJ website, but the archive is extraordinarily difficult to use. The files are poorly labeled, inconsistently redacted, and presented in formats that are difficult to navigate. In some cases, victims’ names and nude photos remain visible, while other relevant information is obscured. Numerous files that arguably fall under the scope of the Act have not been released at all. Of the files that have been released, some have been removed and re-added multiple times. In other cases, the government has inexplicably changed its redactions over time, with some previously-available files becoming completely blacked out in later iterations.

This is exactly the kind of situation ripe for the work of a data-focused archivist. While the files’ current presentation is inconsistent with public transparency, advanced data techniques and artificial intelligence can be used to parse, tag, and organize the entities within them so the public can understand what’s happening. That work is essential. If the public does not know what’s in the files, it cannot hold people accountable.

How we parsed the Epstein Files

Working with COURIER, Thorian AI has produced the most detailed and fully-parsed database of the Epstein Files available to the public. We extracted every piece of usable data across the entirety of the 1.24 million files - hundreds of thousands of unique names, places, accounts, and dates, all spread across a vast and otherwise impermeable surface.

The process wasn’t easy. We had to overcome numerous challenges, and there were four factors that contributed to making this process more difficult.

First, the structure of the files themselves. Most of the Epstein files exist as PDF scans of images, flattened and stripped of a large portion of their metadata. To recover as much data as possible, we needed a system capable of combining Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extraction of information with AI-assisted modeling. The government’s searchable OCR results were lacking, so we re-extracted data from the files ourselves as the project evolved.

Second, the way that the files are stored on the DOJ’s website. The site contains disorganized collections of PDFs, jumbled randomly across different buckets. To make matters more challenging, accessing each individual file requires users to go through age verification, which means clicking on a button every time they want to look at something.

Third, the way the government keeps shifting the contents of the files. The collections and files have not been static. Hundreds of thousands of files have disappeared for months at a time. More than 65,000 files went through multiple shifts in their redaction schemas, meaning that information that was readable in one version ended up being redacted in another. These changes have occurred without warning, forcing us to vigilantly and continuously monitor the archives.

The immense volume of the files was an additional hurdle to overcome. Given the limitations of other approaches, we knew our extraction strategy needed to utilize AI in order to obtain as much data as possible. However, we also had to work within the technical limitations of current large language models. Even with recent improvements to context windows (the amount of data that can be parsed by a model at one time), the biggest models can only handle about 1000 pages of these documents on their own at a time. Given the structural challenges described above, a brute force AI approach would have required constant data reingestion, making the process extremely inefficient.

The fourth and final challenge has to do with the contents of the files themselves. Given the nature of Epstein’s crimes, a large number of the files detail the monstrous behaviour of him and his associates. AI models generally have guardrails that block the kind of content present in the files, threatening to blunt comprehensive analysis of the cache.

Many of the (still very good) attempts to bring transparency to the Epstein Files struggle with these challenges. Some projects achieve high quality data extraction, but do so at the expense of volume - they use the government’s search filters to identify individuals and entities of interest and then parse a smaller volume of files before making them accessible through a public-facing interface. This pathway can be very useful if you’re looking to learn about people you already know exist within the files, like Donald Trump or Howard Lutnick. However, the method falls short; users will end up with an incomplete picture of the Epstein story because search results are not grouped by subject or connected chronologically. When full story arcs are obscured by the DOJ website’s current formatting, it’s difficult to do the sleuthing needed to uncover new names and angles that have not already been in the news.

Other groups struggle with the extraction itself. Their attempts to parse the entire corpus of the files have fallen short, likely due to OCR issues and compute constraints.

How we cracked the Epstein Files and what comes next

Our company specializes in solving exactly these kinds of problems, so the methods we used in this case are, for the most part, a professional secret. In broad terms, our approach relied on a system of AI agents with differing levels of expertise operating as a unit to autonomously manage OCR processes, extract and tag data, and put the data into context with the rest of the files. Rather than using frontier models, we mixed our agents, consistently using the smallest possible open-source model for each individual task. This allowed us to keep costs manageable, especially since we run our extraction system on a regular basis, sometimes for weeks at a time.

One place where our data principles helped us was with the shifting versions of the files. Because our team is constantly looking for big public datasets on which we can run experiments, we started downloading the Epstein Files as soon as they were released. Therefore, we have every version of every file in the cache, allowing us to provide better insight around how documents and redactions have changed over time.

On the front end, we put together an interface that allows users to conduct text searches, analyze files by tagged person/entity, explore specific topics, and compile chronological stories that exist within the files. Upcoming features include LLM-enabled search, image search, and other custom topic features.

To close, we ask that you:

1. Check out the site and do some digging

2. Surface story tips and ideas for additional ways you’d like to see the data displayed

3. Share the site with your contacts.

In today’s technological moment, members of the public can also serve as archivist-investigators. So let’s push the story forward and bring light to the darkness of the Epstein chapter in our country.

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Please note: Thorian AI is a paid vendor of COURIER.

That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 25,815 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on X/Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.

The Future of the Democratic Party is on the Ballot

Join COURIER and MeidasTouch on Wednesday, June 10 at 6:30 PM ET for the NY-12 Primary Debate, featuring George Conway, Jack Schlossberg, Alex Bores, Laura Dunn, Nina Schwalbe, and Micah Lasher.

In one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races, candidates will debate the future of the Democratic Party at a moment of growing frustration, generational change, and political upheaval.

Candidates will debate the issues shaping the 2026 midterms, including affordability and housing, immigration, corruption and money in politics, democracy reform, climate, AI regulation, and American leadership in a second Trump era.

Register now to watch live.

Hi Everyone! I’m Esosa Osa, Founder and CEO of Onyx Impact. In this era of propaganda, the Onyx team is fighting the spread of harmful information, investing in independent Black media, and empowering Black communities to create healthier online ecosystems. My work is grounded in my experience as Deputy Executive Director of Fair Fight Action, where I led national efforts around voting policy reform and developed strategies to protect democracy.

All of that to say: I have dedicated my career to preventing a decision like Callais from happening, and I have an unwavering commitment to scaling power to build something greater on the other side of it.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $16.7 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

American Petroleum earned its spot atop the leaderboard with ads urging viewers in Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to believe that “economic success starts with oil and natural gas.” Right now, the average price of gas across those states sits around $4.50 per gallon, which is well over a dollar more than what it was in 2024. Sounds like it might be time for American Petroleum to revisit its definition of “economic success.”

A little lower on the chart, but still earning top spender stripes, is James Talarico. The Texas Democrat seems to be riding the high of his taco outing with former President Obama last week. So, that leaves pretty much everyone in the Texas Senate race having a better time than Senator John Cornyn.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $17.1 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

This past week gave Super Tuesday’s weird little midterm cousin energy, with voters in six states heading to the polls —a number we will see again on June 2. But a look at the top spenders on Google and YouTube might make you think California is the only one with a major election underway. To be fair, not every state has a top-two primary with 62 gubernatorial candidates. But while you may not get a text back, your work presentation may bomb, and your coffee may burn, there’s one thing you can almost certainly count on: Tom Steyer spending more money than everyone else.

X, formerly Twitter, needs to get its act together on its disclosure information. We are still tabulating political advertisers’ total 2026 platform spend at around $1.8 million. In case you want the evergreen reminder, here are top spenders year to date as of… well, a long time ago:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $1.3M on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Your political media mix has a tracking blind spot

In politics, everything comes down to wins and losses—but you need the right tools to know if you’re on track. As CTV captures more ad spend, measurement hasn’t kept up. Learn how to track performance across CTV, video, display, and more to see what’s really driving real-time results. Learn more >

The Case for Amplification In The Fight For Voting Rights

There are two stories colliding in the digital universe right now that we should all be paying attention to.

This past weekend, the New York Times published a buzzy story questioning the expanding—and sometimes murky—role of content creators in political and advocacy campaigns.

That same day, thousands of people from across the country came to Alabama after the Supreme Court’s Callais decision eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, removing some of the last remaining protections for Black voters in the South. The ruling targeted one of the Civil Rights movement’s most crowning achievements. And organizers responded accordingly.

The All Roads Lead to The South pro-voting rights march and rally came together to reject the wave of former Confederate states moving to erase fair representation and Black political power in the decision’s wake. Alongside those in attendance, 80 satellite events blanketed the country and millions tuned in online.

Now here’s where the two stories come together.

While parts of the Times’ critique of disclosures and the wild-west nature of the sector are valid, it assumes that creators are not leveraging their platforms to help stories break through the noise in one of the most frenetic news environments in our country’s history. In reality, it was the rapid-response creators, organizers on the ground streaming live, and local officials posting in real time who kept the conversation around Callais alive for weeks.

Mainstream media gave the decision cursory coverage. Talking heads on cable news explained the ruling almost exclusively in legal terms. But we all know that cable reaches a fraction of the audience that the right-wing blogosphere does. To win, the Left needs a multipronged approach that must include amplifying narratives from people closest to the ground and, therefore, closest to the harm.

It’s Black creators and their allies who are stepping into the gap left wide open by mainstream media that is feverishly fixated on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Creators like Elizabeth Booker Houston, Lynae Vanee, Joshua Doss, and Garrison Hayes produced content that propelled this decision outside of the beltway and onto social media timelines. Black media outlets added their own amplification lift. Roland Martin Unfiltered multicasted the rally live on YouTube, while REVOLT boosted coverage of the event and The Root collaborated with creators to expand reach across platforms.

Each of them, and many others, have authentic relationships with their audiences, along with the lived experience that enables them to provide critical historical context to the ruling’s impact and the meaning of the moment. This weekend showed us that if we want to move the base, we must adopt a surround-sound strategy that not only hooks people through social media but also engages them in a movement.

According to data collected by Defiance Dispatch and verified by Onyx Impact, content related to the Callais decision generated 948.8 million views, 99.1 million engagements, and 79,818 posts. Defiance Dispatch’s social media sweep found that All Roads garnered 82.5 million views with 11 million engagements and 9,637 posts this past weekend alone.

Given the results of this collaboration, one could argue that failing to engage creators or deploy a sophisticated digital strategy is advocacy malpractice. With the VRA, Black creators and Southern organizers are capturing the public’s attention, driving culture, shaping online trends, and moving audiences to action.

We cannot ignore the power creators have to level the playing field for audiences that don’t typically receive mainstream coverage. Black media storytellers reflect their audiences’ experiences and lived memories in their coverage, deepening connection and providing authenticity that is essential to moving information from the corners of the Internet into the mainstream. When combined with grassroots amplification accounts like the Tennessee Holler, Defiance Dispatch, and COURIER, the aftermath of the Callais decision feels fundamentally different from the post-Dobbs news cycle.

Those who assail voting rights, democratic norms, and anti-corruption practices have long understood the power of amplification to influence the barometer of public sentiment. The right has employed and deployed creators and amplification accounts designed to spread their propaganda and control narratives online to great success. Onyx’s research has found that right-wing narratives spread across the internet at rates their opposition fails to match or replicate.

The story is not merely about political strategy or an evil plot to subvert the law. This is about adaptability in the era of propaganda and regulation that has failed to keep up. For some in our country, especially our Southern neighbors, this is about a means of survival.

We’ve written reports in the past about the unprecedented efforts to erase, distort, and suppress Black history, wealth, and data from the public record, alongside the impacts of the current administration’s anti-DEI policies on Black federal contractors who make up just 1.2% of all federal contract recipients. Unemployment numbers are holding steady for most of the country, but for Black people, especially Black women, 600,000 of whom lost their jobs in the last year, the rate is much higher than that of their counterparts. The Callais decision proves the pattern we are seeing is very intentional: crush the opposition by going after and weakening its loudest voices.

Mainstream media is right to be concerned about the direction of the industry as a whole. Foundational elements and rules of engagement no longer apply in the same form. Podcast audiences continue to grow, while NPR and radio decline. A majority of Americans do not trust journalists to act in their best interests, according to a recent study released by Pew. And every day we see more and more journalists harassed and attacked, while also experiencing widespread layoffs driven by corporate consolidation.

No doubt, journalists and mainstream media are right to ask questions. They are just focused on the wrong problem.

When wielded for evil, we know social media causes massive harm on so many levels, especially our health. Study after study makes this plain. But we have yet to fully understand its potential for good and how it can amplify and socialize the idea that we the people do have the power to hold our leaders accountable.

Traditional media used to be the primary means for communicating information, but unless they adapt, they will be left behind.

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Your political media mix has a tracking blind spot

In politics, everything comes down to wins and losses—but you need the right tools to know if you’re on track. As CTV captures more ad spend, measurement hasn’t kept up. Learn how to track performance across CTV, video, display, and more to see what’s really driving real-time results. Learn more >

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Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on June 11 for Facts vs. Fiction: The Fight for Science in American Democracy.

Misinformation isn’t just noise. It’s shaping policy decisions that impact healthcare costs, public health, and everyone’s lives. This live conversation will examine what’s at stake when facts are ignored and what changes when experts lead with evidence. From lowering costs to protecting access to care, we will break down how science-driven leadership delivers real results and why scientific integrity is essential to democracy.

Hear directly from:

• Senator John Hickenlooper, Former Governor of Colorado

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

• Representative Emily Gregory, Florida House of Representatives (HD-87)

• Dr. Paul A. Offit, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements, and don’t miss this conversation. RSVP today!

Hey guys 👋👋👋 Lucy here again, fresh out of my first year of law school and ready to lock in on a summer full of high-stakes primaries 🫠 ICYMI, I am also writing a new newsletter called Group Chat Correspondent – if you enjoy politics x culture x tech, come hang out!!!

Otherwise, we’re tackling a big one today: the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, and Congresswoman Haley Stevens are battling it out.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $15.3 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

An account (with a very scammy/sketchy vibe) called The Patriotic Prophet spent ~$194,000 on “prophetic” economic advice videos (possibly using AI people) tied to Donald Trump’s alleged secret plans for the upcoming America 250 celebration. These ads are running nationwide, with the messaging appearing to be oriented toward people who are planning to retire soon.

On the flip side, but still very much in a religious vein, Adam Hamilton, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Kentucky and pastor of the country’s largest Methodist church, dropped ~$181,000, a spend that includes fundraising ads running mostly in Kansas (but also in Missouri, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and a few other states) that share a peek into his messaging strategy; they read: “I’ve led a diverse congregation of Democrats, Republicans and Independents – people from all walks of life united by their faith and their common desire to serve their neighbors and address the problems of our world.” The era of the white Democratic religious leader Senate candidate continues…

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent nearly $14.5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Grow California, a group backed by two tech billionaires trying to install more business-friendly Democrats and Republicans as a “counterforce” to labor, spent $311,000 this past week getting involved in several CA state senate and state assembly races.

And speaking of California, which has its primary day in less than three weeks, more than $6.3 million of this week’s $14.5 million Google + YouTube political ad spend came from the Golden State alone.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.8 million on ads in 2025. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.2 million on ads in 2025. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Fmr. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s campaign appears to have recently dropped some new Snap ads, taking a swing at Republican opponent Jon Husted for his connections to the Epstein criminal enterprise.

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A Great Blue Battle in the Great Lakes State

If you’ve followed politics at all this year, you’ve probably encountered the Michigan Democratic primary many times over. The August 2026 race has essentially boiled down to three major candidates: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, and Congresswoman Haley Stevens. And, given Michigan’s status as a key battleground state, the race has gotten… pretty intense and rife with controversy.

As we head into the summer, polling shows El-Sayed with a very slight edge, though it’s looking more like a dead heat.

So how, exactly, is all of this playing out online? Zooming in on Michigan specifically, over the last 90 days (February 11 – May 11), campaigns and political advertisers have spent $5.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads in the state and another $2.7 on Google + YouTube over the same period.

