Hi everyone! We’re the digital team at America’s Voice, a national immigration advocacy organization that uses research, communications, and digital organizing to build public support for immigration reform.

In our last piece for FWIW, we talked about why some of the best messengers on immigration aren’t necessarily immigration experts. They’re the people we already know and trust: our neighbors, teachers, pastors, parents, and creators who have spent years building communities online.

But there’s another part of that conversation we’ve been thinking about a lot lately: the stories we’re asking those messengers to tell.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $40 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Trump is up with a new entity and in case, like us, you can’t keep track of them all, let’s review what his active PACs were up to last week:

• No Going Back ($3.1 million): Active in 29 Senate and House races, it’s basically MAGA in states where the name might trigger backlash. While the House spots are negatives on self-enrichment and corruption, the Senate ads lean into contrast: taxes, health insurance, and “unemployment city”.

• Common Sense Voters Coalition ($4.3 million): The new entity! So far, it’s all generic, fear-motivated mobilization spots. The name and page don’t exactly scream MAGA, but the Meta disclaimer gives it away as MAGA-funded.

• Make America Great Again ($1.8 million): In Texas, apparently there’s no need to shy away from the MAGA brand. 98% of its spending went to a spot titled ‘Weird,’ though we’re still seeing some money behind the older tax contrast spots.

• Safety and Affordability PAC ($400k): Primarily active in the House, this entity is spending broadly on targeted negative content.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $88 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Ballot initiatives have become a real weapon in the political arena on everything from reproductive rights to redistricting. Appropriately, spending behind them has ballooned over the last few cycles, particularly on digital. We tracked $49 million in 2022, $64 million in 2024, and we’re already at $51 million this cycle. With two weeks to go, we expect 2026 will push well past 2024. A few key initiatives to get you oriented:

In California:

• The wealth tax (Prop 40): Tech billionaires, pushing a no vote, dumped $1.8 million last week into fighting higher taxes for themselves. The yes side has just $16k behind it, including this digital spot.

• Another tax thing (Prop 42): This prop would ban taxes on retirement and savings accounts. Much like Prop 40, there’s a lot of educational messaging out there. 42 sits just outside of the top ten here, but had $4 million across all digital platforms last week.

Not in California:

• More tax things (Washington 645): This would repeal the state income tax, a popular issue in ballot fights across the country. Weekly spending broke $1 million, mostly on spots like this one.

• Finally, not taxes—courts! (Montana 132): This one is about whether to allow explicitly partisan judges.

On CTV platforms, U.S. political advertisers spent an estimated $146 million last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Messaging in Texas is all over the place, so here’s your latest debrief on the Senate race:

• Run of the mill anti-trans ads from Texas PAC

• A defense of Ken Paxton, touting his work as AG

• A callout of Paxton’s AI-generated videos of James Talarico

• A Spanish-language spot highlighting Paxton’s role in the Uvalde shootings

• From Lower Costs Now: a pro-Talarico spot and two covering Paxton’s animal abuse and corruption

• A Spanish-language exposé of the Hoffman-Paxton plea deal

Overall, the GOP spent $28 million while Democrats were up with $14.4 million. And we’re sure to see plenty more come through before this thing is over.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, here’s YTD data for the top ten spenders:

Unsurprisingly, WinSenate (an affiliate of Democratic group Senate Majority PAC) was the biggest spender on the platform this week, at $150k. Almost half of that went behind this anti-Husted spot in Ohio.

In second and third place were Jon Ossoff and Bruce Blakeman, who spent $72k and $61k, respectively. Blakeman is still pushing his anti-Hochul saxophone spot, for anyone keeping track.

The Cruelty is the Point

Over the past year, our team has spent countless hours tracking immigration enforcement and abuses of power across the country. We’ve worked with creators and partners to find new ways to bring the human consequences of mass deportation into people’s social media feeds.

And if there’s one thing that has become increasingly clear, it’s this: The violence and cruelty we’re witnessing isn’t a side effect of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. It’s the point.

We’re talking about parents being detained after dropping their kids off at school. Longtime neighbors taken from their communities. Children growing up afraid that their parents might not be there when they get home. Kids as young as 2 years old facing immigration judges alone.

These aren’t abstract policy debates. They’re people’s lives.

And the more we tell these stories, the harder it becomes to pretend that what’s happening is just business as usual.

The People Behind the Headlines

One of the biggest challenges we face as immigration communicators is that enforcement is often discussed in numbers: billions of dollars in enforcement spending, thousands of arrests, dozens of detention facilities expanding across the country. Those numbers matter, of course. They tell us the scale of what’s happening. But they don’t tell us what it feels like.

A statistic can’t capture the fear that spreads through a community when immigration agents show up in the neighborhood. It can’t capture the uncertainty of not knowing where a loved one is being held or when they’ll be released. And it can’t capture a family’s scramble to pay rent, buy groceries, and explain to their children why someone they love isn’t coming home.

Consider the case of a Haitian father in San Diego who was detained by immigration authorities shortly after dropping his toddler off at a Head Start program. What should have been an ordinary morning for a father and his child instead became another example of how immigration enforcement is upending lives in communities across the country.

That’s what gets lost when immigration enforcement is discussed only in terms of arrests and deportation targets. We’re talking about people whose lives change in an instant and about families who have no idea what tomorrow will bring.

For our digital team, stories like these have become central to how we communicate the consequences of mass deportation. Because when people see a parent, a neighbor, or a child instead of an immigration statistic, the conversation changes.

Children Are Paying The Price

Perhaps nowhere is the cruelty more apparent than in what’s happening to children.

According to The Marshall Project, ICE detained more than 500 children ages three and younger between January 2025 and March 2026. We’re talking about babies and toddlers – children who are still learning to talk and who need consistency, stability, and the comfort of their parents.

But behind that number are stories that are even harder to comprehend.

At the detention center in Dilley, Texas, families have reported children experiencing severe emotional distress. A two-year-old boy named Kaleth was reportedly suffering from a fever and refusing to eat the food provided at the facility. When his mother, Joani, asked staff for help, she was allegedly told that his symptoms were all “mental.” According to Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), Kaleth wasn’t receiving adequate medical attention, even as his mother pleaded for assistance.

And he was far from the only child suffering inside the facility. Families have reported severe emotional distress among children, including a 13-year-old who was reportedly placed in isolation after attempting suicide.

These are children whose days should be filled with learning, playing, and spending time with their families. Instead, they’re experiencing fear, isolation, and conditions that child development experts have long warned can cause lasting psychological harm. And for many children – not just immigrant children – that fear doesn’t end when they leave detention. It follows them into their homes, classrooms, and everyday lives.

That’s why we’ve been particularly focused on elevating children’s stories at America’s Voice. Through our work with creators, educators, and children’s advocates, we’re trying to make sure these experiences don’t disappear into the daily flood of immigration headlines.

Why These Stories Are Breaking Through

One thing we’ve learned from working with more than a hundred creators is that people respond to stories that feel close to their own lives.

A video about a complicated immigration court ruling might reach people who already follow immigration news. But a video about a family being separated? That can reach someone who has never paid much attention to immigration policy at all.

And that distinction matters.

Our team works with creators from all kinds of backgrounds, including faith leaders, veterans, teachers, and lifestyle creators. Many don’t consider themselves immigration advocates. That’s part of what makes their voices so powerful. They often recognize something that connects directly to their own values.

A teacher sees the impact on students. A parent thinks about their own children. A faith leader sees a community member who needs support.

That’s how an issue that’s often framed as political becomes personal.