Looking at the candidates themselves (who are spending both inside and outside of Michigan, which is normal), here’s where things stand.

Please note, this graph only accounts for spending by the campaigns directly, not by outside groups (which is a key distinction because outside spending has been a big point of contention in this race).

FWIW, it doesn’t appear that any campaign itself is running political ads on Snap or X/Twitter.

On the organic side, here’s how each campaign’s follower count stacks up on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X/Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky.

Please note that this doesn’t account for duplicate followers, i.e., folks who are following candidates across multiple platforms. Here, McMorrow seems to have the overall edge – although it’s interesting that on Facebook and TikTok, El-Sayed leads the pack.

If you’re content-curious like me, here are the most-liked Instagram posts from Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, and Rep. Haley Steven’s campaign accounts over the last 90 days, according to InsTrack.

And here are what appear to be the most-viewed TikTok videos (per TikTok) from Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, State Sen. Malloy McMorrow, and Rep. Haley Stevens over the last 90 days.

All in all, we are 81 days from the big (primary) one in Michigan… and it feels like anything could happen. Stay tuned! 🧤

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More from around the internet:

• According to new data, for the first time, Anthropic has more verified business customers (i.e., businesses paying for its services) than OpenAI.

• Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, is officially the 2026 midterms’ biggest spender thus far, having dropped a whopping $115.5 million, mostly to support pro-crypto and pro-AI organizations and candidates.

• According to Dave & Buster’s first-ever “State of Fun” report (yes, it’s a real thing!), we are in a “fun drought” with 48% of Americans stating that their lives are lacking fun.

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Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on June 11 for Facts vs. Fiction: The Fight for Science in American Democracy.

Misinformation isn’t just noise. It’s shaping policy decisions that impact healthcare costs, public health, and everyone’s lives. This live conversation will examine what’s at stake when facts are ignored and what changes when experts lead with evidence. From lowering costs to protecting access to care, we will break down how science-driven leadership delivers real results and why scientific integrity is essential to democracy.

Hear directly from:

• Senator John Hickenlooper, Former Governor of Colorado

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

• Representative Emily Gregory, Florida House of Representatives (HD-87)

• Dr. Paul A. Offit, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements, and don’t miss this conversation. RSVP today!

That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 25,808 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on X/Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.

Hi everyone! I’m Alison Rice—many people call me Ali. I’m a campaigner, partnerships builder and organizer with a background in multi-issue advocacy and paid media. I run Design It For Us, a new(ish) organization that leverages youth grassroots power and policy chops to disrupt Big Tech’s status quo. I come to your inbox with experience at The Hub Project, Accountable Tech and EMILY’s List’s IE, WOMEN VOTE!, among other gigs.

Like many readers of this newsletter, my work would not be possible without connective media products–full stop. Social media is our most critical organizing tool, and online platforms are our trusty vehicles for reaching key audiences. But we need to be real with ourselves: the honeymoon phase of digital and new media ended years ago. Expanding surveillance and increasing corporate consolidation of platform ownership have exacerbated a vast power imbalance that digital practitioners, strategists and users should take seriously.

Hold that thought as you read this week’s spending…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $14.8 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The conservative advocacy group Restoration of America dropped ~$288,000 this past week on Facebook and Instagram ads targeting key states like Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania that feature “explainer” videos that address things like how the word “diversity” has been hijacked by the Left and how there’s no such thing as “your truth.”

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent nearly $11.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The California governor’s race, which has its jungle primary on June 2nd, is heating up on Google & YouTube, accounting for 6 of the top 10 spots. Tom Steyer leads the group with a whopping nearly $1 million spend, but is closely followed by anti-Steyer PAC Californians for the People and their $850,000 spend last week.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.8 million on ads in 2025. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

It appears that the only new purchases of X/Twitter political ads in the last 6 weeks (so not accounting for older ads that are still running) have come from this random AI building consultant service called Politech AI.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.1 million on ads in 2025. Here are the top spenders year to date:

The next growth channel in political advertising isn’t paid social or online video…

CTV is reshaping how political campaigns reach voters—combining the scale of TV with the precision of digital. Extend reach beyond saturated channels and connect with the right audiences faster. Learn more >

Using digital platforms, from someone who wants to hold them accountable

It’s no secret that tech and the internet have completely transformed our information ecosystems. The “Facebook Election” of 2008 changed the nature of campaigning and social media gave us moments like “We did it, Joe” in COVID-era America. But considering all things viral-Von Dutch-brat-coconut tree, online engagement now relies almost solely on quick touchpoints like likes and retweets, and far less on the 1:1 exchanges that actually drive real-world action, like in 2008. We’re more connected than ever before, but attention alone has become the dominant—and often only—currency that matters.

Social media is not going away, nor should it, but we can’t feign innocence about how it works. Big Tech companies make deliberate choices that shape our spheres of influence as much as a trending song does. Platforms optimize for eyeballs that lead to revenue, reducing the reach of posts that contain external links and throttling accounts to encourage ad buying. Strategists have had to adjust to those policies and creators have been forced to adapt to shadow banning. The lack of accountability structures has enabled tech companies to make decisions solely in their own interest, building the infrastructure we use every day on their terms, while users shoulder the downstream effects.

Employees have raised alarms about some of the worst of these choices. Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen was the first major social media whistleblower to disclose internal documents to Congress and the SEC in 2021, exposing, among other issues, a consistent pattern of mental health harm that Facebook executives knew about and doubled down on. Another former Meta employee-turned-whistleblower, Arturo Béjar, detailed the absence of reporting mechanisms for harassment—concerns that were ignored or outright rejected by senior leadership.

Rather than responding to clear patterns of harm across their platforms, the largest and richest companies are leaning in. In a landmark case led by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a jury in late March found Meta liable for violating the state’s Unfair Practices Act, fining the company $375 million. Rather than comply, Meta plans to appeal the ruling and has threatened to remove access to its platform for users in New Mexico entirely.

Their response is presumably less about the fine—though among the largest in civil action outcomes against the $214.96B company—and more about the prospect of having less control over user data through targeted advertising and surveillance-driven product design. Compliance would prohibit the use of minors’ data to personalize recommendations and require a product redesign that prioritizes integrity over engagement.

Digital practitioners often rely on the same currencies as companies like Meta, TikTok and Snap. We use demographic data to target audiences, curate experiences, and craft messages based on what testing shows is most compelling for each group. These institutional engagement tactics rely on a thriving attention economy, which treats human focus as a scarce commodity and a carrot-and-stick of our democratic infrastructure.

We should recognize that the attention economy is a lever of control for media companies as much as it is for political operators, and that’s by design. Without capturing attention, we lose—yet capturing it drives up platform revenue and reinforces data surveillance. And when only a handful of companies maintain control over a large majority of our information ecosystem, there’s no incentive to change what’s already working for them. Right now, they are the only winners.

That means it’s on us to reframe our approach to using online platforms. These companies have proven to be unaccountable and will not self-regulate. Until there are product-level accountability measures and pro-competition requirements, we carry the burden of helping shape more democratized, just, safe and private online spaces.

Digital practitioners are uniquely positioned to help disrupt Big Tech while still organizing users who depend on their channels to see our messages.

1. Pay creators instead of Facebook ads. As Social Currant’s Ashwath Narayanan explained in a recent issue of FWIW, users often develop parasocial relationships with creators, resulting in high levels of earned trust and credibility that no ad can replicate. With trust in national news organizations hitting record lows, investing in these influential messengers allows us to meaningfully reach audiences without contributing to Meta’s bottom line.

2. Diversify the tools you use for online engagement. Proactively invest in alternative online spaces that are not predicated on data exploitation to deliver revenue. Design It For Us recently launched a campaign called the Innovator Circle to support human-centered competitors that challenge Big Tech’s dominance. It centers the notion that safety, privacy, and human well-being are not tradeoffs; they’re good business. Its inaugural members include Blacksky, Newsreel, Sparkable, The Nudge and Tribela, which are just a few among hundreds of new platforms that are bucking the status quo of Big Tech’s business model. Consider building an audience on their platforms—not only do they align with better values, you might also find that they produce stronger engagement outcomes and yield a better ROI than traditional channels.

3. Take better care of data—yours and your audiences’. The largest social platforms need our data to operationalize their business models, often partnering with agencies and organizations that weaponize that information. They use information about us to push targeted advertising and recommend content that incentivizes us to spend more time on their platforms, increasing the likelihood that we see ads and convert.

   1. Avoid leveraging transactional mechanisms, like list buying and selling, that treat humans as products to wheel and deal and increase risks of scams or unwanted third-party exposure. Instead, meet people where they are through organic partnerships and creator collaboration.

   2. Emphasize transparency, use privacy-preserving defaults—including opt-ins (not opt-outs)—and consider collecting very minimal data through any social mobilization tools. Make sure you are overly transparent about what you are tracking and what it will be used for.

We won’t win by trying to restore our information economy to what it once was or by investing all of our resources into chasing the highs of simple virality. Tech companies are laser-focused on controlling the attention economy and our relationship with them is only one-sided if we fall in line with how they do business. The long game here is to reclaim some control over what platforms value: our online relationships, our trust in information sources, and our data. When we do that, the ball is back in our court.

If any of this resonated with you, feel free to reach out to me at alison@designitforus.org! I’d be glad to scheme together.

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The next growth channel in political advertising isn’t paid social or online video…

CTV is reshaping how political campaigns reach voters—combining the scale of TV with the precision of digital. Extend reach beyond saturated channels and connect with the right audiences faster. Learn more >

Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on June 11 for Facts vs. Fiction: The Fight for Science in American Democracy.

Misinformation isn’t just noise. It’s shaping policy decisions that impact healthcare costs, public health, and everyone’s lives. This live conversation will examine what’s at stake when facts are ignored and what changes when experts lead with evidence. From lowering costs to protecting access to care, we will break down how science-driven leadership delivers real results and why scientific integrity is essential to democracy.

Hear directly from:

• Senator John Hickenlooper, Former Governor of Colorado

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

• Representative Emily Gregory, Florida House of Representatives (HD-87)

• Dr. Paul A. Offit, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements, and don’t miss this conversation. RSVP today!

That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 25,814 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on X/Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.

Hello there – it’s Ashwath, one of the co-founders at Social Currant, and I’ll be taking over today’s edition of FWIW. Since 2023, Social Currant has built an ecosystem of thousands of creators and helped over a hundred organizations reach audiences more effectively. Most recently, we’ve been expanding on our organizing work in partnership with Double Tap Democracy.

Over the past few years, the role of content creators in politics has become hard to ignore. Since 2024, more and more Democrats have begun to see creators — and the deep, authentic trust they build with their audiences — as a key piece for rebuilding relationships with voters. But much of the conversation still stops at vanity metrics such as likes and impressions. This week, we’ll explore what more meaningful impact measurement looks like for creator work in 2026.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $13.3 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Tom Steyer is (shockingly) at the top of this list and he invested around $40K more on Meta platforms than he did the week before. His gubernatorial campaign’s overall spend has exceeded $115M with a little over 5 weeks to go until Primary Day.

Matt Mahan—also in the running to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor of California—is the first candidate whose initials aren’t T.S. to make it on the list this year.

Steyer’s polling has been holding steady in the teens, while Mahan has yet to break out of single digits. A clear frontrunner has yet to emerge in this race so it’s impossible to say where things will land on June 2. We’ll find out soon enough.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $11.5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Last week was the last full week before Virginia’s April 21 special election, so it makes sense that the state was on the receiving end of about 25% of Google and YouTube’s targeted spend ($2.9M). Tough times for democracy-hater Peter Thiel’s Justice for Democracy PAC, which invested nearly $700K this month on 38 ads attempting to convince Virginians to vote “no” on the redistricting referendum—only for it to pass by a margin of about 3%.

On the plus side, at least Republicans seem to be taking it well.

Twitter/X’s reporting is still glitching… so as of last month, political advertisers in the U.S. had spent just over $1.8 million on ads in 2026. Here were the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $1.02M on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Please take our money…

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Creator Campaigns: Moving Beyond Vanity Metrics

Before we dig into how to measure creator campaigns, it’s important to understand why creators are effective messengers in the first place: the bond their audience builds with them over time.

Audiences often form parasocial relationships with creators, developed through months or years of consistently watching content, resulting in high levels of trust and credibility that no ad can replicate. In other words, the value of a creator can’t be boiled down to one post. It’s the relationship and reputation they’ve built over time. Add to that the fact that according to Pew Research Center, 2 in 5 Gen Z-ers get their news from creators, and you start to understand why they’ve become such a central piece of our media ecosystem. Working with them allows political organizations to engage audiences through the existing relationships of trust and credibility that creators have built.

This is a new way of reaching people, but the way most campaigns measure this work is stuck in the past — outdated frameworks from paid media and brand marketing at best, and totally vibes-based at worst. It’s understandably hard to measure how creator campaigns work, but we’re also repeatedly optimizing for the wrong things.

So what might better measurement look like?

Optimizing for Shares & Saves, not Likes & Views: We look at metrics to understand how content is performing, but we also go beyond views and likes to focus on engagement. Shares & saves are inherently more meaningful because they’re active, not passive. Saves mean a user intends to return to the post in the future, and shares mean that they are either putting their personal stamp of approval on the content to their own community or using it to start a conversation. Both tell you something views never can: that the content actually meant something to the person who saw it.

Understanding the Comment Section: While comments are a small percentage of engagement, they’re one of the richest sources of information available online about what people really think and why, especially when analyzed at scale. We started evaluating comment sections, going beyond sentiment analysis into topic modelling to understand not just what audiences are saying, but how well it aligns with what the campaign wants them to believe. From the health of a conversation to the intensity of certain topics, the comment section helps us better understand whether a message is landing as intended.

The chart below depicts content we produced in partnership with creators around immigration enforcement – there were over 2,000 comments across posts.

We then tracked the “intensity” of those topics: how long, deep, and emotionally engaged the conversations got.

Measuring The Impact of a Program on Creators: Beyond metrics and audience impact, it’s also important to understand how this work affects creators themselves — in particular, whether working with mission-aligned organizations makes them more politically active both online and off. We know creator campaigns reach audiences, but do they actually move creators – making them more confident, more vocal, and more engaged on issues that matter? That’s a harder question to answer, but it’s one of the more meaningful signals we have about whether this work is building something lasting.

When it comes to politics, viewers trust the message because they trust the messenger — not the other way around. The ecosystem has spent years measuring the message. It’s time to start measuring the relationship.

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

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Hey there! I’m Chanda Daniels, a former Congressional aide and longtime communications strategist for mission-driven causes, working for organizations including the Mayor’s Office, the UN, and Human Rights Watch. I write the newsletter ok so hear me out…, where I explore the intersection of politics, culture, and identity. Excited to be back!

For today’s FWIW, I’ll be diving into how social media is reshaping not just how conflicts are covered, but how they’re perceived and responded to.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent just over $12.8 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The top spot on this list is occupied by none other than 14% of California’s favorite gubernatorial candidate: billionaire Tom Steyer. With the exit of former congressman Eric Swalwell from the race, Steyer has seen his support jump incrementally. But polling shows that Xavier Becerra, former CA Attorney General and US Secretary of Health and Human Services, saw the biggest boost, with his support more than tripling what it was last month.

Unfortunately, most polls still show the two Republicans leading the pack, which could spell disaster, but also, who knows where we’ll be a week from now? Watch this space.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $9.6 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Advertising on Google and YouTube was oddly balanced last week amongst the biggest spenders. Both the Democrats’ Virginians for Fair Elections PAC and the GOP’s Virginians for Fair Maps RC made the list, though Democrats outspent the Republicans by nearly double. Tom Steyer is also on here (of course), but he is joined by the anti-Tom Steyer Californians for the People PAC. And the two Republicans running for governor of Georgia, once again, each spent upwards of $200K on attack ads against one another.

Now onto the “Justice for Democracy” PAC, which is very misleadingly named seeing as it’s being bankrolled by an outspoken democracy hater. Peter Thiel, the 40th richest man in the world, who once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” has decided that he needs to make his voice heard in Virginia’s special election. And it probably won’t shock you to hear that the way he’s going about it is more than a little sketchy. Lisa Graves did a deep dive on the whole operation in this week’s edition of Grave Injustice—it’s worth the read.

Alas, the glitch in the Twitter/X reporting matrix continues… so as of last month, political advertisers in the U.S. had spent just over $1.8 million on ads in 2026. Here were the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $923,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Please take our money…

We’ve actually heard this before, and you’d say this too if you finally found an ethical list-growth platform that helped you turn $1 into $2 like clockwork. Join over 900 groups like Everytown, Amnesty International, and Mercy Corps that have found a better way to nail their fundraising goals. Learn more >

War, in 280 characters or less

The TV abruptly cuts to a breaking news broadcast, my confusion replacing the sitcom that had been playing moments before on my screen. It’s May 2011. I watch President Obama start the long procession to the podium. With each step, the immense gravity of whatever he’s about to say next becomes more apparent. He announces the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden. Quiet outside—then pandemonium.

I walk past the construction of the Oculus, a landmark that sparks flashbacks to the announcements that shaped my childhood as a New Yorker: 9/11, the endless stream of footage, President Bush declaring that we were going to war, and later, the fanfare of a warship banner prematurely declaring his “mission accomplished.” These moments formed my expectation that major military news would be delivered with gravity, in primetime addresses, press conferences, or sit-down interviews with journalists.

Cut to 2026, when that understanding came crashing down with a social post from the president stating he planned to “end a civilization” in under 1,000 characters. It wasn’t the first time a world leader (or Trump himself) had posted something like this, but it marked a clear shift in how conflict is communicated and what we have to do to respond to it.

We are faced with a bombardment of what one would consider important messages from Trump, but the sheer volume and speed dilutes their significance. And that’s not an accident – it’s tactical. What were once measured and carefully timed messages from leaders have been replaced with a constant stream of live updates that create confusion, weaken the military chain of communication, and increase the potential for escalation.

This shift isn’t trivial. It requires us to establish new rules on discretion, verification, and accountability, especially in moments when a single post can carry profound real-world consequences.

In the face of unprecedented distraction, we’ve become trained to match the pace of our feeds, leaving us to either speak without substance or excuse inaction. We need to resist both.

Social media has changed the way we view war, quite literally. I’ve watched daily, on-the-ground reporting from Gaza alongside “day in the life” videos from refugee camps. This unprecedented level of access is as transparent as it is jarring. The reality of war hasn’t changed, but our relationship to it has. We now witness it through posts, clips, livestreams, and TikTok updates.

These platforms can exacerbate harm, as seen in Myanmar, but they have also democratized and decentralized war narratives. Real-time documentation can hold governments accountable, connect people on the ground to life-saving information, and mobilize global attention, as seen in Sudan. In many ways, this exposure has humanized conflicts that once felt distant and abstract.

On the other hand, world leaders are on the same platforms, writing posts that are creating these life-altering impacts. Governments subtweet one another. We receive updates on military operations as we would a sports game.

As war is documented in real time, a strange duality unfolds. In the hands of the public, social media can enable accountability. In the hands of the people in power, it not only changes how conflicts are perceived, but how they unfold. The platforms allow people in power to bypass traditional channels—sidestepping diplomacy, evading accountability, and feeding into the contentification of war, where strategy and spectacle begin to blur.

The media was once a crucial intermediary in holding those in power accountable for the decisions they made and the impacts they had. Now, when I see the president post about war, my first instinct is to question whether it’s even real and then scramble to find confirmation.

Traditional media imposed structure. It validated information, asked follow-up questions, and shaped the stories that become history. That work hasn’t disappeared, but the administration is restricting their access. Instead, we’re in an era of live tweeting war.

In 2012, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) became one of the first to effectively declare war via Twitter.

The tweet was followed by an airstrike—and then an hour later, a video of that strike posted with the caption, “In case you missed it.”

In 2017, Trump tweeted a threat toward North Korea that its leadership took as a declaration of war.

Today, it often feels as though discussions around decisions, tactics, and operations once confined to the Situation Room are being broadcast in real time. According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal back in March, the president had posted over 90 times about the Iran war, accounting for roughly a quarter of his entire feed. He posts so rapidly and often that Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has a monitor dedicated solely to tracking his feed in real time. Trump’s posts seem to trigger a scramble behind the scenes, as staff rush to catch up, contextualize, and update everyone from military officials to members of Congress. While there’s a lot of debate around how much transparency the public is owed, we can probably all agree that key decision-makers and those serving in the military need to be read in pretty early on to ensure our world order isn’t hinged on the whims of a man and his smartphone.

When the same tools used for awareness and accountability are also in the hands of the people directing military action, they can’t be wielded carelessly. Governments live-tweeting about war is engrossing, at best, and a major security risk, at worst. We can’t deny that these messages carry life-or-death consequences. On the other side of every air strike is a family, a home, a world destroyed.

Social media isn’t going anywhere, but treating war like “content” is a deeply unserious approach to the most serious matter there is. Decisions about whether we go to war or escalate it further should not be first announced—ironically— in a post on “Truth” Social.

The result is a public left unsure of what’s real, what matters, and what comes next. Yes, we may have gained access, but in doing so, we’ve lost structure, accountability, and, in some ways, the gravity these moments demand. We scramble to react, to be present in the ‘chat,’ but when interacting with the new updates it’s important to ask: are you adding substance or to the spectacle? Contextualizing is of equal or more importance to intellectualizing. There is always a need for dialogue, but not at the cost of responsibility.

The initial reaction is to scramble to respond, to ensure you acknowledge the moment, but words with no action ring hollow. Strongly worded posts have replaced substantive action. For Democratic leaders, it’s of course important to create a solid crisis comms plan and use discernment in responding. By the time you decide to message in opposition, you should be able to explain both your perspective and steps you will take to move forward – even if that action appears small to you.

We also need to stop normalizing this new reality we live in. At any other point in our history, if a president threatened to wipe out an entire civilization, it would have been a huge deal. Meanwhile, it’s been just ten days since Trump posted that horrific message on TruthSocial and we’ve already moved on. Part of being the opposition party is making sure the awful things this administration says and does remain in the public’s memory.

War used to arrive at a podium, with the world holding its breath. Now, we hold our breath waiting for the next announcement to show up on our feed, just like anything else we scroll past. And that’s exactly what they are hoping for.

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Hi everyone, idris brewster here! I am a Brooklyn artist, technologist and founder of Kinfolk Tech, a non-profit that uses immersive technology, local storytelling, and community-centered design to preserve and share untold stories of place. I have spent the last 10 years working in communities across the country, unearthing the stories that have been erased as part of an effort to reshape and broaden America’s collective memory.

For today’s FWIW, I will be diving into the current battle for control over our history taking place as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent just over $13 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

A majority of the ads Jon Ossoff and James Talarico ran last week were centered around meeting their campaigns’ goals for the first FEC quarterly fundraising deadline of the year.

On the other hand, billionaire Tom Steyer, who famously has no financial concerns to speak of, ran the gamut on issue areas, hitting everything from entertainment tax credits, climate justice, and the Iran war to ICE, free school meals, and the tech revolution. He even came out in support of single-payer healthcare, contradicting his own previously held stance on the issue.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $8.2 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Three states—California, Virginia, and Georgia—dominated 7 of the 10 spots on this list. Nearly $2.6 million were spent on ads in Virginia alone, which makes sense considering the state will vote on its redistricting referendum in less than two weeks.

California saw $1.3 million in investments last week as the battle to replace Governor Gavin Newsom wages on. The top spenders were Steyer, former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, and Californians for a Fighter PAC supporting Rep. Eric Swalwell. Swalwell is currently at the center of lots of online conversation around possible misconduct, allegations his team categorically denies.

Georgia’s gubernatorial primary is on May 19 and it’s no surprise Rick Jackson and Burt Jones make up a good chunk of the $947k spent in the state last week. ICYMI, the two of them HATE each other. A lot. Like a lot a lot.

There once again appears to be a glitch in X’s political ad disclosure and the numbers have not been updated, so as of last month, political advertisers in the U.S. had spent just over $1.8 million on ads in 2026. Here were the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $805,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

The Billion-Dollar War Over America’s Memory

There are 48,178 public monuments in the United States. Only 0.5% honor people of color. Three times as many memorialize Confederate leaders as honor Black, Indigenous, or Brown figures.

That imbalance isn’t really surprising, but it also hasn’t been treated as what it actually is: a political project with a centuries-long head start.

Allow me to explain.

When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, it marked a resurgent obsession with white grievance politics and historical revisionism. The country’s public spaces became battlegrounds over memory itself. Confederate monuments—long-standing symbols of terror—were suddenly defended with renewed ferocity. It became clear not only how contested our history is, but how deeply power depends on controlling it.

The American monument landscape is one of the most effective propaganda machines ever built, and almost no one in progressive politics talks about it that way.

Now, the right understands how to wield the tools of narrative and culture extremely well. Trump 2.0 has put its full force behind the effort to control our collective memory.

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order creating a task force for America’s 250th birthday. It called for the construction of a “National Garden of American Heroes” and directed federal buildings to reflect “traditional, classical architecture.”

It also set a clear tone: “restore Federal sites dedicated to history … to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage” and remove content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living.”

In other words: Clean up the story. Decide what gets remembered and what doesn’t.

Just last month, the government ordered signage to be taken down from at least 17 national parks, including exhibits about the forced removal of Native Americans from the Grand Canyon and George Washington’s enslavement of people at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.

But this war doesn’t just sit in the physical. It’s digital too.

A separate executive order, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government” requires that AI companies doing business with the federal government ensure their systems are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias.” Translation: Strip any acknowledgment of structural racism, erase diverse representation from AI outputs, and ensure that the systems shaping how Americans learn and communicate reflect a single, white, conservative worldview. An administration whose playbook is steeped in ideological supremacy should not be able to define what objective means for the country.

At the same time, media ecosystems are growing increasingly imbalanced. According to Media Matters president Angelo Carusone, right-leaning content accounts for 82% of the major online programming across podcasts and streaming channels, AKA “narrative dominance.”

This conservative narrative infrastructure, from the Heritage Foundation’s $150 million annual budget, to PragerU’s $70 million operation, to Leonard Leo’s $1.6 billion war chest, is the result of billions of dollars invested over decades to control which version of American history gets told, taught, and remembered. It’s a coordinated, well-funded effort with institutional backing at every level.

So, how do we catch up? (And before you even think it, no, the answer isn’t to build a liberal PragerU.)

Progressive movements need to build long-term infrastructure rather than chasing cycle-to-cycle wins. We need to invest in the kinds of stories that ignite agency within people. What moves the needle to get people engaged in politics in the first place? An ad campaign alone won’t do the trick. We need to start a few layers deeper and speak to people through their hearts and through their values.

When people understand where they come from and can trace the patterns that connect their present to a past they actually recognize, they become harder to manipulate and easier to mobilize. Liberation becomes truly possible when we stop treating art, history, and culture as secondary to “the real work” of advocacy. They are the real work.

And there’s research to support this. The American Historical Association found that people with an active relationship to history are 8 to 13 percentage points more civically engaged. If our stories didn’t matter, Trump and his cronies wouldn’t be spending so much time and effort to erase them.

I have learned this firsthand through building Kinfolk from the ground up over the last 10 years. Inspired by Pokémon Go, we created our own augmented reality (AR) app where people could walk around their city and see history come to life through community-generated digital monuments. Each monument is the product of 3-6 months of deep engagement: building relationships with local leaders, artists, and residents, hosting community workshops, and creating spaces for shared storytelling.

What started in New York City has grown into a platform with over 100 monuments, accessed by people in all 50 states.

Immersive media has the power to shift how people understand the world and each other in ways that other media cannot. Emotionally engaging, immersive storytelling activates key psychological processes, such as empathy, moral reflection, and perspective shifting, increasing the likelihood of actual behavior change.

But at the core of all of this is something far simpler: trust. If your relationship with communities, especially communities of color, begins and ends with election cycles, it’s not a relationship. It’s extraction. And people can see right through that facade.

Authenticity has become a currency, and the further we catapult into the tech bro billionaire AI dreamscape future, its value will only increase. People are craving real in-person experiences that foster connection and a sense of belonging.

Third spaces, the community gathering spots where civic life actually forms, are disappearing across the country, and people are starving for them. A nation without shared physical spaces loses the habits that make democratic life possible.

If progressive leaders want to galvanize support, they need to stop optimizing for surface-level engagement and start showing up in these spaces where trust is already built in: parks, local businesses, cultural centers, community events. That’s where Kinfolk operates. That’s where Mamdani operates. That’s where you should too. While digital engagement is critical for successful movements and organizing, we need to make sure to balance that with as much in-person engagement as possible.

The long game requires investment in cultural and community infrastructure, helping people build collective knowledge and mobilize on their own terms, in both digital and physical spaces. The future isn’t one or the other. If we want to maintain a winning trajectory, we’ll need to truly show up and support people’s agency and humanity no matter where they are.

If any of this resonated with you, you can reach out to me at idris@kinfolktech.org!

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Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

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Howdy hi hello; Scott here. 👋

If you work in politics, you’re likely crunched for time and budget. And with all of the focus on organic social media, it may feel like just another thing. Unfortunately, if you want to understand politics in 2026, you also have to understand what’s trending online. More times than I can count, I’ll see something go viral and have no idea what’s driving it. So, Who Broke It — a newsletter written by veteran Recount journalist Grace Weinstein — has become my go-to for figuring that out. This week, Grace and I caught up about how to decode your feed and why campaign staffers need to care about digital culture.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $13.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

While this week features most of the same players as last week, the spending went up significantly (5.6m → 13.4m) in the final days of Q1. Pete Buttigieg’s Win the Era PAC was the only new spender to last week’s list. Otherwise, Talarico and Steyer continued to occupy top spots for the Dems, while PragerU continues to lead Republicans asking for donations and driving audiences to its conservative-leaning history content.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $6.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

A top story to watch this month is the battle over whether Virginia will redraw their electoral maps to favor Democrats ahead of the midterms. That election is scheduled for Tuesday, April 21. The Democrats’ Virginians for Fair Elections >$1 million ad spend continues to far outpace the Republican Virginians for Fair Elections RC’s $188k.

The Democrats’ highest-spending ad features President Obama telling Virginians “we’re counting on you” to stop Trump and Republicans from stealing seats to continue wielding “unchecked power.” The Republicans’ highest-spending ad argues that Democrats “defied a court order” to enable policies that put “criminal aliens back on the streets.”

Meanwhile, as a follow up to last week’s story about California’s gubernatorial primary mess: Tom Steyer, Eric Swalwell (“Californians for a Fighter”), and Xavier Becerra all cracked the top ten spenders this week. The primary is in 2 months, mail ballots will be sent out in 1 month, and the two Republican candidates continue to poll at the top of the field. We’ll keep tabs on how this evolves.

There appears to be a glitch in X’s political ad disclosure and the numbers have not been updated, so as of last week, political advertisers in the U.S. had spent just over $1.8 million on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $644,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

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What’s Going On Behind Your Social Media Feed

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Scott: To start us off, what is Who Broke It, and who are you?

Grace: I’m Grace, and I’ve worked in digital journalism for seven years. Who Broke It is my Substack publication that catalogs, contextualizes and entertains about the world of political content creation and alternative media. My goal is to cut out the chaos, and deliver something that’s readable and helps explain what’s going on. There’s too much to tackle if you try to do it alone. And as politicians and creators get deeper into the content space, somebody has to make sense of it. That’s what I was born to do!