Of course, telling these stories responsibly matters, too. We have to verify the facts, provide context, and make sure we’re not reducing someone’s trauma to a viral moment.

Part of our work is helping creators access credible reporting, research, and firsthand accounts so they can tell these stories accurately and in their own voices.

And importantly, the goal isn’t simply to make people feel sad or angry. It’s to help them understand that the consequences of mass deportation aren’t happening somewhere far away, to people who have nothing to do with their lives. They’re happening all around us – in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and communities across the country.

And it is about people taking action to make it all stop.

The Stories We Need to Keep Telling

As we get closer to Election Day, there will be no shortage of conversations about immigration. We’ll hear about border security, enforcement statistics, and political messaging. We’ll hear plenty of arguments about which policies are popular and which talking points are most effective.

But we hope communicators keep coming back to the real people at the center of those conversations – the children in detention, the parents and children grieving their loved ones caught in the dragnet, and the families being separated.

Because there’s a difference between telling people that an immigration policy is cruel and showing them what that cruelty looks like.

We don’t need every creator, communicator, or organization to become an expert in immigration law. We need more people willing to pay attention, listen to those directly affected, and help tell their stories with care and accuracy.

The Trump administration has made cruelty a defining feature of its immigration agenda. Our responsibility is to make sure the people experiencing that cruelty aren’t reduced to numbers, headlines, or political talking points.

The most powerful way to expose what’s happening isn’t always to explain another policy. Sometimes, it’s simply to tell the story of the person whose life that policy has changed.

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Hi, y’all! I’m Dillon St. Bernard, founder of Team DSB, a creative agency helping organizations and campaigns engage young, multicultural folks online. Our team has led content for political candidates and nonprofits who are defining this political moment, including Angie Nixon, the largest network of youth activists, and leading climate organizations.

As the 2026 election reaches its grand finale, I’ve been advising communicators on what will yield the best results in the final weeks before the midterms.

I’ll tell you exactly what I’ve been telling folks, but first…

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A note from Lisa Graves, author of COURIER’s Grave Injustice

Next Tuesday, October 20, COURIER is hosting a must-watch event in partnership with Americans United: "Weaponizing Faith: Christian Nationalism at the Supreme Court."

I'm thrilled to moderate what I'm sure will be an illuminating, infuriating, and inspiring conversation about the forces behind the weaponization of the Roberts Court and key federal agencies, like the Pentagon under Pete Hegseth. Our panelists — Rachel Lazer, Mike Podhorzer, and Stasha Rhodes — have deep expertise in exposing and countering these extremists.

All Americans have the freedom to worship or not, but no American has the right to impose their religious agenda on the rest of us through the force of law. Regressive billionaires are fueling efforts to control who we can be, who we can love, and how we care for our bodies and families. Together, we can and must take a stand.

Please join us by registering here.

Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $28 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Future Forward is back online for the first time since the 2024 election. They’re running as Lower Costs Now, an entity that has already announced $9 million in paid ads across six Senate races. The group is live in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and Kansas with a broad mix of creative from polished traditional spots and news clips to creator content.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $72 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

As the GOP “privately” concedes that it’s given up on the House majority, attention has shifted to the Senate, and in particular to playing defense in an attempt to hold the upper chamber. No state illustrates that better than Kansas, where Democrat Adam Hamilton nearly tripled his second-quarter fundraising.

On the paid side, non-candidate spending eclipsed candidate spending for the first time last week. Outside spenders poured $1.7 million into the state, with Senate Leadership Fund and Main Street Fund leading the defensive effort. On offense, Lower Costs Now (Future Forward) was the biggest spender, while Senate Majority PAC’s WinSenate launched spots at the tail end of the week.

The creative is mostly familiar territory: immigration, trans attacks, socialism, and diesel/Iran. But some groups are going more local with Kansas-specific messaging: a dueling war over child predation, a return to the Epstein files, and a healthcare spot which contrasts the two candidates.

We may have spoken too soon about Democrats’ other new pickup targets. American Bridge has put money into Florida’s Senate race and even gone online in Mississippi and South Carolina. Democratic megadonor Steve Pajcic is also planning a seven figure ad blitz.

On CTV platforms, U.S. political advertisers spent an estimated $123 million last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

As the GOP grows increasingly worried about their base, they’re reaching for a familiar playbook: anti-choice messaging. Women Speak Out PAC is running ads across multiple states, often in multiple races, including Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, and South Carolina. They’ve spent over $420k so far, with more to come.

This is the first wave of anti-abortion spending we’ve seen from outside groups since 2024 and it’s a completely different tenor from Musk’s October surprise, which sought to muddy the waters around Trump’s abortion stance. It’s also a risky strategy—without careful targeting, Women Speak Out’s ads could end up alienating swing voters rather than turning out the base.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, here’s YTD data for the top 10 spenders:

Mary Peltola has made her Snapchat debut with a moderating spot that highlights her NRA rating. On a platform dominated by young voters, it’s not immediately clear how this tactic will play, though her buyer did provide an undisclosed list for the targeting.

The other new Snapchat spender worth watching is Texas Forever, which has already dropped $30k on the platform across ten placements, all against Ken Paxton.

The Home Stretch Playbook

With less than three weeks to go until Election Day, the temptation is to panic-post with more volume. More graphics. More emails. More of whatever we were already doing.

This home stretch is the time to sharpen what’s already working, get it in front of people who haven’t seen it yet, and lock in the voters who haven’t been paying attention. They’re out there in bigger numbers than we’d like to admit, and they will decide this election. A lot of these voters are scrolling past election content in defiance of business as usual, and their frustration is understandable.

Voters don’t owe us their attention. But it’s our job to earn it, and we’ve got to move fast. This requires clarity, consistency, and the right messengers.

In a FWIW article earlier this year, “The Internet Knows You’re Faking It,” I made the case that you can borrow tactics, but you can’t rent trust.

Assuming you’ve been building that trust muscle all cycle, now’s the time to be both loud and strategic. These final weeks are all about showing up in more places, collaborating with more voices, and delivering the same core message every time.

Five moves for the final stretch

This is the framework I use for everything: create the content, amplify it through people your audience already trusts, and mobilize those people toward the next step. Here are five ways to put that into practice:

• Invite folks to your kitchen table, one voter at a time: Voters are feeling the economic strain, and at this point, every candidate is talking about “the economy,” however abstract. It’s time to get more granular and more emotional by building specific messaging tracks around your plan and your vision. Your message should address voters’ frustration and offer a vision of what can be. This is also the point in the cycle when communicators feel like they’re repeating themselves and try to get cute with their language. Resist the urge by remaining clear and consistent across every imaginable medium.

• Invite your audience in, through the front door: The audiences we’re trying to reach deserve an easy way to learn what we’re about. Consider a “Start Here” hub that doubles as a guide to boost voter confidence. Voters are overwhelmingly encountering misinformation and disinformation. The hub should answer three questions: Who are you? What are you fighting for? What can you do right now? Include key voting information and dates. Pin it on socials and give it prominent placement on your website. Make it easy for voters to be informed.

• Recycle your best content: As communicators, we are often too precious about the stories we tell. Now’s the time to put the work you’ve done over the past several months in front of new audiences. Revisit your best-performing content. Pull your greatest hits. Upload them as-is or with a twist. If it did well before, it will likely do well again and reach a portion of your target audience who have never seen it.

• Run content sprints: You no longer have the luxury of time, so consider the moments where you can capture something immediate and human. This content should answer what folks are asking most: Are you who you say you are? Do you understand what’s at stake? Will you fight? Mix in reaction videos to cultural moments already happening, behind-the-scenes footage, and on-the-street conversations. These final weeks are about credibility, sure. But we can’t forget that credibility goes hand in hand with relatability. Show off your personality!