Scott: How do you decide what is important enough to cover?

Grace: There are some days and some weeks where there’s an obvious answer. For example, if Trump announces that we are going to put boots on the ground in Iran. For non-obvious issues, I want to make sure that our audience is tapped into something that they wouldn’t necessarily have understood on their own.

Scott: We all have filter bubbles. How would you describe yours, and how do you recommend exploring what’s happening in other bubbles?

Grace: I’m the type of person that’s not satisfied until I’ve heard every argument about something. My absolute life blood is burner accounts. I have so many. Burner accounts are better than Twitter lists (which I do have) because they allow you to manipulate the algorithm. I have made a concerted effort to put a lot of effort into influencing what I need that algorithm to be.

Also, I do a lot of analysis on packaging. I wrote one piece about how all of the liberal YouTube stars are using the exact same set of evocative words in their headlines. It makes you understand that there are not a ton of lone wolves in these environments. These are networks.

Scott: How does this compare to the right?

Grace: It’s funny. After the 2024 election, the panic among the left was to figure out what our media space is, and how to become attractive to viewers at home. And now, two years on, there is so much cohesion on the left.

The right has fragmented into all of these smaller offshoots. You have the sort of Fox-affiliated corporate podcasts. You have Tucker Carlson spinning off, and the visuals are like, “I’m a regular American.” Or you have The Daily Wire which is filming on sets that cost millions of dollars.

Scott: For folks trying to understand this space you cover – the intersection of politics, culture, and digital media – what are suggestions of habits to build or sources of information to track?

Grace: Number one: Familiarize yourself with a key voice in every different faction. The main ones I lay out are leftists and DSA, progressives, liberals, centrists, conservative, MAGA, and then farther right. And if you can find one person that you’re checking their feeds every day to see what movements they’re making and what they’re focusing on, that’s going to give you a much wider scope than just listening to MSNBC or watching Fox News.

Number two: Build the muscle that helps you determine what is authentically viral and what is a manufactured campaign. This is all about reps. With reps, you’ll be able to see that these three right-wing major platforms all use the exact same wording to describe a presidential executive order. The more you start seeing with some sort of skepticism or curiosity, the less likely you are to be duped by some online information or disinformation campaign.

Number three: Build up your referential knowledge and institutional history. I’m not talking about Congress; I’m talking about which specific creators have been on a specific beat for a long time. For example, when Pete Hegseth was going viral for leading prayer services at the Pentagon, people were like, “Who are these dark, shadowy figures he’s praying with?” And I’m like, this all started with [conservative theologian] Doug Wilson from Moscow, Idaho. He is the patriarch of the sort of denomination of churches that Pete Hegseth belongs to.

Finally: Understand that the lifespan of a digital trend is much shorter than you think it is. So if you’re two weeks late to something, don’t do it.

Scott: That’s tough because I’m constantly four weeks late to everything. Really drilling in now – political campaigns have limited finances and even more limited time. Why should busy staffers care about what happens with influencers?

Grace: I think that there are two types of lawmakers. There are engineers and there are salesmen. Almost nobody is both. And this idea that everybody has to be a salesman has led people in office to make some really bad, inauthentic decisions. Bringing influencers into the fold is one surefire way that you get time back in your schedule. If everybody’s going to be breathing down your neck that you have to have a social presence, outsource that work to pre-existing influencers who know how to message to their audiences better than a lawmaker ever will.

Scott: I love this. Influencers are an organizing target to build genuine relationships with, not a new substitute for paid media. Speaking of, what are some of the best or worst examples you’ve seen of elected officials engaging online?

Grace: First, Ro Khanna. A lot of people generate hype around digital content, but are not asking what the mechanics are. I got to ask him about his social strategy and how he’s trying to create a brand online. The biggest and most important thing he said was that he’s not afraid to make mistakes. This hyperfixation on the right trend or aesthetic is so uncomfortable. There’s nothing personal, and the whole point of social media is to be personal and showcase who you are and what you believe.

I got a lot of shit for saying it – I did not like Gavin Newsom’s Trump imitations when they first came out. I know every liberal thinks that it is the best thing since sliced bread. But it is going to create a problem for him when he’s running for the White House. A year from now, he will have to start his own brand. It will, no matter what he chooses to do, look like he’s copying someone else or taking ideas from someone that’s not necessarily authentic to him.

Scott: I appreciate the take because that’s forward thinking. Consuming Newsom’s content at face value I think, “Ah, this is funny.” But you’re right; this may create a long-term problem for him.

We talked about how a lot of things seem synced up on the left versus different factions on the right. This lines up with my general perception of the Democrats being a party that is trying to empower policies that support working people, but functionally operates as a top down machine. Contrastingly, the Republicans have policies that make the rich richer, but they have an impressive amount of tolerance for letting their online advocates cook. How does that line up with your perception?

Grace: 100%. It’s like, you have these dark forces on the right disseminating money or influence whatever. They’re very open and honest about it for the most part. On the left, it’s very taboo. It’s very secret, but we all know that it’s there, which is why campaigns like Track AIPAC have been so successful.

Scott: Looking to the future, two years from today, how will today’s intersection of politics and digital culture be different? Is caring about creators a fad?

Grace: There are certain regressions in culture at large, but we’re never going back to the way that things were. And I think the slowness to accept that has doomed a lot of the legacy media. I think the money will run dry in those places. Culture has shifted so far into the world of opinion and no standards, and I just can’t see that going back.

As for creators specifically, 2028 will be the first non-incumbent year since 2016. So I think candidates will actively seek not just collaborations but endorsements. We got a little bit recently with Hasan Piker. Axios was asking 2028 candidates whether they would go on his stream. This sort of thing will be used carefully at first, and then it will snowball from there. That’s my prediction.

Scott: Grace, thank you for doing this!

Grace: Yes, thank you. I’m so excited! So glad we could.

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Hi everyone! We’re Meg Schwenzfeier and Jack Welty, builders of Caucus AI and today’s FWIW guest authors. We come from the world of campaign data and analytics – we led analytics on the Harris-Walz campaign. Since then, we’ve been exploring how AI is reshaping the way voters learn about politics and campaigns do analytics.

AI search is the next digital frontier in politics. Instead of typing a candidate’s name into Google and clicking through links, millions of Americans now get answers from AI chatbots and AI-generated summaries. These chatbots have enormous persuasive power, but we know very little about what they’re actually saying or why.

With support from the Analyst Institute, we built Caucus AI to start building that record – tracking what ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini tell people about candidates and elections, storing every response, and pulling out the sources each chatbot cites. We’ve been publishing our findings on Substack, and recently we ran an experiment to watch it play out in real time.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $5.6 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

For the second week in a row, James Talarico and Tom Steyer are the only left-leaning spenders on this list. And top performer Liberty Asset Champions (see here) outspent both of them combined.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $6.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The primary to succeed California Governor Gavin Newsom is coming up on June 2nd and in case you haven’t been following that shitshow, allow us to catch you up. So far, there isn’t a clear frontrunner in the race and this past Tuesday, USC canceled a planned debate featuring five white candidates amid controversy that the criteria were purposely designed to exclude candidates of color. In the aftermath of the decision, Tom Steyer said he would host a self-funded town hall for the whole squad that same night. Ultimately, that too did not pan out due to “logistical challenges.”

So now, here we are. Ballots will begin to go out to voters in just over 5 weeks and California’s jungle primary system means that the top two vote-getters in June, regardless of party, will advance to the general election. As it stands, polling shows the fifty jillion Democratic candidates splitting the vote so badly that Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco could find themselves facing off in November (which would frankly be embarrassing for all involved).

For the most part, billionaire Tom Steyer has been the only gubernatorial candidate to consistently make Google and YouTube ad investments worthy of top ten honors. This month, he’s been joined by independent committees backing Matt Mahan (“Deliver for California” and “California Back to Basics”), and now this week, we can add “Californians for a Fighter,” a PAC supporting Eric Swalwell’s campaign, to the list. It’s safe to assume there will be a lot more activity from California gubernatorial hopefuls online and across the airwaves over the next few months. Will it be enough to avoid a CADEM crisis in November? We shall see.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.8 million on ads in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $583,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Faster than a Fact-Check: Our 12-Minute Experiment in AI Candidate Profiles

From our earlier research, we know that chatbot sourcing isn’t random. It follows patterns. Across models, there’s a clear preference for neutral sources like Wikipedia, Ballotpedia, and the Associated Press. But there are patterns within each model as well. ChatGPT, for instance, cites its media partner Axios frequently, but almost never cites NPR. Neither GPT, Gemini, nor Grok cite the New York Times very often.

This means that by selecting a chatbot, users are also (often unknowingly) selecting into a specific information ecosystem.

Citations matter because they seem to influence what information appears in chatbot responses and how. For example, when responses cite a candidate’s own website, they tend to reflect the same tone and substance – a huge advantage for candidates looking to control their narrative. While we have not yet shown that this relationship is causal, the correlation is hard to ignore.

How does information actually make its way into a chatbot response?

There are three paths for information to surface in a chatbot response when a user asks about politics: via training data, system prompt, or web search.

Of these, web search (when a model gathers information from the internet live before responding to a query) is the easiest for campaigns and candidates themselves to influence. From our testing, when users ask about politics and current events, chatbots tend to rely heavily on web search since it allows them to overcome their knowledge cutoff (the date beyond which a model has no training data).

But unlike traditional search, where users can click through links and evaluate sources themselves, chatbot responses often present information as authoritative fact. That makes the speed at which new web content filters into those responses especially critical.

So how long does it take for something posted online to become something a chatbot tells a voter?

In the case of OpenAI: twelve minutes.

The setup and model uptake

We created two Wikipedia pages for candidates we thought met Wikipedia’s notability regulations, but didn’t yet have pages: Gregg Hull, a Republican running for governor of New Mexico, and Hallie Shoffner, a Democrat running for Senate in Arkansas. We took care to ensure these pages conformed to all Wikipedia rules related to sourcing, content, and neutrality. They were not overtly partisan and did not cite sources that Wikipedia generally disallows, like campaign sites. (Full disclosure: despite our best efforts to follow the rules, moderators later deleted one of the pages… we’ll let you figure out which one.)

We created the pages at 10:18pm on Sunday March 8, 2026. At the same time, we launched a monitoring script that ran “Tell me about [CANDIDATE]” at regular intervals.

At 10:30pm – just 12 minutes later – OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 chat began heavily citing the new Wikipedia pages. Grok and Gemini, on the other hand? Still nothing, as of this writing.

How the answers changed

Once Wikipedia entered the mix, GPT’s responses changed fast:

• Wikipedia became the backbone of both summaries, making up one-fifth to two-thirds of all web citations, crowding out the wider variety of sources the model had been citing before.

• GPT didn’t just reference Wikipedia, it pulled directly from it. Nearly every response for Hull began with his Wikipedia intro: “Gregg Hull is an American politician and businessman who served as Mayor of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, from 2014 to 2026. He is the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history.” The summaries repeated biographical details, like the number of grandchildren he has, word for word.

• Responses got flatter. Because Wikipedia pages are themselves summaries of other sources, GPT was essentially summarizing a summary. Responses became less detailed and cited fewer sources.

• Opposition research faded. For Shoffner, the initial responses included partisan sources like the NRSC, Daily Wire, and Free Beacon. After her page went up, those still appeared occasionally, but were often passed over in favor of Wikipedia.

What this means

AI search matters and is a powerful, brand-new pipeline to get political information to voters.

This experiment shows how quickly new Wikipedia content can flow into chatbot responses. It stands to reason that the same can be true for many other websites as well, not just the one we tested.

There is plenty of ongoing research into biased training data, post-training adjustments, and how they shape AI outputs. Those questions are important. The need to better understand how web content filters into AI answers is also important and the need is immediate.

What we found is simple (albeit a little unsettling): new web content enters some AI responses quickly, unvetted, and without anyone on the other side watching. Chatbots also strongly prefer certain sources of information over others. This awareness is critical for digital and communications professionals looking to optimize the reach of coverage they generate.

Google AI Overviews now reach over 2 billion people a month worldwide. Two-thirds of American teenagers (aka future voters) use chatbots. This is increasingly where people go to learn about candidates, and in our case, it took twelve minutes and a Wikipedia edit to reshape what they’d find.

Campaigns and political organizations should be thinking about how to get their own information into the right places. That means understanding what sources chatbots are pulling from when voters ask about their candidates and how to influence the way those sources are ranked. The models are already assembling narratives about every candidate on the ballot from whatever they find online. And while we still have a lot to learn about how to shape that process, ignoring it isn’t an option.

To be very clear: We do not recommend campaigns edit their own Wikipedia pages.

Yes, you read that correctly. Now read it again.

What campaigns should be doing is paying attention to what is on their Wikipedia pages and understanding how coverage of their candidate from different outlets is surfacing in chatbots and AI summaries.

What content do you have the most control over? Your candidate’s own website. So make sure it is accessible to AI chatbot crawlers, contains plenty of clear, authoritative facts and figures, and is machine readable.

Because in the age where AI search is increasingly becoming people’s go-to source of information, if your content isn’t making it on there, it might as well not exist.

You can explore our tool and/or reach out at contact@caucus-ai.com if you’re working in this space – we’d love to hear from you!

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Hey y’all! I’m Katie Serrano, the DFW Political Correspondent for Courier Texas. I’ll be your guest author for today’s edition of FWIW.

I live in Dallas and cover local politics throughout North Texas. Over the last year and a half, I’ve spoken with local leaders and community members, looking at policies implemented by the Trump administration and breaking down how they impact everyday Texans.

I also write a free, weekly newsletter called The TexEd Report (subscribe here!) focusing on the intersection between politics and education throughout Texas.

For today’s FWIW, I’m recapping the Texas primary election that took place on March 3 and sharing my perspective on the chaos and confusion that took place in Dallas County on election night.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent just under $12.9 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

If you’re wondering what the heck “Liberty Asset Champions” is, well… the entity, listed as a “fan page” on Facebook, has been running ads telling people that they “don’t need to wait” to claim their stake in Elon Musk’s anticipated SpaceX IPO. The lengthy ad copy sings Donald Trump’s praises and reads like a creepy ChatGPT fanfic.

The Texas Democratic nominee for US Senate, James Talarico, comes in at #6 on this list as he gears up to face the winner of the May runoff election between Republicans Ken Paxton and John Cornyn. If you’ve been following our commentary here the last few weeks, you won’t be surprised to see billionaire Tom Steyer as the only California gubernatorial candidate on this list.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $6.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Interestingly, Democrats and left-leaning organizations seem to be really over-indexing on Google and Youtube investments these days. Billionaire Tom Steyer is joined on this list by Deliver for California, an independent expenditure committee aimed at boosting Steyer’s fellow California gubernatorial candidate San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.

Think Big (not to be confused with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s nonprofit Think Big America) is a PAC supporting Democratic candidates “dedicated to advancing AI innovation in America.” Nearly all of their $236K ad spend last week was thrown behind congressional candidates Jesse Jackson Jr. and Melissa Bean, who were running in IL-02 and IL-08 respectively. ICYMI: Jackson Jr. lost his race to Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, while Bean won hers and will face off against Republican Jennifer Davis in November.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $1.65M on ads so far in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

One blue square! We see you, Matt Mahan.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $506,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

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An exclusive look at the most expensive US Senate primary in history

Over the last three months, it didn’t matter if you lived in Texas or halfway across the country—everyone, from celebrity podcasters to musicians to the President, seemed to have something to say about our US Senate race.

While covering campaign launches and town halls for Democratic candidates James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett, I watched crowds grow from hundreds to thousands leading up to the primary.