• Focus on distribution: We seem to have gotten the memo that focusing on content is critical. That’s great, but there’s a new reality: elections in 2026 and beyond will be won or lost by how well we amplify our content across every corner of the internet. Instead of our accounts being the broadcast tower, we’ve got to think in terms of hubs and satellites. The hub is your official page. The satellites are trusted people in orbit: supporters, volunteers, creators, and local celebrities. They post from their own pages, to their own people, in their own voices. Look for amplifiers who expand your reach, validators who lend credibility, and connectors who tap into communities and culture you can’t reach on your own.

Make people believe

We’ve spent this entire cycle experimenting and seemingly making more political content than ever.

The campaigns and movements that win in these closing weeks will do more than produce content. They’ll make people believe in a vision that goes beyond themselves and beyond any single election cycle. Voters are eager to mobilize around belonging, purpose, hope, and possibility. Let’s give them what they want.

As communicators, our focus should be on creating content that resonates, amplifying it through people your audience trusts, and mobilizing voters with clear and useful information.

Transformative change requires nothing less.

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Hi there, me again, Danielle Butterfield, Executive Director and President of Priorities USA. I’m back this week because this past Sunday, I was watching football when an ad for the Texas Senate race came on (ok let’s be real, I was watching the NY Liberty game, but another TV at the bar was playing football). Alas, I live in Brooklyn—I can’t vote in Texas. And neither can most of the people around the country who saw that ad. Texas PAC ran it nationally anyway. That, plus a few other signals have me thinking Republicans are more scared than they’d like us to believe.

More on that in a moment, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $22.2 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

It’s not often we see a lieutenant governor’s campaign crack the top ten, let alone one focused so heavily on persuasion and mobilization content. For folks who haven’t been following LG races this cycle, incumbent Republican Dan Patrick is running for a third term against Democratic State Rep. Vikki Goodwin. LG Patrick is the only major advertiser live in the race—and his panic isn’t unwarranted, as recent polls have flip-flopped in a contest that’s likely to be decided by the strength of Texas’s Senate and gubernatorial coattails.

Patrick’s digital operation is pretty sophisticated for a lower-ballot statewide race: he’s up on CTV and Facebook with a wide range of creative on crime, data centers, and property taxes, to name a few. Goodwin is live on Facebook too, but mostly with fundraising spots. Let’s hope she pivots that money into a strong ground game, because there’s not much time to make up the digital gap.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $57.3 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

In a cycle where Republicans have spent boatloads of money claiming Democrats put children at risk, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) is showing off his digital savvy again with this spot cutting that attack off at the legs. That doesn’t mean he’s ignoring the bread-and-butter: messages on drug prices, the cost of groceries, and Social Security also dominated the Peach State’s airwaves last week.

Though the press has been bleak, Republicans haven’t totally given up on the seat. Senate Leadership Fund is still running with their creative which calls Ossoff a… makeup hog? No Going Back and One Nation stuck to the traditional lane, blaming Ossoff for a higher cost of living. Despite those efforts, Democrats outspent Republicans on digital last week, $8.3 million to $3.8 million.

On CTV platforms, U.S. political advertisers spent an estimated $106.6 million last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The Florida Republican Party spent a second straight week near the bottom of the CTV charts, which officially makes it of interest. They’re spending across a number of statewide races on ads that are very distinctly Floridian:

• In the governor’s race, claiming that Democrat David Jolly will institute a hurricane tax.

• In the CFO’s race (yes, Florida’s Treasurer is called the CFO), saying that Democratic nominee Annette Taddeo would raise taxes.

• And in the AG’s race, running a fairly standard “we lowered crime rates” spot.

There aren’t many bright spots for Democrats in a state where Republican registered voters outnumber them by 1.5 million. But we’ll take what we can get: a recent poll put Jolly “within striking distance” of the governor’s mansion, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) said he hopes to campaign with Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sent her campaign $250k.

But for every good piece of news, there’s a bad one. Another poll showed Republicans with substantial leads in both races, no Democratic outside spenders have gone up on the air, and none have announced plans to do so in the last four weeks. It seems like Jolly and Nixon are on their own at the top of the ballot in the Sunshine State, for now.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, here’s YTD data for the top 10 spenders:

Snapchat spending continues to climb, week-over-week. Last week, $640k flowed onto the platform, the size of a medium-scale Senate CTV buy. Much of that came, as usual, from Democrats: Senate Majority PAC-aligned WinSenate was the top spender at $106k, followed by Sen. Jon Ossoff in second place at $64k. Both ramped up considerably from the previous week, when they spent $67k and $12k respectively.

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And Now Back to That Football Ad

Texas PAC isn’t the only one buying airtime during football. Since September, the Trump administration has spent at least $11 million in taxpayer money on campaign-style ads, including some that aired during NFL games. One is a shortened version of a 2024 Trump campaign ad with a new tag at the end, “Paid for by the U.S. government.” Spoiler: that means you.

It all fits with what we’ve been seeing in our competitive data for months. Republicans are trying to buy their way out of an impending electoral catastrophe, and the polling helps explain why. Democrats are 9 points ahead on the generic congressional ballot in this week’s polling averages. For context, the party leading on that question has gained seats in each of the last seven midterms. Trump’s approval sits at 37%, tied for the lowest pre-midterm rating in half a century. When George W. Bush hit that same mark in 2006, Republicans lost both the House and Senate.

In September, the two parties spent roughly $1.3 billion on ads, with Democrats spending $520.7 million and Republicans $770.9 million. Put another way, that’s about $1.50 in GOP spending for every Democratic dollar.

The gap is widest on TV screens, both broadcast and streaming TV (CTV). Outside of CTV, digital is basically a tie.

Republicans Doubled Down

To see how unusual this is, compare it to September 2024. I’ve pulled presidential spending from the 2024 figures to keep the comparison fair.

Both parties are spending more than they were two years ago. Democrats are up just 3.5%, but Republicans more than doubled their investments. For every new dollar Democrats added, Republicans added about $22, and no, that’s not a typo.

A lot of that new money went into governor’s races, fewer of which were on the ballot in 2024. Republicans’ five largest gubernatorial buys this September totaled about $118 million.

Ohio and Wisconsin show just how much the GOP has ramped up at the gubernatorial level. Republicans are spending more than twice as much as Democrats in Ohio and about two-thirds more in Wisconsin. Tom Tiffany’s campaign alone spent $10.1 million, bankrolled almost entirely by three billionaires.

The House shows the same pattern. Across the 124 districts on the DCCC’s target list, Republican ad dollars grew at about 8x the Democratic rate. Republicans now lead in total spending in those districts ($146.3M vs. $136.0M). In the 19 Republican seats Democrats are working to flip, Republicans have ramped up their ad buys by 154%. In other words, they’re putting a lot more money into defending those seats.

Everything’s Bigger in Texas

The Senate map has moved fast. The Cook Political Report has shifted six Senate races toward Democrats since June, and a majority that once looked like a long shot is now within reach.

Republicans haven’t lost a statewide race in Texas in three decades. In September 2024, they spent $13.8 million on the Texas Senate race. This September, they spent $108.4 million, a 687% increase. Texas PAC, Senate Leadership Fund, the main Republican Senate super PAC, accounts for $65.2 million of it.

The governor’s race is a different story. Gina Hinojosa has spent $3.8 million, compared to Greg Abbott’s $28.3 million.

Altogether, Texas voters saw $137 million in Republican ads in September. Two years ago, Trump carried Texas by 14 points and Ted Cruz by 9. You don’t spend that kind of money on a race you feel good about.