As support for both candidates surged, one thing became clear: Texas Democrats were happy to finally have a hard decision to make on Election Day. (Democrats outvoted Republicans by 140,000 votes.)

On the Republican side, it didn’t take long for the race between Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton to get ugly. Cornyn delivered personal blows to Paxton, while Paxton leveraged his MAGA support to quickly close any substantial lead Cornyn was projected to have as the incumbent.

So, it’s no surprise that these competitive and contentious races not only drew national attention, but resulted in Texas setting a national record for the most expensive Senate primary in US history.

Advertising spending exceeded $120 million across the two races, according to a report from the media tracking firm Ad Impact. And it’s about to get even more expensive, as the majority of that money was spent by Cornyn, who’s headed to a runoff election on May 26 against Paxton.

Cornyn received nearly $70 million in ad support ahead of Election Day, yet landed just one percentage point ahead of Paxton, who received around $12 million in the lead up.

With the runoff set, Cornyn wasted no time going back on the offensive, releasing a bizarre AI attack ad taking aim at Paxton’s alleged affair and infidelity.

On the Democratic side, Talarico defeated Crockett by six percentage points and outspent her nearly five-to-one. His campaign spent over $25 million on ads leading up to Election Day, including a splashy six-figure Super Bowl ad that aired in Houston.

Both candidates largely refrained from direct attack ads created by their own camps, remaining fairly positive and staying focused on their own policies and experiences.

Still, that didn’t stop tensions from boiling over online between their supporters.

Political influencers shaped campaign discussions and discourse on social platforms like Threads and TikTok, sparking several think pieces about the impact influencers—and the free advertising they provide—have on today’s political landscape.

But as a reminder: Twitter isn’t real life.

And although online discourse remained heated leading up to Election Day, it didn’t match what I saw on the campaign trail or at the polls.

I attended several events for both candidates and nearly every constituent I spoke to said that even though they were voting for one candidate in March, they would still vote for the other in November if they ended up being the Democratic nominee.

Ultimately, Talarico’s positive, populist campaign strategy focused on fighting billionaires and corruption while leaning into his faith as a Presbyterian seminarian paid off.

“ He’s just got something special that I think we haven’t seen in a politician in a really long time,” Katie Ryan, a voter in Frisco, told me. “He’s got a kind of special sauce of being young and being able to speak to those of us who are under the age of 50. He hits people where we are.  He’s reclaiming my faith in a way that realigns who I am with my values in a political way.”

Chaos, confusion, and voter suppression in Dallas

Election night began on a high note at Crockett’s campaign watch party in downtown Dallas, where I was waiting with a few hundred supporters for results to start trickling in.

But the night quickly took a sour turn before any races were even called. To understand why, we need to back up a few months.

In January, both the Dallas County GOP and Williamson County GOP decided to ditch countywide voting. That meant that although Republican and Democratic voters could vote anywhere across the county during early voting, they were required to cast their ballot at one specifically assigned neighborhood polling location on Election Day.

(In case you didn’t know, Dallas is Crockett’s home base; Round Rock—located in Williamson County—is Talarico’s.)

Although the change was led by Republicans, Texas law requires both state parties to run their primaries exactly the same way, meaning that if Republicans weren’t offering countywide voting locations, Democrats couldn’t either.

So to put it plainly, both Republican party chairs in Dallas and Williamson counties decided to make voting more difficult in the places where Crockett and Talarico would have the most support. They claimed the move would make voting more secure—despite there being no evidence of fraud due to countywide voting.

Democrats warned that the change would cause chaos and confusion on Election Day—and tried their best to warn residents to vote early.

But despite their best efforts, chaos and confusion came out on top.

Over 10,000 voters in Dallas County, unaware of the changes, were turned away from their usual polling sites on Election Day.

Because of the widespread confusion, the Dallas County Democratic Party obtained an order from Judge Clay Jenkins to extend voting hours to 9 p.m. But by 8 p.m., Attorney General Ken Paxton (...who was also on the ballot himself) filed a petition with the Texas Supreme Court to block the extension, which was granted.

The Texas Supreme Court ordered all polling locations to set aside ballots from anyone who got in line after 7 p.m., leaving a number of votes in limbo and delaying results from Dallas County.

“People have been disenfranchised,” Crockett told attendees at her watch party to a chorus of groans and boos. She told guests that she would wait until the morning to make any further announcements about her race, given Dallas County’s size and importance as a voting bloc. Talarico shortly followed suit.

Even with the delays, the margin was wide enough to declare Talarico the winner on election night. Still, nearly 1,800 ballots cast in Dallas County won’t be counted.

But here’s the kicker: After defending the shift to precinct-based voting ahead of the primary election, the Dallas County GOP has now changed course, reversing its decision for the May 26 runoff.

“After causing chaos on Election Day, Republicans are now scrambling to undo the damage they created,” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Kendall Scudder said in a statement following the news. “For months, Democrats warned that forcing a return to a precinct-only system during Election Day would confuse voters, create long lines, and turn people away from the polls, and that’s exactly what happened. This was a completely avoidable failure that wasted taxpayer dollars and undermined voter confidence.”

Let what happened in Dallas County be a warning sign for Democrats across Texas leading up to the general election in November.

At a time when all eyes are on Texas—and when Democrats are trying to win a statewide race here for the first time in 32 years—Republicans wouldn’t be trying so hard to take your vote away if it didn’t matter so much.

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ICYMI: MAHA & the Midterms

Last week, COURIER’s virtual event in partnership with 3.14 Action drew 22K+ live viewers across platforms. The event featured Hank Green, Dr. Mary Trump, Representative Lauren Underwood, Shaughnessy Naughton, and Dr. Vin Gupta discussing how misinformation and policy decisions affect healthcare access and costs in the U.S. Missed it? Watch the full replay on YouTube.

This event is part of a broader series on science, health, and public policy in American democracy. Our next conversation, Facts vs. Fiction: The Fight for Science in American Democracy, is happening Thursday, June 11. RSVP today!

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Scott here. 👋 Following up on our piece about Evie Magazine, this week I dove into Katie Miller’s podcast and was surprised by what I found. I expected rage bait. What I got was something worse.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $14.2 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Topping this week’s list is American Sovereignty – a mysterious conservative group that launched in January. They followed up their pro-ICE Super Bowl ad with new ads encouraging people to “let ICE do their jobs.” Though the message feels like it could be straight from the White House, there’s no public connection. Putting the capital D in Dark money!

Also, for the second week, Facebook found itself in the top 10 spenders on *checks notes* Facebook. They’ve been running this ad highlighting how Facebook Marketplace can be effective for selling vehicles (and presumably other large ticket items). This ad blitz comes amid ongoing problems with Facebook profiting from the millions of scams within its marketplace.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $7.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

This upcoming Tuesday, March 17 is the Illinois primary, so it’s not surprising that Raja Krishnamoorthi’s Senate campaign cracked the top ten list. Less recognizable is The Impact Fund – a PAC spending against Krishnamoorthi’s opponent Juliana Stratton.

Also, with the primary to succeed Gavin Newsom less than 3 months away, the independent expenditure California Back To Basics is spending big to promote San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s bid for governor.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.5 million on ads in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $422,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

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Katie Miller: Clean Up on Aisle MAGA

In the 2024 presidential election, there was a notable gender divide: young men broke for Trump by 14 points, while young women broke for Harris by 17 points. Since then, the conservative machine has come to life pushing right-leaning women-led media properties such as podcasts hosted by Zoomer Brett Cooper, MAHA mom Alex Clark, and Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey. My last piece on the womansphere focused on the right’s “conservative Cosmo” Evie Magazine. Around the time we published that piece, Katie Miller (wife of Stephen Miller) launched her own podcast with Vice President JD Vance as her first guest.

Now that it’s been 7 months, let’s take a look at what’s been happening with Katie Miller’s show, how it subverted my expectations, and what it says about the future of media.

Let’s start with the basics. The first episode launched on August 11, 2025. New episodes are published on Tuesdays and around 30 have come out so far. Guests have included Republican power players like Speaker Mike Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth. Miller has also hosted cultural figures such as Elon Musk, Nicki Minaj, Sean Hannity, Chamath Palihapitiya, and MAHA actress Jenny McCarthy. In many episodes, guests’ wives also join the conversation.

By my count, the show has around 120k cross-platform followers, with Youtube leading at 50k. The Musk and Minaj episodes were the furthest reaching, with 919k & 242k Youtube views respectively. The show’s best performing short-form clips cover lighter topics: Elon Musk’s favorite food (“a cheeseburger”), JD Vance’s current favorite music genre (“classic rock”), and whether Nicki Minaj would consider entering politics (“she already has”).

To be honest, this surprised me. Going in, I expected way more right-wing rage bait. Where was the MAGA cheerleading?! Instead, the show spends most of its time on commonplace lifestyle topics – morning routines, funny stories, and meet-cutes. Occasionally, Miller jokes about topics relating to current events (like whether Kash Patel’s girlfriend is an Israeli Mossad agent), but for the most part, the show leans into its self-assigned podcast category: “Culture.”

Confused, I went digging for more on Miller’s background.

Miller describes herself as a mom of three trying to juggle a career, eat healthy, and work out. Before starting the show, she worked in communications for senators, a vice president (Mike Pence), and Elon Musk’s DOGE. She grew up in a wealthy suburb in South Florida and attended the University of Florida. There, she served as an operative for the dominant student political party and developed an unethical reputation by doing things like dumping over 250 copies of a school newspaper that published an opposing candidate’s endorsement.

Scrolling through Youtube clips from other appearances, I found her proudly calling AOC a “sad, petty, childless adult” on Fox News. She denounced antisemitism and complained about a former guest on Abby Phillip’s show. And on Piers Morgan Uncensored, she managed to both play the victim of antisemitism and threaten to have Cenk Uygur deported. Now, these were the grievances I expected!

It’s clear that Miller is comfortable playing different roles in different contexts, which explains why her podcast topics are so innocuous. Many of this administration’s moves have been insane (to say the least). Her job, in part, seems to be to clean that perception up. Plus, given the podcast’s access to Trump administration officials, it basically feels like an arm of the White House communications department.

Zooming out, what should strategists take away from this? What does this reveal to us about how our media ecosystem is changing?

First, monoculture is dead. Gone are the days of a single Walter Cronkite delivering the news to a mass audience. Instead, millions of niche-focused mini-Cronkites share information across every digital platform. That means if you want to reach a specific group of people, you need to meet them in their digital space. Miller understands this. So, she can confidently play the conservative culture warrior on Fox News while projecting trad-wife energy on her own show, without worrying too much about the audiences overlapping. You can do that too.

Second, the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger is just the latest example of prominent conservatives buying the tracks upon which information flows. Politics is downstream of culture, and we need to recognize that the currents will flow harder against the Left in the future. That means messengers must be able to persuade people in unfriendly territory. Miller claimed that she wants to have people on her show from both sides of the aisle. Will a courageous Democrat, liberal, or leftist take her up on that?

Finally, we must remember that voting identities are “sticky.” Only about 10% of people switch which party they support in a given year. 2024 renewed the Left’s focus on winning back young men’s votes, but this should not be done at the expense of young women. Kamala Harris’s interview with prominent podcaster Alex Cooper undoubtedly helped her win some young women’s votes. The Left must keep making those kinds of investments.

If they don’t… well, the Katie Miller Podcast will be ready to pick up the slack.

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Hi everyone! We’re Andrew Eldredge-Martin and Katie Workman from Ground Truth AI, longtime FWIW readers and today’s guest authors with backgrounds in Democratic paid media, advertising analytics and digital fundraising.

After seeing rightward shifts in 2024 — even in places like Brooklyn and Oakland — we realized campaigns were missing how algorithmic-driven organic content shapes narratives. So we built ClarifyAI, a narrative intelligence platform that gathers and tracks all of YouTube videos mentioning a brand, candidate or issue and analyzes the visuals, audio and sentiment expressed in each video. The Epstein files dominated much of 2025 and 2026 – so we decided to do a landscape analysis on how content covering it is persuading, mobilizing, and engaging viewers in relation to Donald Trump.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $16.5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Unsurprisingly, Texas Democratic Senate primary opponents Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico took 2 of the top 5 spots on this list, both investing nearly $300K each on Meta platforms the week before Election Day. As we now know, Talarico would go on to ultimately secure the nomination. It’s unclear who his opponent will be in November’s general election because Republicans are in disarray and 4-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is headed to a runoff against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on May 26th.

Meanwhile, California’s gubernatorial race continues to unfold in potentially alarming ways and the only candidate spending enough money on Facebook and Instagram ads to consistently make the Top 10 list is (billionaire) Tom Steyer. With Primary Day less than three months away, we’ll be watching to see if and how that changes.

Lastly, you may have clocked Facebook also invested in a six-figure ad buy. Meta advertising on Meta platforms is well… meta (we’ll see ourselves out).

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $9.1 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Texas’ primary election was March 3rd and this data reflects the last full week before E-Day. Still, it’s pretty wild that half of this list is made up of Texan entities. Of the $9.1M spent on Google and YouTube last week, about 1/3 of it was on ads shown in Texas alone.

Also on this list: aforementioned California gubernatorial candidate (billionaire) Tom Steyer.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $1.3M on ads so far in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

Not a blue square in sight.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just under $345,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

What if you could raise more in 2026?

Groups like Common Cause, Earthjustice, and Amnesty International are setting themselves up to crush it in 2026 with Civic Shout, and you can too.

The YouTube Narrative on Epstein & Trump is Overwhelmingly Negative – but Fox News is Trying to Hold the Line

YouTube is the largest media platform on U.S. television screens, significantly bigger than Netflix, which is #2 according to Nielsen. By number of users, YouTube is also the largest vertical video and podcasting platform. When thinking of it as a media intelligence source, it’s also important to remember that it hosts a huge sample of linear television media from all the cable channels and local broadcast stations posting their content there.

For at least the last decade, digital strategists have been sounding the alarm about how YouTube plays a central role in alt-right pipelines. After the 2024 election, reporting emphasized how the right dominates the most-viewed online news accounts and how the algorithm favors right-wing content.

And that’s a massive problem, not least because YouTube is also excellent for reaching low-information voters.

However, the virality and negativity of YouTube’s ecosystem around Donald Trump’s association with Jeffrey Epstein in recent months complicates this narrative and offers lessons for the 2026 cycle and beyond.

We used ClarifyAI to gather and analyze 97,851 YouTube videos (with 6.4 billion views) mentioning Epstein that were posted to the platform between November 17, 2025 and February 20, 2026. Here are the key takeaways.

The YouTube Ecosystem is Consistently Negative on Trump in Epstein-related Videos

Across the videos mentioning Epstein that also referenced Donald Trump, 77% of views were of content that was negative in sentiment, while just 7% of attention was on mixed sentiment and 7% on positive narratives. That’s an 11:1 negative-to-positive view ratio.

This ratio held relatively steady throughout each week in our study, ranging from 4:1 during holiday content lulls to as high as 18:1 after Epstein file releases – but it never inverted.

MAGA Voices Were Winning – Until the Files Starting Dropping and Progressive Creators Mobilized

Looking solely at political news and commentary channels, conservative commentary initially drove significantly more views than progressive content. Between November 17 and December 14, conservative creators generated 2.8 million views, while progressive creators generated only about 600,000 – that’s more than a 4:1 view ratio.

Then everything changed when the first batch of Epstein files was released on December 19. That week, progressive content drove 9.3 million views while right-wing content drove only 700,000 — a 13:1 ratio. By December 28, the gap widened to 54:1.

Before the December 19 release, the progressive story around Epstein was abstract and speculative, while MAGA creators were already defending Trump. Then the file release, even in its heavily-redacted form, gave left-of-center creators a clean and concrete narrative about Trump’s negative associations with Epstein that they rushed to spread, while many right-wing creators went quiet and struggled with how to respond. The right did eventually attempt to respond. During the week of February 1, right-wing political content received 40.2 million views, driven by videos from Sky News Australia (8.3M views), Benny Johnson (7.6M), Candace Owens (2.5M), and others. But even at the MAGA high-water mark, opposition voices still outperformed them by a 1.6:1 view ratio.

The Biggest Creators Covering Trump’s Associations with Epstein

Who drove negative narratives on Trump:

Since the first Epstein file drop, MeidasTouch produced 104 videos and Brian Tyler Cohen produced 74. MeidasTouch and Brian Tyler Cohen alone account for 122.1 million views in our study — more than the entire right-wing commentary ecosystem combined (89.8 million views).

On the other side were Trump’s defenders, which formed a specific coalition: Fox News, right-wing commentary channels, and (surprisingly) some entertainment creators.

Fox News drove 22.5 million positive views defending Trump against his ties with Epstein — more than the entire right-wing commentary ecosystem combined.

Remove Fox, and Trump’s positive coverage drops by half.

Also yes, you read that right: ClarifyAI assessed some content from CNN and MSNBC as positive for Trump. This is due to “balanced” or “both sides” coverage, such as this MSNBC (now MS NOW) short with 2.9 million views showing Rep. Massie and AG Pam Bondi in a heated but even exchange where Bondi defends the DOJ and accuses Massie of “Trump derangement syndrome.” Similarly, this CNN short with a million views shows new photos of Epstein’s island and then credits Trump for signing the bill that released the files – without mentioning his alleged ties to Epstein.

It’s notable that legacy media’s default “balance” framing functionally produces positive coverage for the person under attack.

Entertainment voices are a wildcard. Gaming streamer Asmongold, for example, drove 8.3 million positive views on Trump and Epstein. In this video with 1.5 million views, he suggests Trump acted as a “whistleblower” to help convict Epstein. Entertainment channels that dip into political content can move meaningful numbers — they’re not the core defense infrastructure, but they matter at the margins.

Do the Epstein Files matter to Republicans or just Democrats?

In our past YouTube studies on 2025 election candidates and content mentioning ICE, ClarifyAI’s media analysis has shown the direct impact of digital narratives on public opinion, usually with a 1-2 week time lag – but in this study we don’t see that, at least among Republicans.

Between July and December 2025, Republican approval of Trump’s handling of the Epstein investigation rose from 45% to 58%, according to Economist/YouGov polling. During that period, the administration released very little information, missed its congressional deadline, and the documents that did emerge contained potentially damaging Trump connections.

This is why Fox and similar right-wing creators supporting Trump are deeply important: they enable him to operate in a media ecosystem that is only hostile to him, not unilaterally negative.

For comparison, we also analyzed videos mentioning Epstein that contained narratives about Prince Andrew’s associations with him. We found that 99.97% of views were negative and almost no one posted anything defending Prince Andrew. Only 248,000 views were positive, compared to 915 million negative views — a ratio of more than 3,600-to-1. As a reminder, the same ratio for Trump was “just” 11-to-1.

We were surprised by how little conservative media posted on this story – perhaps intentionally, to avoid spreading narratives that require Republicans to play defense. Conservative audiences hear less about the Epstein files, and when they do, they hear about it from sources like Fox News and MAGA commentators who downplay, defend, and distract from the evidence.

Key Takeaways

Progressive creators such as MeidasTouch and Brian Tyler Cohen displayed remarkable agility, producing over 170 videos to seize the Epstein narrative. This high-volume and quick mobilization achieved a massive view ratio over conservative content, showing that progressive creators can dominate the digital conversation and saturate Democratic and left-leaning independent audiences when they move with speed.

Despite this volume, penetrating the Republican bubble remains a hurdle. While YouTube views reached an 11:1 negative ratio for Trump, his GOP approval actually rose, protected by a media ecosystem that reframes or ignores damaging evidence.

Legacy media’s “both sides” framing may be validating the preconceptions of Republican and right-leaning independent viewers, offering them a narrative reprieve that reinforces existing beliefs.

Sentiment toward Trump on YouTube seems remarkably negative and consistent overall, and not just in relation to Epstein. In a separate study analyzing all the YouTube videos mentioning Trump from September 1st through the end of 2025, we found a 4:1 negative-to-positive view ratio – which is identical to his 4:1 Epstein-related sentiment ratio. This suggests that the YouTube information environment surrounding Trump is consistently negative across topics and the Epstein issue may not be an outlier.

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Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on March 12 for MAHA & the Midterms: How Trump and RFK Jr.’s Agenda Costs Americans.

This live conversation will examine how political choices are reshaping healthcare access ahead of the midterms. We’ll break down how Trump, RFK Jr., and the broader MAHA agenda are impacting public health, who benefits, and what’s at stake for families across the country.

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Hey there! I’m Chanda Daniels, a former Congressional aide and longtime communications strategist for mission-driven causes, working for organizations such as the Mayor’s Office, the UN, Human Rights Watch, and more. I write the newsletter ok so hear me out…, where I explore the intersection of politics, culture, and identity through a personal lens, because the personal is political. Most days you can find me documenting my life in NYC and writing my first book of essays on TikTok (which I think is allowed since I’m a native New Yorker). I'm excited to be today's FWIW guest author!

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $14.5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The Texas Democratic Senate primary has had no shortage of drama and, well, that continues to be the case. Last Monday night, Stephen Colbert (of canceled “Late Show” fame) shared that he was told “in no uncertain terms” by CBS lawyers that his interview with James Talarico would not be allowed to air on the network. CBS later claimed that was not the case… but let’s back up for a second.

CBS’ parent company, Paramount Skydance, is run by David Ellison, who, along with his dad, Larry, is besties with Trump. Until yesterday, Paramount had been in a battle with Netflix to buy Warner Bros. Discovery — either deal requiring regulatory approval from the Justice Department and since the Justice Department is basically in Trump’s pocket, it’s safe to say the winning company would benefit from having a favorable relationship with the president. Whether you believe Colbert or CBS’ version of the story, Paramount has been known to cave to Trump in the past, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they did so again.

Either way, Colbert posted the interview as an “online exclusive” and Talarico made a pretty penny after the incident, raking in $2.5M in 24 hours, the best fundraising day of his campaign. He turned around and spent over $1M on Meta ads last week alone, more than 7x that of his opponent, Jasmine Crockett. If recent polls are to be believed, Democrats’ high early voting turnout is encouraging and either of them has a shot at winning the nomination. At this time next week, the contentious primary will (hopefully) have come to an end, BUT if neither candidate receives at least 50% of the vote, they will advance to a May 26th primary runoff… fun times.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent nearly $7.4 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $1 million on ads so far in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date on the platform where Democrats’ presence continues to dwindle:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent nearly $232,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

It’s rare to see a candidate running in a local election on any list of top US political ad spenders, but former Houston mayor Annise Parker came in at #10 on Snapchat last week. Polls have her as the frontrunner in the Democratic primary for Harris County judge.

Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on March 12 for MAHA & the Midterms: How Trump and RFK Jr.’s Agenda Costs Americans.

This live conversation will examine how political choices are reshaping healthcare access ahead of the midterms. We’ll break down how Trump, RFK Jr., and the broader MAHA agenda are impacting public health, who benefits, and what’s at stake for families across the country.

Featured Speakers include:

• Hank Green, Author + Creator

• Dr. Mary Trump, Psychologist + Author

• U.S. Representative Lauren Underwood, Member of Congress + Registered Nurse

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements.

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Minaj and the Midterms

After 2016, I thought very little could still shock me, until the rise of MAGA Minaj.

As someone who can recite her entire verse in Monster by heart, it was disappointing to reach the third strike I needed to finally delete my “Feeling Myself” playlist from 2014 (Kanye and Drake were the first two). Nicki Minaj’s stark turn from Trump skeptic to his ‘biggest supporter’ and Turning Point USA headline speaker was odd and alarming.

This week, a new report revealed that something nefarious has been at play with Minaj (aside from being on stage with Erika Kirk and Donald Trump), in the form of bots deployed to prop up Minaj’s social media accounts, manipulating the algorithm to push out a coordinated MAGA narrative on a massive scale. Cyabra’s analysis details the rapid speed at which Nicki Minaj’s X account led her to become a conservative culture maker.

Over a three-month period, nearly 19,000 fake accounts accounted for 33% of her overall engagement. While we know bots are everywhere, this level of usage is unusually and extremely high.

Source: Cyabra, ‘Inauthentic Amplification Of Political Discourse On Nicki Minaj’s X Account’

The report exposes a cluster of synchronized messaging such as “I’m proud of you queen,” “mad respect Nicki,” and “you gained some new fans.” These comments weren’t just repetitive; they were posted within the same 2-3 hour period, overall generating more than 31,701 (!) fake interactions.The goal was clear: flood the zone, manipulate the algorithm, manufacture momentum.

But if you don’t have your own “Feeling Myself” playlist, why should you care? Because this is a preview of how the 2026 midterms will be fought online – algorithmic preconditioning shaping feeds months, even years, in advance so that certain narratives feel normal, popular, and culturally inevitable.

While Democrats budget for boosted posts and consultant-produced videos only during election season, the right was playing the long game and has already infiltrated the algorithm. Republicans post year-round and go viral more often than Democrats. Their messaging is woven into fandoms, lifestyle content, and online discourse so stealthily that it often doesn’t register as politics at all. It just feels like the vibe.

Public opinion is shaped and reinforced in the comment section. And now as we see through Minaj’s account, the right is also bolstering their narrative through fake conversations. Coordinated bot engagement doesn’t just inflate numbers — it creates the illusion of consensus and owns the online discourse.

This is the next evolution of digital campaigning: embedding political messaging inside organic ecosystems and influencer networks long before voters see a campaign ad. If Democrats continue their digital strategy as is, they’ll be stuck in the past while the right has already adapted to this new reality (while also owning the majority of social platforms).

There’s still room to maneuver… but we have to move now.

As bot networks and disinformation attacks scale up, Democrats need to enact a digital literacy campaign. Acknowledge and help voters understand that everyone online may not be as they seem. Encourage people to consider whether conversations are real. And if it all seems eerily repetitive and oddly-timed, it probably is.

Another tactic to help win the algorithmic war is one that Democrats have started using, but not nearly at the level they should be. We need to create and activate an ecosystem of influencers, credible voices, and podcasts with their own loyal fanbases to engage in cultural epicenters we are often left out of. It’s time to build authentic relationships across movies, media, Substack, podcasts, and more. Sporadic engagement and sole reliance on traditional media are no longer enough in this current digital landscape.

The right has spent years building an ecosystem of quiet narrative control through their own podcasts, trad wife and other influencers, plus big internet personalities like Candace Owens and Joe Rogan. Democrats, by contrast, often show up only when it’s time to ask for a vote.

That must change.

While it may be too late to build from scratch, it’s not too late to activate existing allies and integrate our messaging into lifestyle content that audiences already engage with. With the recent 2016 nostalgia and reminiscing of the Obama-era circulating online, there’s an opening to regain cultural capital.

Voters shouldn’t first encounter Democrats when it’s time to head to the polls. They should encounter them between pilates and Erewhon lunches. We need to be embedded in the culture, not just parachute in for election season.

The right may have already spent years priming the algorithm to bolster their narrative, but Democrats can still infiltrate if we’re willing to think outside the box and meet the moment.

If we do, we just might, as Nicki once said, “win again.”

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Scott again. 👋 After my last piece about how MAGA-world is cashing in, I didn’t expect my next rabbit hole to start with our smart TV. But when I spotted an unfamiliar app called “Angel,” I started digging. Today’s piece showcases a new wrinkle in the conservative culture machine story and raises bigger questions about audience agency and alternative ways to fund our movement.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $13.1 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Jon Ossoff, Jasmine Crockett, and James Talarico cracked the top 10 last week. Ossoff is running a mix of persuasion and fundraising ads. Crockett’s ads discuss how the establishment and super PACs are working against her, and Talarico’s ads emphasize his electability and how contributions will be used to persuade voters.

Early voting in the Texas primaries opened this past Tuesday and the primary is on March 3rd. So you won’t be surprised to learn that Texas spenders also cracked Google’s top 10.

Political advertisers spent just over $5.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Re Texas: the Cornyn Lonestar Victory Fund and Conservative Texans PAC were among the top spenders this week. The former is supporting John Cornyn’s Senate re-election bid, and the latter is running attack ads against Cornyn’s primary opponent, Wesley Hunt, accusing him of being a RINO.

Also, this chart gave me the pleasure of looking up Rick Jackson. Turns out, he’s a billionaire health care founder and executive who plans to invest at least $50 million of his own money in a bid to become Georgia’s next governor. His ads promise to halve the state income tax, freeze property taxes, and ban DEI. He’s also apparently leading the Republican primary! Sound familiar?

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $791,000 on ads in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

In the top spot is @KeepNewsLocal, a page running ads that praise Trump and decry “fake news” in order to push through a merger between media companies Nexstar and Tegna. If completed, Nexstar would own television stations that reach more than 80% of US households, which violates an FCC rule that no station owner can reach more than 39%. But, to surprise no one, both Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr are supportive and in the process of changing the 39% rule.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $176,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

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What the Left Can Learn From A MAGA–Adjacent Christian Streaming Service

At the beginning of 2025, it felt like American culture had shifted to the right. Professional athletes were doing the “Trump dance.” Pronouns disappeared from email signatures. Sydney Sweeney’s genes jeans. In previous FWIWs, I detailed how new MAGA-aligned organizations like Evie Magazine and the Rockbridge Network helped usher in that change, and then profited from it. So when I saw the Christian-focused streaming service ‘Angel’ app on our smart TV, I was intrigued.

Given the way that MAGA has co-opted Christianity, I assumed it might be yet another vehicle for conservative extremism. But the reality is more complicated. And in some ways, the streaming service is uniquely…democratic? Today, we’ll explore what Angel Studios is, its surprising new direction, and what the Left can learn from its participatory business model.

Let’s start at the beginning. Angel Studios began in 2013 as VidAngel Entertainment. Their original mission was simple: allow viewers to skip “unacceptable scenes,” involving sex, violence, or profanity. For example, if you wanted to skip moments like Ned Stark beheading a man on Game of Thrones, VidAngel had you covered.

Unsurprisingly, Hollywood took issue with this business model. Multiple studios sued, and in 2017, VidAngel filed for bankruptcy. But during its first few years, VidAngel cultivated something more valuable than censored films: a loyal audience.

In late 2016, VidAngel executives began experimenting with crowdfunding. First, they fundraised to help cover operation and legal expenses. When that worked, they tried funding a biblical show about Jesus’s life called The Chosen. They released the pilot on social media, and their fundraiser took off. VidAngel raised over $10 million from 16,000 donors, making it, at the time, the largest crowdfunded media project ever.

After three successful seasons of The Chosen, the rebranded Angel Studios acquired the distribution rights to its next big hit – an indie film called Sound of Freedom. Sound familiar? In a year that most people remember for Barbenheimer, this film about a U.S. government agent who rescues children from international sex traffickers ranked third at the box office behind Barbie and Oppenheimer the weekend both films were released. The story capitalized on QAnon’s fervor, and unsurprisingly, Republican politicians loved it. Ted Cruz and Tim Scott praised the film, and Donald Trump (of Epstein Files fame) hosted a special screening at his Bedminster golf club.

Note: part Sound of Freedom’s financial success can be attributed to its controversial “Pay It Forward” program. At the end of the film, viewers are shown a QR code to buy an extra ticket for someone who can’t afford one. But were those extra screenings empty? The people have questions!!