And that pattern holds across red states. In Florida, Republicans outspent Democrats about 11 to 1 in the governor’s race ($17.4M vs. 1.6M). They also poured $7.6 million into a Senate race where Democrats spent almost nothing. Kansas governor ($5.0M vs. $0.6M) and Nebraska Senate ($5.4M vs. $1.9M) followed suit.

Senate Leadership Fund is following the same playbook. After putting more than $30 million into North Carolina, the group paused its spending there in the final weeks and moved seven figures into Kansas, a state Trump won by 16 points in 2024.

How Democrats Are Responding

In plenty of races, Democrats are the ones setting the pace. In September, they outspent Republicans in the Arizona governor’s race ($9.0M vs. $3.2M), the Georgia Senate race ($21.7M vs. $16.3M), and NH-01 ($4.3M vs. $1.5M), along with governor’s races in Oregon and New York.

They’re also going on offense in places Republicans once considered safe. They more than doubled their spending in NJ-07 and IA-01, two seats Republicans currently hold. Democratic spending in the Texas Senate race grew 49%, led by $23.2 million from James Talarico’s campaign.

Super PACs and party committees still do much of the heavy lifting. In the Senate, Dem-aligned WinSenate is outgunned by Senate Leadership Fund ($70.8M vs. $107.3M). In the House, Dem-aligned House Majority PAC and the DCCC combined for $49.8 million, against the GOP’s $78 million from the CLF (House Republicans’ super PAC) and the NRCC. In governor’s races, Democratic money is coming more from candidates and in-state groups.

Democrats are also leaning harder into digital, which now accounts for 44% of their Senate buys, up from 36% in 2024.

Running Through the Tape

With less than four weeks to go, Republicans aren’t slowing down. Money can only do so much to close a gap in the polls, though. In September 2024, Democrats outspent Republicans about two to one in the presidential election ($310.5M vs. $156.4M) and still came up short. At this point, we are unlikely to outspend Republicans in many of these races, so how we finish comes down to what we say with the dollars we have.

In a September poll, Priorities asked battleground registered voters which issues they’re personally concerned about, which they’ve been hearing a lot about lately, and which party they trust to handle each.

Cost of living—whether defined as gas prices and utilities or groceries and day-to-day expenses—is the clear leader. Nearly two in three voters select each as something they personally are very concerned about (64%). And 67%-69% say they’ve been hearing A LOT about them lately. In a poll that runs D+6 on the generic ballot, Democrats hold a net trust advantage of 12 to 13 points.

Some of the issues Republicans have heavily advertised—trans issues, violent crime, and border security—are areas where they hold a trust advantage. But far fewer voters say they’re very concerned about them.

All that said, net trust only tells us so much. It’s largely driven by voters who already have firm opinions. Undecided voters in the same poll (either undecided on a generic ballot or a named battleground senate match-up) were very concerned about many of the same issues: groceries and day-to-day expenses (63%), gas, electricity and utilities (60%), housing (49%), and health care (46%). But, importantly, on all four issues, 27–30% said they were not sure which party they trust more.

Republicans may be running like they’re scared, but among less engaged voters, plenty of minds are still far from made up.

So the next time a Texas Senate ad interrupts your Sunday football (or basketball!), take it as a good sign. Republicans are betting they can spend their way out of this. On November 3, we’ll find out if that’s true.

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Data from AdHawk by Priorities, covering September 2026 persuasion and mobilization spending, with September 2024 as the comparison month. TV includes broadcast and cable. Digital includes CTV, Google, Facebook, and Snapchat. All comparisons list Democrats first, then Republicans. Ratios are Dem:GOP, so 1:1.5 means Republicans spent $1.50 for every $1 Democrats spent.

This piece uses two totals. “All spending” covers every race on the ballot. “Contested races” covers races where both parties spent at least $1 million in September, and is the basis for the 2024 vs. 2026 comparisons.

Polling from Warbler Media Intelligence’s September Landscape Poll of 5,289 registered voters in key House and Senate geographies, fielded September 15 to 21, 2026.

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Hi, it’s me again — I’m Jiggy Geronimo, a progressive narrative strategist, consultant, and budding content creator. But before politics, I was a neuroscientist so I think a lot about how messaging and persuasion actually work in our brains 🧠. I recently co-authored Feelings Over Facts, a strategy for embracing emotions-first narratives. Spoiler alert: The brain and algorithm both reward emotion, surprise, belonging, efficacy, visuals, stories, and repetition.

Our brains are constantly trying to regulate threat and discomfort — which is one reason it’s so hard to change someone’s mind. Conflicting information registers as discomfort and our emotional brain works to protect us from the psychological pain of being wrong. What helps is knowing that other people like you believe something. And that’s where Macklemore comes in.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $17.2 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The Senate map has expanded, so this week we’re looking at which races are heating up—even if they haven’t cracked the top ten. The new map is broad; it includes old reach states like Florida, recent state-level wins like Kansas, and even stretch goals in Mississippi and South Carolina. But, as any operative knows, the money tells us where the party really thinks we can win.

South Carolina and Nebraska have seen some of the biggest increases in Democratic (or Independent) spending in recent weeks, relative to other Senate battlegrounds. In South Carolina’s digital landscape, only Democrat Annie Andrews is live. Her spending grew from $294k the week of September 13 to $455k the week of September 20. Nebraska Values, a super PAC supporting Independent Dan Osborn, made headlines for its aggressive messaging attacking incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts. The PAC spent $206k from September 20 to 26, outspending Ricketts. That’s small potatoes in the grand Senate scheme, but both states are ramping up faster than many top-tier races.

That’s not to say those top-tiers have fallen by the wayside (though in the cases of Georgia and North Carolina, the GOP does appear to have given up). In fact, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) has redirected some of his fundraising efforts to support Texas Senate candidate James Talarico through a rare cross-candidate joint fundraising committee.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $47 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

When it comes to high-ballot races, the House is the Wild West: There are more than 80 races to watch, the dynamics shift quickly, and a race flush with spending one week can go quiet the next. With House Majority PAC (D) spending heavily on Google, it’s clear that understanding the battleground means understanding outside spenders.

So have Democratic outside groups pushed further on offense? Short answer: yes. You can tell by looking at whether their average dollar has gone to redder House races than it did in prior weeks.

In the week of August 2, the average Democratic outside spender’s dollar went to a D+3 district. By September 20, it had moved five points to an R+2.2 district. Also that week, 37% of Dem outside group digital spending was going to R+4 or higher seats, up from just 18% at the end of August.

Republican spending has remained remarkably steady, though. Their outside group share of spending in R+4 or higher seats has held steady between 34-39% since mid-August, while their average dollar has remained solidly in the R+2.0 and R+2.5 range.

On CTV platforms, U.S. political advertisers spent an estimated $92 million last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

We’re going back to No Going Back PAC, which launched in four new places: the Texas Senate race ($22k) and three House races. Between September 20 and 26, they spent $50k in FL-14 (R+4), $50k in MT-01 (R+5), and $33k in AL-02 (R+7). All three are fairly red seats—whether that means No Going Back is playing more defense or simply going after Democrats in redistricted territory and open seats, we’ll see.

But wait, there’s more! Trump’s Safety & Affordability PAC has finally launched on CTV and Google. So far they’re live in AZ-01, WI-03, and PA-07.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, here’s YTD data for the top 10 spenders:

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Macklemore shows us that passion is persuasion

Macklemore is kind of having a moment. His songs leapt up the billboard charts, his streams of ‘Hind’s Hall’ jumped over 1000% in two days, and his recently announced Free Palestine concert tour sold out within minutes.