Beyond Sound of Freedom, Angel’s network frequently intersects with the conservative establishment. Angel’s film Sound of Hope was co-released with the Daily Wire (to the great dismay of the film’s executive producer and star.) Angel executives have appeared on the Heritage Foundation-funded podcast The Daily Signal, and I found 60 articles & videos mentioning “Angel Studios” on Fox News’s website. Plus, Venture capital firm Gigafund (who has invested large sums in Elon Musk’s businesses) led a $47 million investment into Angel Studios.

Setting aside the MAGA and QAnon ties, Angels’ model gets even more interesting.

Angel Studios has continued crowdfunding many of their projects, but that’s not the only way their audience shapes the business. Unlike Netflix or Hulu, Angel lets paying subscribers vote on certain proposed projects before they move forward. The voting system doesn’t apply to every release (only externally-proposed projects that Angel would pay to produce). Still, it’s a surprisingly participatory model for a company who censored an actress in a bra. @HBO – I have ideas!!

Since not every project is voted on, a battle is playing out for where Angel Studios goes next.

Within the past two years, Angel has been experimenting with expanding beyond conservative biblical stories. Last year, the studio acquired distribution rights to Rule Breakers, a scripted film about an all-female Afghan robotics team who rejects gender norms to compete in an international competition. And this summer, Angel acquired the rights to release an animated adaption of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, directed by Andy Serkis and starring Seth Rogen, Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson, Steve Buscemi, Jim Parsons, and Laverne Cox.

Unsurprisingly, some Angel fans are not happy with Animal Farm. On Twitter/X, they lamented that Serkis is “an avowed socialist” and the film features “a trans [woman] and a homosexual star.” Angel executives responded that the film is actually “anti-communist.” But time will tell whether Angel will go the way of the Kellogg Company (which started making bland food to minimize excitement and sexual arousal).

Stepping back, what can the Left learn from Angel Studios? Two lessons stand out.

First, as highlighted in our piece about Evie Magazine, the Left should remember that persuading voters doesn’t start with any one campaign or district. Instead, it starts with funders making investments in culture-first properties to change hearts and minds through the entertainment that people already seek out. After all, messages are better delivered when an audience wants to hear them.

Additionally, Angel Studios’ unique participatory model harkens back to a time when more civic organizations were funded by union dues and a strong membership base, instead of a few wealthy individuals. The Left talks about a politics of empowering working people and those without power, but too often our organizations operate in top-down ways. Voters sense this inauthenticity. Instead of centralizing power and funding, what would it look like to return to a more member-driven model of fundraising and policy-setting?

Angel Studios shows us one iteration of how to engage more deeply with an audience. And if the Left wants to bring in new voters, organizations would do well to give stakeholders more say in exactly what they’re being asked to support.

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Join DEFIANCE.org and COURIER at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on February 24th for the State of the Swamp, a rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union.

Opposition figures, current and former elected officials, celebrities, and other leaders will gather to tell the truth and to counter Donald Trump’s lies. Speakers include Robert DeNiro, Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan, and Senator Ron Wyden.

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Hi everyone! I’m Sarah Stamper, a neuroscientist turned civic data nerd and previous FWIW guest author—excited to be back. Currently, I lead research and data at Murmuration, where my team constructs a holistic view of civic life in America, bringing together data on people, places, and perspectives. I also write State of Us on Substack, where I share insights on what it feels like to live, hope, and participate in democracy today.

For today’s FWIW, I’m writing about how “horizon loss”—the feeling that the future is closing rather than opening—is reshaping Americans’ emotional lives, civic behavior, and expectations of political leadership.This shift has real political consequences, shaping how people respond to campaigns and messaging, and how willing they are to stay engaged.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $12.5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

With less than a month to Primary Day, both Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico made six-figure investments on Meta platforms last week. Combined, that’s over $350,000 in seven days from just those two campaigns alone. The DNC still leads the board at nearly $300K, but the Texas candidates aren’t far behind individually, and together, they rival any single national player.

Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas since 1994 and the last time a Democrat was elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas was in 1988. Could this be the year that changes? Only time will tell…

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $4.5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The big mystery spender on this list is “Georgians for Integrity,” an anonymous group registered in Delaware, running attack ads against gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. Are they Democrats? Are they Republicans? No one seems to know.

What we do know is that Jones, who boasts Trump’s endorsement, is so pissed about these ads that he asked the FCC to step in and help. The Georgia Republican Party is on a similar crusade to get the organization to disclose its donors. When Jones’ campaign called for TV stations to pull these ads from their rotations, the PAC’s lawyer responded that the Lt. Gov. seeks to “halt a healthy discussion about his record by cutting off his critics’ access to the airwaves.” The girlies are fighting!

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $627K on ads so far in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just under $132K on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Join us for the State of the Swamp

Join DEFIANCE.org and COURIER at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on February 24th for the State of the Swamp, a rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union.

Opposition figures, current and former elected officials, celebrities, and other leaders will gather to tell the truth and to counter Donald Trump’s lies. Speakers include Robert DeNiro, Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan, and Senator Ron Wyden.

Use discount code COURIER15 for 15% off tickets

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Breaking the Doom Loop

In Murmuration’s latest Civic Pulse, many Americans describe a sense that the future is closing rather than opening. When we ask people how they feel about the next five years, the dominant mood is not confidence or optimism. It is uncertainty paired with a belief that no matter who is in charge, things won’t really get better.

What stands out is not just pessimism, but the scale of what people fear.

When Americans are invited to describe what could most disrupt their lives this year, many jump quickly to macro-scenarios of societal breakdown: violence, war, collapse, the country unraveling. These are not abstract political complaints or partisan grievances. They are anchored in lived and witnessed events: an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, federal troops deployed in American cities, high-profile political killings, and highly visible immigration raids. Together, they reflect an Overton Window that has shifted so far that once-unthinkable outcomes feel plausible. But, the feelings reported by people also signal a public imagination stuck in threat response and bracing for what could go wrong rather than planning for what could go right.

When fear operates at this scale, it doesn’t just heighten anxiety, it reshapes civic behavior, narrowing people’s willingness to plan, participate, or believe political action will meaningfully change outcomes.

Across multiple questions, Americans describe a future that feels compressed, fragile, and difficult to imagine beyond the near term. A majority believe life for the next generation will be worse than it is today (51%), far outpacing the share who expect it to be better (18%), down dramatically from 2022.

More people say their own future feels uncertain rather than stable (44% vs. 30%), and this sense of constraint shows up in how far ahead they can look: fewer than one in four can imagine their lives beyond the next five years (23%), while almost double say they are only focused on getting through the next few weeks or months (44%). When asked how they feel about the next five years in the United States, the most common response is not hopeful or determined—it is worried.

It’s tempting to treat all of this as a mood shift or another data point in America’s long-running pessimism cycle. But horizon loss—the feeling that the future is too unstable or inaccessible to plan for—is not just emotionally taxing, it’s costly to our communities and detrimental to Americans’ sense of unity. It is also costly politically. Movements and parties that rely on sustained participation, long-term reform, and belief in incremental progress are especially vulnerable when people lose the ability to imagine a future worth working toward.

People who can maintain a longer horizon, who feel the future is more open for them and who believe that with the right leadership things can improve over time, are more likely to believe:

This is one of the deepest risks of perpetual crisis: not just that people become more scared or angrier, but that they become shorter-term and stop believing in their own agency. That loss of agency is inseparable from today’s crisis of political trust.

In this moment, a majority of Americans are deeply skeptical that political leaders care about them or will meaningfully respond to their problems, which only reinforces the sense that planning for the future is futile.

When leadership feels transactional, distant, or perpetually reactive, it shortens people’s time horizons even further. But, people aren’t disengaged because they don’t care; they’re disengaged because they’re conserving energy in a world that feels extractive, unstable and unresponsive.

Reopening the Horizon

So what does leadership need to do to meet this moment?

First, it lengthens the timeline without diminishing urgency. People continue to see today’s threats as real and immediate, but much of modern political and campaign messaging treat every moment as an existential emergency: “Act now before it’s too late,” “This is our last chance to stop Trump,” “Donate in the next 24 hours to save democracy,” or “Everything hinges on what happens today.” That framing can be effective to mobilize people in bursts, but when it becomes constant, it traps people in crisis mode and becomes a recipe for burnout and eventually disengagement. Murmuration data shows that people who believe the future is more open are more trusting, more collaborative, and more likely to stay engaged. Leadership that is more honest and helps people see longer arcs and believe in a future can begin to reopen that horizon.

Second, it lowers the temperature rather than fueling division. When Americans are asked what they want most from political leaders right now, the answer is not someone singularly focused on defeating opponents (only 12%) but a leader who inspires people to find common ground (72%). In a moment defined by horizon loss, people aren’t looking for escalation or constant conflict, but for leadership and messaging that reduces threat, restores a sense of shared fate, and makes it possible to imagine a future that extends beyond the next battle. They are looking for leaders who help them extend their horizon.

Third, it restores agency by making progress visible. When the future feels inaccessible, people disengage not out of apathy but exhaustion. And importantly, Murmuration data indicates most Americans do believe change is possible somewhere: at the local level (70%) and the national level (48%), including 37% who believe change is possible at both. Just 11% believe change is not possible at any level. Messaging that is honest and transparent, closes feedback loops, and points to concrete changes, even small ones, meets people where that belief still exists.

In practice, this means showing people what happened because they participated: documenting how a local ordinance changed because residents organized; reporting back when a school board reversed or amended a decision after community input; explaining clearly, after a vote or campaign, which demands were met, which were not, and why; and pointing to tangible outcomes such as expanded early voting hours, new tenant protections, a stalled policy finally moving forward, a harmful proposal delayed, a new clinic opening, or funding secured for a specific community need. It helps counter the feeling that nothing ever improves and reminds people that participation can still lead to real, visible outcomes over time.

​​You can see glimpses of this posture in some visible political moments: Mamdani drawing attention early in his campaign by physically showing up to protest ICE enforcement actions; Whitmer conducting on-site visits and public briefings following major infrastructure failures in Michigan; Moore structuring his first year in office around specific workforce development and service initiatives with publicly stated benchmarks; Warnock holding “community office hours” across Georgia to discuss federal policy impacts; Beshear delivering regular, detail-oriented updates during COVID and natural disasters; Wu pairing housing and public health proposals with neighborhood-level engagement processes in Boston; Murphy convening ongoing community conversations in Connecticut around gun violence prevention; Murkowski holding statewide town halls about appropriations and infrastructure projects affecting Alaska communities; Massie providing detailed floor explanations of his votes and publishing legislative analysis for constituents in Kentucky; and Cox convening statewide policy forums in Utah and promoting cross-partisan civic initiatives such as “Disagree Better.”

Horizon loss is not inevitable, and it is not permanent. But rebuilding a sense of future will require leadership that resists constant crisis and instead helps people imagine themselves as part of something longer, steadier, and shared. It also requires an intentional commitment to rebuilding that future together.

The encouraging signal in the data is that most Americans still believe in each other and that change is possible, especially close to home. At a moment when the future feels hard to picture, leadership that makes progress visible, lowers threat, and stays oriented toward the long term may be one of the most important civic interventions we have.

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Greetings, FWIW subscribers, I’m Denny Carter, purveyor of the Bad Faith Times newsletter, where I analyze and agonize over the American right’s expert use of bad-faith politics to advance its anti-democracy agenda and what the Democrats should be doing about it.

My background is in journalism and social justice issues, but my day job is as a longtime sportswriter and podcaster, a spreadsheet-loving fantasy football expert since 2012. I can be found posting incessantly on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social, which I have dubbed “The Official App of Sports.”

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $14.2 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Meta platforms were dominated by left-leaning ad spend last week, most notably with James Talarico and Jon Ossoff’s Senate campaigns combining for over $800K. After a testy week in Texas Senate Primaryland, Talarico’s ads touted him as “Democrats’ best chance to flip Texas’ Senate seat,” while Ossoff’s looked ahead to the general election, highlighting the fact that Republicans have already spent $10M against him in Georgia.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent nearly $4.2 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Since Mitch McConnell announced his retirement, three candidates have emerged as frontrunners in the Republican primary to replace him: Rep. Andy Barr (KY-6), former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, and businessowner Nate Morris. In an unsurprising bout of hypocrisy, despite claiming last year that he would “do a lot less” political spending, one Elon Musk recently proceeded to make what Axios deems the biggest single contribution he has ever given a Senate candidate. Musk donated $10M to the Fight for Kentucky super PAC backing Nate Morris, which spent $207K last week alone propping up who they deem to be Kentucky’s “real Trump guy”.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $478,944 on ads so far in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date on the platform where Democratic ad spend continues to dwindle:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $99,295 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism rebranded as Blue Square Alliance Against Hate last year, but is continuing to run ads on Snapchat under both names, taking 2 of the top 3 spots on this list.

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TV Ads Seem To Think Fascism Is Here To Stay – We Better Not Buy It

When the country elected a guy who ran an openly racist, misogynistic 2024 campaign brimming with fascistic messaging about ethnic cleansing and returning the fatherland to its former glory, corporate advertisers swiftly got the message, and their ads over the past 13 months have reflected just that.

In Sunday’s Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks, the eye-wateringly expensive TV ads are sure to reflect what corporations still believe is a permanent rightward shift in the American electorate.

The KFC Colonel is a gigachad. Terry Crews is furiously waving giant American flags on a football field. The head of the UFC is telling Ram Truck drivers to never feel shame about being American while a stonefaced George Washington drives a Ram toward invading British troops. And Billy Bob Thornton and Luke Wilson are dressed up as cowboys, shuffling their way around the western frontier, talking about cell phones.

But…are they right? All of these ads are landing at a moment when a majority of the country is expressing its growing disdain toward the authoritarian excesses that have defined this second Trump term, during a game where the entertainment includes sworn foes of MAGA: Bad Bunny and Green Day. And it’s a game the president will not even be attending for fear of being booed out of the building – and perhaps the state.

Advertisements are always the first to register what corporations perceive as political or cultural swings because they want your money whether democracy or fascism is ascendent. It’s all the same for them, as we know from the spate of extremely woke ads that blanketed the American airwaves during the racial justice reckoning of 2020.

At that time, as the nation turned hard against the first failed Trump administration, every major brand had women of color front and center in their TV ads. They had people of various body sizes. They had LGBTQ folks and people of indeterminate origin. Some big companies even platformed transgender folks (shocking!), a once-unthinkable ad strategy. It was sudden, and jarring, and never really felt sincere. Some of these COVID-era ads linger on the airwaves like artifacts from a long-dead past.

The first year of the second Trump administration has seen a 180-degree shift in how products are advertised to the people who elected the country’s first tyrant because eggs were expensive in 2023. Everything on your TV is hypermasculine. It’s all very much in your face, aggressive and ugly and unyielding, desperate to tap into the zeitgeist that led to the political comeback of an insurrectionist president who had been wildly unpopular throughout his first term in office. These corporations, of course, are selling their products to an American public with consumer confidence on par with the hyper-inflationary days of 2021.

Take the KFC ads as an example of how companies perceive our current political moment.

A generation ago, the KFC Colonel was a round-faced jolly old man with a shock of white hair and a smile splashed across his face. The colonel, soft and pudgy, was happy about his chicken. His grandfatherly demeanor was his main appeal as he tried to sell you his crispy fried chicken thighs,breasts, and wings.

Today the KFC colonel is utterly joyless and square-jawed, sweaty and barrel chested, storming into the KFC kitchen and furiously throwing around pots and pans for workers to clean up, smearing at people who take credit for his various fried chicken-based discoveries. He looks hungover, mad, and generally unpleasant. This fascist colonel is meant to appeal to the very people who elected a proudly fascist president. Today’s KFC colonel is certainly a three-time Trump voter. That, for now, is the appeal.

The aforementioned Ram commercial has blared from my TV for months now, starting with a line that would have been rejected from the script of Idiocracy, of course narrated by ardent Trump ally and UFC President Dana White: “Americans, we can do anything we want, except one thing: We just can’t stop being American.”