We all know why. Macklemore announced his support for Palestine while opening for Ed Sheeran and got kicked off the tour following pressure from billionaire Robert Kraft. Then all of Ed Sheeran’s opening acts — including his own band — dropped out in solidarity. Other celebrities, the internet, and the American public began their outpouring of support for both Macklemore and Palestine. And this wasn’t just passive support: donations to a humanitarian aid group were 3x their average.

You might think it’s just because people and the internet love controversy (which they do), but there’s more to the story than that. Three years ago, this same situation would not have catapulted Macklemore’s career to center stage in quite the same way.

So what changed?

Between February 2023 and February 2026, public sympathies swung a whopping 28 points toward Palestinians. Importantly, the shift isn’t confined to the Democratic base — ​​in just one year, independents swung 19 points from +8 pro-Israel to +11 pro-Palestine. And yet, even as this massive shift was taking place, only 2% of survey respondents organically named Israel/Palestine as one of their top 5 issue priorities.

So how then did an issue that would never rise to the top of any poll create such a gigantic cultural shift?

The answer: passion ❤️‍🔥

Pollsters ask people what matters to them, and the answers are stable and predictable (spoiler: always costs). The advice then says that to persuade the masses, you should just talk about whatever rises to the top of the poll, usually by presenting a message that the largest number of people already agree with.

But what actually persuades people isn’t how many other people check a box saying an issue is important. It’s how many feel it passionately enough to become evangelists for a cause.

A political ad that conveys a message you nod and agree with is not what really changes your mind. It’s your friend’s repeated passionate posts online, the heated conversations at dinner with your family, and the feeling that other people like you believe something.

This is social proof. And social proof can persuade the people in the middle who aren’t sure what to think. Because people who aren’t experts (and let’s be real, most people are not political nerds like us) think, “Wow, if everyone around me that I know and trust believes this thing, then it must be the right thing to believe.”

Anat Shenker-Osorio has argued this idea for over a decade, recently coining the term Magnetism to describe it. She asserts that political belief spreads through relationships and repeated, trusted conversation, not through ads repeating whatever a poll says voters want to hear. She rejects the notion that messaging to your base is “preaching to the choir” and asserts that it is actually the choir — not the candidate — who carries the most credibility to persuade. And there is proof that she is right.

Let’s start with ICE, which went from net-positive approval to underwater by a swing of 30 points within one year, one of the fastest and sharpest reversals of public opinion we’ve ever seen. Immigration was Trump’s so-called strongest issue. And yet, a base of Americans, when faced with ICE’s brutality and moral violations, were passionate enough to show up on street corners with whistles, set up mutual aid hubs and school patrols, and share and scream loudly on the internet. That passion, coupled with a clear villain and an igniting moment of ICE murders, set off a storm of social proof that actively moved public opinion.

The right, as usual, has always understood this. They’re constantly throwing red meat to their base because they know their base will serve as credible messengers to spread their ideas.

Take trans athletes: between 2021 and 2025, support for letting athletes compete under their current gender identity fell 10 points overall — including double-digit drops among Democrats and independents. This was a relatively small, but very loud base that kept talking about the issue until it moved public opinion beyond the base.

As the polls tell us, cost matters too, of course — but talking about it with bland messaging doesn’t ignite enough passion. Kamala Harris built her entire 2024 closing argument around cost-of-living and an “opportunity economy” because that’s what the polling said most voters cared about. She still lost economy-focused voters 81 to 18.

Meanwhile, Trump’s closing message wasn’t about the economy at all. Roll Call counted his rally speeches mentioning “border,” “migrant,” or “immigration” about 100 times more than “economy,” “inflation,” or “prices” combined.

One campaign talked about the poll. The other gave its base a villain and red meat. Which one worked?

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is the real proof in the pudding. He entered the 2025 Democratic primary polling in low single digits against a former governor with statewide name recognition. Within five months, he surged from 1% to 32% and then won 56-44. The engine for his rise was 104,000 volunteers who were out preaching the Mamdani gospel through relational organizing.

And yes, Mamdani also ran on economic issues, the same #1 problem that Harris did. The difference wasn’t the topic. It was that one version gave 104,000 people a real villain (billionaires and landlords) and concrete outcomes (frozen rent, free buses, free childcare) which inspired them to activate and evangelize — and the other gave them a sterile ad.

Conventional wisdom says you can take your base for granted and focus on the “moveable middle.” But when you abandon your base, you lose the most free and credible advertising you could have.

Ignoring the base has a cost. While ICE and Gaza were swinging hard toward the Democratic positions, the party’s own approval hit record lows, driven mostly by its own voters souring on leadership they felt wasn’t fighting hard enough.

You can be on the right side of a real, fast-moving shift in public sentiment, and still fail to capture it if your own posture is too cautious, too poll-tested, and too bland for your own base to want to evangelize on your behalf.

Which brings us back to Macklemore. A passionate base changed the temperature of that stadium. And Ed Sheeran just looked like a fool wearing a jacket in the July sun.

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It’s me again, Danielle Butterfield, Executive Director and President of Priorities USA. If you’re like me and spend most of your time around political junkies, strategists, and staffers, it’s easy to get trapped in a bubble—either believing we live on a totally different internet than the voters we’re trying to reach or assuming our own media habits are the norm.

So I decided to see how my political bubble stacks up against reality. I surveyed my network of colleagues, strategists, and friends and compared our media habits head-to-head with data from a major media consumption survey of nearly 5,000 voters my team conducted earlier this summer.

If you’re reading this on Substack, congratulations. You’re part of a very exclusive club. Just 6% of voters use Substack. In my network, it’s 53%.

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:

Turning Point USA is having a moment on digital as one of the key spenders in Arizona’s gubernatorial. They dropped $400k this week; that makes them the biggest GOP spender by a wide margin, and second overall (first? Navajo County Dems). For now, the candidates have taken a back seat: incumbent Governor Katie Hobbs (D) spent only $23k, while challenger Andy Biggs (R) spent $43k.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $38 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Trump-aligned No Going Back rocketed into the no. 2 spot on Google this week. Last week, we focused mostly on the group’s Senate spending, but they’re also spending across thirteen key House districts. At the top of the list is MI-04, where they’ve put nearly half of their $280k spend behind this CTV creative.

Despite the massive war chest behind No Going Back, Trump continues to leverage every budget he has—including the US government—to gain an edge in the midterms. The spot has landed on CTV and Broadcast so far, reminiscent of the DHS buys last year.

On CTV platforms, U.S. political advertisers spent an estimated $84 million last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

For anyone not obsessively following the Texas Senate race (unlikely, if you’re reading this), Texas PAC may look like a bit of an odd duck after the game of chicken among top GOP spenders. But don’t fret—it’s just the GOP PAC Senate Leadership Fund finally lining up behind the same candidate they previously worked against. Much of the party, though, still has its doubts.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, here’s YTD data for the top 10 spenders:

Snapchat is often an afterthought in competitive tactics, but there’s a trend worth watching: Republicans are investing heavily on the platform compared to past cycles.

According to our recent polling, 65% of voters ages 18-24 use Snapchat at least weekly. And its users are more likely to identify as independent or undecided. All this to say, Snapchat is a place where swing voters are hanging out. Do with that what you will.

The partisan spending gap has narrowed dramatically too. At this point in the 2022 cycle, the GOP faced a 90:1 spending disadvantage on Snapchat. This time around? It’s less than 6:1. Here’s a look at the cycle-by-cycle balance, courtesy of AdHawk:

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We all live in an information bubble.