This ad, has it all: Red, white, and blue smoke pouring from the back of red, white, and blue Ram trucks; red, white, and blue smoke pouring from the tails of fighter jets; monster trucks soaring through the air; a fucking bald eagle; guys with zoomer-style mullets wearing tuxedos; weary grandmothers with tattoo sleeves; an astronaut on the moon planting an American flag; a guy playing the Star Spangled Banner on electric guitar; cowboy boots and cowboy hats and cowboys boots and cowboy hats, and just when you think you couldn’t get enough cowboy boots and hats, there they are: more fucking cowboys boots and hats.

The Ram commercial is brutally clear, leaving no room for interpretation: Fascism is here, baby, so get comfortable and buy our truck and be a goddamn American because that’s the only thing to be now.

Advertisers’ embrace of cowboy culture goes well beyond the sphere of hideously large trucks, of course. We’ve watched over the past year as two Hollywood veterans, Billy Bob Thornton and Luke Wilson, star in dueling cell phone ads in which both guys mosey around in the desolate western expanse, speaking in hackneyed southern accents, pretending to be salt-of-the-earth American men concerned about the quality of your phone calls and internet connection.

These men are alphas, alone in the unconquered west, bemoaning the lies of competing phone companies trying to rip you off. The two are full of colloquialisms. Wilson, for one, can tell the difference between facts and fertilizer, like any alpha male worth his salt. Thornton and Wilson could not be more American if you tattooed the red, white, and blue on their asses.

It all reminds me of the months and years after 9/11, when every part of American culture served as a mirror to the fear and hatred that would manifest into anti-constitutional policy making that was always going to make us vulnerable to a mad king who recognizes no limits to his power.

Today feels specifically like 2003 – the height of post-9/11 hysteria with the launch of the Iraq war. What you’re experiencing today is the supercharged version, fueled by two decades of letting the computer make us go mad. The shift feels as enduring and permanent today as it did back then, when no one in public life could safely critique the Constitution-shredding boy king.

No cultural turn is permanent though. Remember that as you watch the Super Bowl and see ads desperate to tap into the supposedly far-right zeitgeist that brought a traitorous president back to power. Know that one day it won’t be cool to embrace an American fascist aesthetic. And whenever this lurch to the right feels permanent – when the TV is trying to convince you that there’s no going back – remember that support for the president and his odious regime has already tanked.

It’s important that pro-democracy Americans and elected Democrats in particular reject this messaging, and understand that the party and its leaders have the job of shaping and harnessing those opinions, not meekly giving in to ephemeral polling. It’s important to understand that resistance is not, in fact, futile, and that TV advertising does not reflect reality, but only the corporate idea of reality. And when that reality moves on and the backlash arrives, those corporations will do their best to reflect that as well – belatedly, and poorly.

Really, that backlash is already here. We are only a few months removed from the largest nationwide protests in the country’s history, after all. The Midwest is in open revolt against the federal government. And large majorities of the electorate are ready to toss the entire Department of Homeland Security into the sea.

Americans are ready to move on, if recent special elections are any indication. Woke 2.0 is on its way. Don’t worry, the ads will get there eventually as well. Enjoy the game.

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Hi again. I’m Danielle Butterfield, Executive Director of Priorities USA, back today for another week of FWIW. Before we get into our analysis of the media environment, we want to acknowledge that our country is in a very dark and scary place. There is no justification for what is happening in Minneapolis and other communities across the country. My team and I at Priorities are angry. We are grieving. And we’re thinking seriously about how we turn these emotions into action.

Standing up to protect our immigrant communities from indiscriminate violence is not only the right thing to do, but who are we as a party if we cannot stand against Trump gutting our health care and starving our children to fund a secret police force that terrorizes our communities? We know there’s a lot of work to do to consolidate voters behind a fair and humane immigration system, but what we’ve witnessed over the last few weeks shows us that the tides are turning and persuasion is possible.

We want to spend some time talking about how the political and media worlds are responding to this crisis. But before we get to the ICE and immigration messaging that is breaking through widely in earned and organic spaces, let’s touch on the paid media landscape.

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $4.9 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Of note, Lone Star Rising, the coordinated PAC arm of the Texas Democratic Party, has staked out a pro-Talarico stance in the tight Senate primary – even as the candidates remain laser-focused on fundraising. The group spent $26k on Facebook in this reporting period.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $2.1 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Lots of Google spend is happening in another heated Democratic primary, in Illinois’ 9th District, where Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, State Senator Laura Fine, and activist Kat Abughazaleh are competing to win the safe Democratic seat. It’s one of few races in the country where a fight over ICE operations has already crystallized within the party: Abughazaleh ran spots with aggressive anti-ICE language while Fine and Biss spoke to their official actions responding to ICE activity in Illinois.

Another race worth highlighting on Google is the GOP Kentucky Senate primary, where Daniel Cameron, Andy Barr, and Nate Morris have taken up successive spots in recent polling. Morris is running a unique message to attract voters: his endorsement by Charlie Kirk.

It’s worth noting that DHS has remained a top advertiser across multiple platforms this week. Even as chaos reigns in the streets of Minneapolis, they are pulling out all the stops to recruit online.

And this week, courtesy of AdImpact, we’re adding estimated CTV to the mix. Political advertisers spent $9.8 million across streaming platforms.

While the Texas primaries heat up ahead of their early March date, one special election this Saturday has captured substantial attention as a potential harbinger for the midterms. The once-ruby red Senate District 9 has seen ads from national spenders while both candidates have run generalist digital campaigns. There’s good reason for the GOP to be concerned: Former Representative Beto O’Rourke carried the county in 2018, Biden won it in 2020, and the area has been a flashpoint for Patriot Mobile’s school board activism spearheaded by the Republican candidate who previously served as the group’s spokesperson and as executive director of its PAC.

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On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers have spent approximately $533k in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

It’s not often we see a non-partisan, non-lobbying entity advertise on X, but No Labels has returned to the platform with commentary on the protests in Iran. It’s their first active spot since the end of 2025. While the group remained sporadically active through last year, it hasn’t run an ad on a non-X platform since August.

Finally, on Snapchat, political spenders have placed about $35k in ads so far this year. Here are the top 10 spenders year to date:

Snapchat remains the quietest platform in 2026, though not without its highlights. The two highest GOP-aligned spenders on the platform are both media groups: The Free Press promoted an Epstein-related story and the Daily Wire hawked Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Collection. While we speculate their goal is audience expansion using a youth-centric platform, the targeting doesn’t imply a specific strategy: both are broadly aimed at 18+ audiences across the United States.

The disappearing line between MAGA trolls and federal policy

The role of the manosphere in Trump’s 2024 victory has been joked about and studied ad nauseam, but what deserves closer attention is how much that same manosphere serves as a constant pulse on what’s resonating online and, increasingly, as an upstream driver of federal policy.

The relationship between viral, alt-right creators and direct government action is one that allows the GOP to shape their actions based on what’s garnering online attention, rather than waiting for polling results. In December 2025, ICE launched Operation Metro Surge in response to fraud allegations pushed by right-wing activists, like Christopher F. Rufo, who claimed that Somali communities were stealing millions in taxpayer dollars. Those claims were picked up and amplified by officials like Kristi Noem and Scott Bessent. Then, the day after Christmas, right-wing troll and online provocateur Nick Shirley went viral – with help from MAGA-sphere staples like Elon Musk – claiming that Somali daycares were sitting empty. The video racked up a hundred million views. JD Vance said Shirley deserved a Pulitzer.

In the wake of that video, the Trump administration froze federal funding for early childhood education across the country. Days later, it sent a surge of troops to Minneapolis, adding more than 2000 agents on January 6, 2026.

What followed marks a turning point.

ICE brutality has captured attention. Attention shapes culture. Culture shapes politics. And all of this is unfolding online.

In less than a month, we’ve witnessed the very public murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the kidnapping of children at the hands of ICE on all of our screens. We’ve seen the victims’ parents and spouses issue statements through their anger and grief. And we’ve seen members of Congress get attacked at town halls. The same internet that Trump used to his advantage to win two elections is now spreading his most brutal moments as president far and wide in a matter of minutes.

On Monday, January 26, following the killing of Alex Pretti that Saturday, Resonate reported: “The murder of Alex Pretti and widespread backlash against ICE is still by far the top story on social media.”

We know what comes downstream of this attention: public opinion. A rapid realignment is taking shape and it is opening up new opportunities to reframe and win on immigration – long one of the most entrenched partisan issues. Broadly, support for ICE’s actions and Trump’s management is eroding. Per The New York Times, net approval for Trump on immigration (-17) and the economy (-18) lag behind his overall approval rating (-16).

But we didn’t need a poll to tell us this.

Americans are sending clear, real-time signals about culture shifts through their online behavior. On the day Renee Good was killed, search traffic on related topics surpassed even sports queries. Creators who never normally touch politics are now talking about Minnesota instead of the NFL.

This is a good opportunity to circle back to the most poignant lesson from our loss in 2024: persuasion starts with attention. It’s not enough to craft a compelling message. That message has to break through, a much tougher battle in today’s media ecosystem and attention economy.

As Chris Hayes argues in his book The Siren Call, voters can only recall so many things when they head to the ballot box. We can no longer assume that pouring millions of dollars into a poll-tested ad will automatically lead to views, let alone move the needle.

Money alone doesn’t buy attention. Creativity does.

That means we need to be taking seriously the very real signals voters give us through what they watch, share, search for, and talk about online. The GOP understands this and uses it to shape policy. Hayes recounts Trump’s persistent calls to “build the wall” even though 66% of voters were opposed to it. Still, the slogan drew loads of attention to an issue that at its core, Republicans held an advantage on. They capitalized on the attention and turned it into a persuasion opportunity.

Today, we have folks’ attention. The question is what we do with it.

The number one thing we need is for the violence to stop.

The second thing we need is for voters to lay the blame for what’s happened on Trump and his party.

And the third thing we need is for voters to see the Democratic Party as a home, and a solution for the anger they feel.

All three of these things are possible – at the same time – if we reject false choices. Too often, our work forces us to choose between saying what we want to say and saying what we think will work best. Activists are pitted against strategists. We often want to make the smartest choice, waiting for the polling to guide us. We stay away from issues that feel uncomfortable and stick to the lowest common denominator.

But this moment demands something different.

Activism and strategy must go hand-in-hand. The anger people feel about what’s going on right now will not automatically convert into Democratic support unless Democrats show up alongside them with the level of outrage that is warranted.

Our partners at Equis and Somos have been doing this work for a long time and can point electeds, strategists, and other allies in the right direction when it comes to framing and delivery. But what the data makes clear is the need to have conviction. We need to be tough, have a point of view, and present a real alternative to the world Trump is building. We need to be bold in our anger and righteous in our desire to offer new solutions.

Showing up as leaders who genuinely care – and are willing to fight – is the strongest way to show voters we are in their corner, and eventually earn their support.

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Scott here 👋; happy 2026! The news has been…a lot. It’s hard to believe this is only the third week in January. I hope the start of your year has had some bright spots!

I’ve been looking forward to writing today’s piece. This is a part two from our story last year about the Rockbridge Network, which revealed how MAGA-world fundraises. This story focuses on another organization, 1789 Capital, founded by the same MAGA power brokers. 1789 Capital shows how MAGA profits.

More below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $11.2 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

PragerU came in at the top spot, which is fitting considering that they and 1789 Capital share deep financial ties to conservative heiress Rebekah Mercer. The Patriotic Prophet ran ads pitching “secret” knowledge about how to cash in on a law they claim Trump is about to change. And State + Local Election Alliance leaned on celebrity validators including Bradley Whitford to explain how donating to down-ballot races through its network is an effective way to blunt Trump’s power.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $2.7 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

This week, two non-overtly political organizations cracked the top ten: Money Metals Exchange ran ads focused on selling gold and other precious metals and Iris Social Stock App marketed their social investing platform that follows the portfolios of public figures, including members of Congress.

Additionally, the DNC, Sen. Mark Kelly, and Newsmax ran ads to build their fundraising lists, and the Dept. of Homeland Security continued their ghoulish behavior of running ads encouraging people to self-deport.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $213,000 on ads in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $17,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

ICYMI: Gloves Off is officially live!

COURIER founder and publisher Tara McGowan kicked off her new show with Rep. Jasmine Crockett in a candid, yet hopeful conversation about power, courage, and what real leadership actually looks like. Stream the first episode now on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

1789 Capital: The Secret Financiers Turning Presidential Power Into Profit

This week, we hit one full year of Trump 2.0. Over the past year, we’ve heard repeated claims that Trump and his family have profited off of the presidency. Today, we examine one way that may be happening: MAGA’s new venture capital arm and its investments into a “parallel conservative economy.”

Let’s start with the basics. 1789 Capital was founded in 2022 by Omeed Malik, Chris Buskirk, and Rebekah Mercer. As you may remember, Buskirk also co-founded the Rockbridge Network and Mercer and Malik were among its major donors. The firm was created with the mission to promote “patriotic capitalism” which is conservative-speak for avoiding companies that care about ESG (environmental, social, governance) and DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion).

In practice, their “parallel conservative economy” translated into an investment portfolio made up of artificial intelligence, defense, crypto, fin-tech, rare-earth minerals, spaceflight, alcohol/nicotine, and conservative media companies. A few of their portfolio companies include Substack (FWIW’s publishing site… yeah, we know), Juul, Polymarket, Happy Dad, Perplexity AI, BlinkRX, and unsurprisingly, many of Elon Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, xAI, Neurolink, and Twitter/X.

What do these organizations have in common? You guessed it – the President of the United States. The Nelk Boys welcomed Trump onto their channel; now their alcoholic seltzer brand Happy Dad is backed by 1789 Capital. Musk (famously) donated millions to help elect Trump; now his companies have 1789 Capital investment. There’s overlap between the Rockbridge Network and 1789 Capital because many in the MAGA orbit share the same financial interests. And the man tying it all together is Donald Trump Jr. who, in late 2024, turned down a role in the White House to instead join 1789 Capital as a partner.

Over the past year, the firm’s scale has ballooned. At the end of 2024, 1789 Capital had a modest $150 million assets under management (AUM). At the end of 2025, 1789 Capital crossed $2 billion in AUM – more than a 1200% increase. Proximity to power has its perks.

Concentrating capital is not the only way 1789 Capital has benefited from Trump 2.0. Its portfolio companies have also gotten “lucky” recently with the federal government.

Take Polymarket. In November 2024, the FBI raided the home of CEO Shayne Coplan and seized his phone and electronics as part of an investigation into whether the platform was operating without proper regulatory approval. Then in July 2025, the Dept. of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission formally ended their probes without bringing charges. Just a month later, it was announced that 1789 Capital was investing in Polymarket and that Don Jr. was joining their Advisory Board.

Or take Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth minerals company. In August 2025, 1789 Capital disclosed its investment in Vulcan. Four months later, the company was awarded a $600 million loan from the US Department of Defense as part of a $1.4 billion deal to increase the supply of rare earth magnets.

Obviously, ethics experts are not happy. An executive at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington stated that while this kind of thing is “a problem that impacts the whole of government…there is no modern or historical comparison for what Don Jr. and the President are doing.”

Despite objections, Don Jr., Buskirk, Malik, and their allies are expanding their reach. You won’t be surprised to learn that the three co-founded a swanky, new members-only club in Georgetown called the ‘Executive Branch.’ This invitation-only club is for cabinet secretaries and business moguls, costs over half a million dollars to join, and may just be the subject of a future FWIW.

That’s it for today. Please let me know in a comment what stood out, what we missed, and if you’d be interested in a Part 3 focusing on the ‘Executive Branch.’ Thanks for reading!

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