Where Everyone’s Actually Hanging Out

Several years ago, my team set out to better understand voters’ media consumption habits. Now, alongside awesome partners like Equis, Climate Power, NEA, and others, we’re constantly in the field asking voters where they spend their time and how.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, we’re all biased toward our personal digital footprint: the creators we follow, the platforms we use, and what our algorithms show us. When we think about where “everyone else” hangs out online, it’s natural to make assumptions based on what’s popping up on our own screens.

That’s especially true for those of us who work in politics. If we understand how our personal screen time differs from the average voter, we can catch our natural biases and prevent them from affecting our campaign strategy.

So, it’s time for a little self-reflection. Here’s where my network spends time online compared to where voters do.

It’s no surprise to me that my network is heavy on platforms that tend to be a little long-winded and wonky, including Substack (as I mentioned), online audio like Spotify (100% vs. 57%), AI apps (87% vs. 43%), X (66% vs. 27%), and Reddit (55% vs. 26%).

Because many of those apps are open on our screens all day for work, it’s easy to subconsciously assume voters are using them the same way. Remember the “podcast election”? Turns out we’re the ones listening. Most voters are using the internet to stay connected and be entertained. Our work tools are not their hangout spots. Knowing that is step one.

This split is especially clear on social platforms. Nearly everyone I know is on Instagram (92% vs. 51%), but less than half of my peers use Facebook weekly (47% vs. 79%). Voters flip that: they’re far more likely to be on Facebook than on Instagram.

You’ll also notice my network leans away from linear TV and radio. Now, I don’t know anyone who thinks political campaigns are underinvesting in TV ads, but keeping an eye on broadcast still matters. It helps our team spot the core messages and narratives shaping viewers outside our own media bubbles.

YouTube: We’re All on the Same App, But the Vibes are Different

If you know me or my team, you know we can’t go five minutes without talking about how YouTube is the #1 place voters spend time online. Our YouTube usage looks pretty similar: roughly three-quarters or more of both groups use it, and overall video streaming hits 80–90% across the board.

So if we’re all on YouTube, what’s the difference? It’s how and why we watch. I tend to use YouTube as a quick catch-up tool—pulling up a news clip, policy breakdown, or bit of commentary on my phone or laptop. But for voters, it’s often the main screen. 53% of voters spend an hour or more a day on YouTube, compared with 37% of my network.

Streaming platforms show another clear divide. My Slack channels are regularly blowing up with chatter about award-winners on prestige shows like Widow’s Bay and Hacks. So seeing that we stack up subscriptions like HBO Max, Hulu, and Apple TV was no surprise.

But millions of voters are getting their entertainment somewhere else: free platforms where targeted ads reach them right in their living rooms, including Tubi (30% vs. 8%), The Roku Channel (21% vs. 8%), and Pluto TV (16% vs. 3%).

Screen Time Confessions

Logging onto an app is one thing. Where we actually spend our hours is where the real gap shows up. To see how deeply these habits run, we asked people how much time they spend on each platform in an average week.

When you look at who’s spending serious time on these platforms, geography, age, and lifestyle likely explain some of the divide.

My network—the same people who took this survey and the ones I talk to every day—is mostly under 50, and 71% of us live in urban centers like Chicago, New York, and D.C. We spend an hour or more a day on online audio like Spotify and podcasts, AI tools, Instagram, and X.

On the flip side, nearly half of my network (47%) uses Facebook, but not one of us spends an hour or more a day on it. Among voters, 46% do. Facebook might feel like a ghost town to some of us, but for voters, it’s still a watering hole they frequent. And while our research shows that vertical video is reaching more and more generations, it’s happening on different platforms: Instagram for those under 50, and Facebook Reels for those over 50.

The same goes for AM/FM radio. Not a single person in my network listens for an hour or more a day, compared to 26% of voters. And just 13% of us watch an hour or more of linear TV a day, as opposed to 46% of voters.

Some of this is easy to explain. People in cities are more likely to take the train or walk, so we don’t spend much time in the car with the radio on—unlike the 77% of voters who say they live in a suburban or rural area. (Ok, if I’m being 100% honest, I’m guilty of taking a few Lyfts a week, but you can bet I have a podcast or Spotify in my ears.)

What We’re Watching When We Turn Off The News

Now for the fun part: what we’re all watching when we’re not doomscrolling.

First off, my network was more likely to select just about every category. A bunch of political internet nerds over-engaging with a survey? Shocker. My network overindexed on comedy podcasts (hey, Democrats need to be funnier so maybe this is all of us doing our homework!), news and politics, pop culture commentary, travel and world culture, food and cooking, and beauty tutorials. Meanwhile, our voters overindexed on religion and spirituality, science and technology, and gaming.

To get a better sense of our off-the-clock digital lives, I asked my network to describe the types of content they’re watching in these more entertainment-centric categories. They did not hold back. A few highlights:

• “Late 20s/early 30s ‘city girl’ finance and home remodeling influencers”

• “Direct-to-consumer ‘here’s how I made my first million’ videos.”

• “Comedians who are anti-Joe Rogan (like Gianmarco Soresi or Josh Johnson)”

• “Chain restaurant order mukbangs, DUI bodycam videos, and Summer House recaps”

Politics Is Our Personality (Voters, Not So Much)

This is the number that really caught my attention: 87% of my network says politics is “very important” to their personal identity, compared to just 30% of voters.

And more than half of voters surveyed (54%) either stumble across political news passively (42%) or actively avoid it (12%). Sound familiar? I did a whole post on this last month.

Not a single person in my network reported avoiding political news. That’s partly because we genuinely enjoy it, but also because it’s literally in our job descriptions.

Demographics explain a big part of this disconnect: 64% of voters don’t have a bachelor’s degree, while the rate among colleagues in my field is much higher. When your job revolves around policies and politicians, it forces you to stay up to date on what’s happening in the news. It’s easy to forget that most people aren’t spending their time tracking whatever crazy thing Trump and his cronies are doing on a given day.

When I asked my network in open-ended prompts what political news topics they’d recently encountered online, the answers were… revealing:

• “Data center energy buildout and power grid strain”

• “SCOTUS White House ballroom ruling and Trump’s $1 coin”

• “Missouri redistricting, DSA candidate backlash, and 2028 primary speculation”

• “USPS system changes affecting mail-in voting”

Trump’s $1 coin? We really do follow everything.

The truth is, we track legal rulings the way sports fans track trade deadlines. But while the average voter is keeping up with the news, they’re not necessarily following it with our level of granularity. Real world issues like gas prices and cost-of-living pressure break through, as do major international headlines like the war in Iran.

What Keeps Us All Up at Night

Our media diets and backgrounds may be different, but when we asked about issues people were very concerned about, one in particular stood out: AI. Both groups showed similar levels of concern around fake AI photos/audio and AI data center growth. Given what we’re seeing in other research and reporting, I’d expect that concern to keep growing. Still, for voters, the cost of gas, electricity, and utilities ranked as the biggest concern overall.

If we want our campaigns to land outside our own group chats, we have to connect not just with the issues that are top of mind, but with the social and information environments where voters actually spend their time.

We’re all living in different, algorithm-driven online worlds, and my network clearly has a few major blind spots. Voters aren’t going to break into our bubble to find us. We have to build plans that meet them where their lives are happening.

So, fellow members of the exclusive Substack club: close a few tabs. And maybe even open Facebook… just for research.

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Hey kids! I’m Josh Millman, a media and marketing executive who has somehow survived more than two decades planning and buying advertising, including as COO of Plowshare and an executive at Publicis Media. I’ve worked on campaigns for everything from cell phone plans to efforts that helped millions of Americans quit smoking. I’ve also helped organizations including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Wounded Warrior Project, NMDP and Best Friends Animal Society secure billions of dollars’ worth of donated media through public service campaigns.

When I’m not thinking about media, I’m usually wasting entirely too much time on fantasy sports or eating something with enough sugar to make Wilford Brimley spin in his grave. By the time you finish reading this, my wife and daughters will have called me “bro” and mocked my outfit about 4,000 times.

I’m here to say a few words, drop a pop culture reference or two and give you the inside scoop on the impact an industry I’ve managed to make a career out of for more than half my life is about to have on the midterm elections.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around 12.6 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

It’s no surprise that the post-Labor Day landscape is dominated by Senate spending. If we read the tea leaves on the GOP PAC side, we can get a closer look at how the party is dividing up the battleground.

Among the top GOP PACs on digital this week: Senate Leadership Fund, MAGA Inc., One Nation, No Going Back, NRSC, and America PAC.

• New Hampshire and Ohio each saw five of the six live, missing only MAGA Inc.

• Only one race had a single spender: Nebraska, where the NRSC opened up with $60k in a tightening race.

• MAGA Inc. was live exclusively in Texas, while Trump’s new entity, No Going Back, was up in Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio (probably to keep some distance from the Trump brand-name association).

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $28.7 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Two new entities in the top ten this week are worth flagging: the Congressional Leadership Fund across House races and Rick Jackson in the Georgia gubernatorial.

CLF was live in 15 districts nationwide with some notable spikes. They tripled spending over last week in CO-08, nearly doubled it in AZ-06 and IA-01, and also opened in eight districts with a minimum digital investment of $85k each. Topping the list were PA-10 ($160k), MI-07 ($140k), and WA-03 ($125k).

Rick Jackson was by far the largest spender in Georgia’s gubernatorial, dropping more than $2.2 million across all platforms. Former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms trailed with only $50k overall, tilting the balance sharply toward Republicans, $2.2 million to… well, $70k (KLB’s $50k + $20k from allies).

On CTV platforms, U.S. political advertisers spent an estimated $66.7 million last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

MAGA Inc.’s war chest is starting to deplete in earnest across the battleground—or at least in one battleground in particular.

The group has crammed nearly $8 million into Texas’s Senate race since the beginning of September, with $7 million of that landing in the last week alone, spread across two creatives running fairly standard economic contrast messaging.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, here’s YTD data for the top 10 spenders:

No on CA 40 2026 is really hitting Snapchat hard; they’re the only spender on the platform to break $100k weekly. On the GOP side, Senate Leadership Fund and One Nation spent a combined $51k, making them the third-highest spenders in the week when tallied together.

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The Political Ad Industry Approves This Message

Congratulations everyone! We just survived the summer of diarrhea lettuce with the FDA overseen by a guy who once had a brain worm. Now, welcome to the fall of political earworms and diarrhea of your screens.

It’s election season!

Over the next several weeks, nearly every screen you own will be bombarded with political advertising: your phone, TV, Youtube, streaming services, social media, websites, apps. Radio and podcasts will get in on the fun too.

Add the yard signs, mailers and increasingly unhinged text messages from candidates who will pursue you with the persistence of a past booty call who cannot take a hint, and politicians will soon be harder to avoid than your extended family’s political opinions at Thanksgiving.

I’ve spent more than two decades in media planning and buying, including more than a decade as an executive, so I can tell you this isn’t an accident. It’s the point.

Political campaigns are trying to flood the zone. At its most basic level, advertising creates awareness and frequency: Here’s the candidate. Here’s what the candidate stands for. Here’s the candidate again. And again. And again.

But modern political advertising is considerably more sophisticated than name recognition. Campaigns are also testing which issues actually motivate voters, particularly people who might be persuadable or need a little extra motivation to turn out.

And nothing motivates quite like fear.

Fear that someone is coming for your money. Your job. Your health care. Your rights. Your neighborhood. Your children. Democracy itself. Pick an issue and someone has probably produced a 30-second ad explaining why you are 60 days away from losing it forever.

The 2024 presidential election offered a particularly revealing example.

Donald Trump’s campaign spent heavily on ads attacking Kamala Harris over her previous support for providing medically necessary gender-affirming care to transgender federal prisoners. One memorable ad concluded: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

According to post-election reporting on testing conducted by Future Forward, Harris’ leading super PAC, one related Trump ad moved voter preference 2.7 percentage points toward Trump among people who viewed it. Other research found no statistically significant change in voting intention from exposure to anti-trans ads, so precisely how much the campaign moved votes remains debatable.

From a media perspective, however, the lesson is straightforward: When testing suggests a message is breaking through, you throw more money behind it like Jordan Belfort tossing fun coupons and lobsters at the feds.

After all, why spend precious airtime building bridges when fear can be easier to manufacture, particularly around a small population many Americans may rarely encounter in their everyday lives? Of course, having a tiny share of the population dominate a wildly disproportionate amount of the political conversation is hardly a new phenomenon.

From there, the machine goes to work.

Television is only the part you can easily see. Behind it sits an extraordinarily sophisticated data ecosystem. Campaigns and political organizations can combine voter files, consumer information, behavioral signals and modeled audiences to determine not merely what messages to run, but who should see them.

That’s where the media planners, buyers, ad exchanges and demand-side platforms, or DSPs, enter the picture. In the simplest possible terms, enormous amounts of political money are matched with enormous amounts of data to put an advertisement on the right screen at the right time.

The goal might be awareness. It might be a website visit, a donation, or a volunteer signup. Ultimately, it might be getting you to vote.

And there is an extraordinary amount of money available to do it.

AdImpact currently projects $11.6 billion in political advertising during the 2026 election cycle, which would make it the most expensive cycle on record. Broadcast television alone is projected to receive $5.6 billion, while connected television is expected to account for another $2.7 billion.

Without a presidential race, much of that money becomes intensely concentrated around congressional, gubernatorial, state and local contests. AdImpact projects a record $3.7 billion for down-ballot and state legislative races.

That concentration has consequences beyond annoying the living hell out of you in between quarters of a football game.

Political campaigns operate on immovable deadlines. Election Day is Election Day, despite the fact that the continued existence of free and fair elections has somehow become something Americans now regularly find themselves arguing about.

Candidates also receive certain protections in broadcast advertising. During the 60 days preceding a general election, for example, legally qualified candidates are entitled to a station’s lowest unit charge for comparable advertising time.

As political spending accelerates, available local inventory gets tighter. And when billions of dollars pour into a finite advertising marketplace over a relatively short period of time, the effects extend well beyond the candidates whose faces are suddenly everywhere.

I’ve seen those consequences firsthand while managing advertising for nonprofit organizations. Many nonprofits supplement their paid campaigns with public service announcements that television and radio stations air using donated inventory. According to internal data I’ve relied on in managing those campaigns, I’ve seen available PSA airings decline by nearly double-digit percentages from one quarter to the next during election cycles.

It makes perfect economic sense. When someone arrives with a Scrooge McDuck vault to purchase airtime, the free stuff becomes considerably less attractive.

Unfortunately, that can leave nonprofits fighting for awareness immediately before one of the most important charitable giving periods of the year. We’ve had to develop contingency plans, move messages into digital channels and prepare organizations for the possibility that their campaigns simply won’t receive the exposure they would during a normal year.

Small businesses can get squeezed, too. A local business trying to generate awareness heading into the holiday season suddenly finds itself competing for finite inventory with political organizations carrying enormous budgets and an expiration date.

The political advertising ecosystem isn’t disappearing anytime soon. There is too much money involved, too much technology available and too much evidence that advertising can influence what people know, feel and do.

So what can you do about it?

Do your homework before the machine does it for you.

That advice applies to voters, but it may matter even more for those of us who understand how the machine works.

For all of us operating within the broader political marketing ecosystem, every impression, audience segment, frequency cap and optimization ultimately lands in front of an actual person. The technology has become extraordinarily good at finding the right voter, at the right moment, with the message most likely to move them. That makes the work more effective. It also makes the choices behind that work more consequential.

Those of us who understand that process also have an opportunity beyond our professional roles. We can encourage the people around us to visit campaign websites and understand what candidates say they support. We can point them toward credible reporting about their records and claims. We can encourage them to seek out viewpoints that challenge their own rather than allowing a social media algorithm to construct an increasingly comfortable echo chamber around them.

And we can remind them to pay attention to the races farther down the ballot. State legislators, county officials, mayors, councils and school boards make decisions that can affect taxes, schools, roads, development and everyday life far more directly than their comparatively tiny share of political coverage would suggest.

Media literacy becomes a lot more useful when it leaves the media industry. And an informed electorate is a dangerous thing, at least if you’re in the business of trying to manipulate one.

The ads are coming. You can’t stop them or escape them. Somewhere, an exhausted 26-year-old media planner is staring dead-eyed at a frequency report, wondering if there are any chicken Caesar wraps left in Conference Room B from the vendor lunch-and-learn while simultaneously figuring out how to make sure you see even more of them.

And that is worth remembering for everyone who works in this business. We have a responsibility to think about how we do this work, but our influence does not have to end when we close our laptops.

If we’re serious about government of, by and for the people, those of us who understand how the system works have an opportunity to do more than just operate it. We can help the people around us understand it, question it and make informed decisions before the machine does it for them.

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We’re Cassandra Custis and Andrew Eldredge-Martin from GroundTruth AI. Cassandra’s background is in political research and polling, with a focus on race, public opinion, and political behavior. Drew’s background is in narrative intelligence, advertising and analytics. Together, we’re interested in which political messages break through on YouTube, who’s spreading them and what campaigns can learn as a result.

So this week, we’re taking a closer look at Georgia. Same Senate seat, same election, two very different stories.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $11.3 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The story of this week across all platforms is new spending from major Republican war chests: Elon’s America PAC and Trump’s No Way Back PAC. We covered America PAC’s first wave of spending last week with its anti-socialist mobilization spots. This week, the first persuasion hits have started to come down on Google and CTV. Despicable as the ads may be, the bulk of spend hasn’t hit yet: we’re counting only $590k so far across Meta, Google, and CTV.

The good news? America PAC is mistrafficking all over the place. Turns out “move fast and break things” still doesn’t work in Washington politics.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $26.2 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Musk and Trump may be the splashiest stories of the week, but the usual suspects still account for a large chunk of the action. Senate Leadership Fund, One Nation, and American Action Network made up 16% of all Google political spending. Narrow that down to House and Senate races, and their share jumps to 25%.

The Navajo County Dems are another spender of interest, dropping more than $2.1 million across all platforms. Most of that went into the Arizona governor’s race, dominated by this Spanish-language creative. The group was also a notable spender in the attorney general race and several legislative contests, including State Senate District 4.

On CTV platforms, U.S. political advertisers spent an estimated $56 million last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

While most eyes have been on the Senate race in the Lone Star State, incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott has built a huge spending lead over his opponent, State Rep. Gina Hinojosa. Abbott has consistently shown up in the top ten on several platforms in recent weeks and though Hinojosa did crack the top ten on Meta last week, her campaign was primarily focused on fundraising.

Over the past week, Abbott spent $7.1 million across all platforms, compared to just $383k from Hinojosa’s campaign. The gap is similarly stark looking back to the beginning of August: $21.7 million from Abbott vs. $1.5 million from Hinojosa.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, here’s YTD data for the top 10 spenders:

For the first time in a while, a major GOP persuasion spender has entered the Snapchat villa! While the affiliated Senate Leadership Fund has spent only $14k (as we covered last week), their 501(c)(4) has been considerably more active—enough to pass the left-aligned, perennial Snapchat spender Senate Majority PAC.

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Jon Ossoff is giving the internet exactly what it wants

What’s breaking through in Georgia

Georgia’s on our mind today, and FWIW, it should be on everyone’s. Jon Ossoff – the only Democratic senator defending a seat in a state Trump won in 2024 – is having a hell of a run, heading toward November with a nearly double-digit polling lead and a serious cash advantage. The latest polls have Ossoff up 52% to 43% over Republican Mike Collins and he’s also been a stellar fundraiser, outraising his opponent nearly 10-to-1 last quarter. He’s sitting on a reported $42 million cash on hand, nearly double what Democratic Senate hopefuls James Talarico and Roy Cooper have banked in Texas and North Carolina respectively.

But polling and fundraising tell only part of the story.

ClarifyAI helps turn thousands of YouTube videos into a clear picture of which narratives are breaking through and who’s driving them. We turned that lens on Georgia’s Senate race, assessing 3,765 videos with 70 million combined views across July and August. In short, Ossoff isn’t just winning YouTube, he’s winning bigly by a lot. He commands 87% of all views between the two candidates, and 85% of his views are positive. Collins pulls the other 13% and 86% of his view share comes from people dunking on him.

Ossoff gives people something to share

The positive content about Ossoff reinforces a consistent message: he has momentum, he’s doing his job in the Senate, and he’s willing to challenge President Trump and his administration. In our narrative analysis, content focused on his campaign strength and polling leads alone generated 35.7 million views, representing 58% of views across the Ossoff narratives we tracked. Other favorable narratives highlight his policy work, including healthcare, veterans’ issues and rural communities, along with his campaign skills and assertive questioning in Senate hearings.

The Senate hearing clips are especially useful because they give viewers something concrete to visualize. Ossoff asks a direct yes or no question. A Trump official dodges and stumbles through what should be a straightforward answer. It’s an easy clip people can pick up and run with.

Ossoff and his team treat Senate committee rooms as high-yield content studios designed for third-party creators, late-night hosts, and commentary channels to clip and monetize.

Ossoff’s positive content comes from a range of sources: news outlets like MSNBC and CNN, online political commentators, his own Senate and other campaign channels, and late-night television. Across those different creators, the basic story is the same: Ossoff is a candidate with momentum who is actively good at his job.

Narratives about his presidential potential were also picked up in our analysis. That’s not entirely surprising as Ossoff has already made it onto the likely long list of 2028 Democratic presidential nominee favorites in coverage from outlets like New York Times and the Washington Post. Which, okay, one election at a time.

Ossoff does face criticism and the data shows it. Negative narratives include opposition to his political positions and voting record, broader attacks on his candidacy and pushback on his continued criticism of the Trump administration. But those attacks are dwarfed by a much larger volume and reach of positive content.

Collins’ associations become the story

Collins is living in a different data set entirely. Political criticism and doubts about his Senate prospects generated 4.3 million views, representing 45% of views across the narratives we tracked about him. Other themes focus on his relationship with Trump, ethics and hiring concerns, political associations, and difficulty expanding his appeal beyond MAGA voters. Put together, it’s a portrait of a candidate with questionable electability and judgment.

In the study’s final week (August 24-31), accusations of racism and antisemitism made up 34% of views across both candidates, making it the largest single narrative of the period. The uptick coincided with news that yet another former Collins staffer had white nationalist ties and a trail of troubling social media posts.

And Ossoff actively pushed that narrative forward. At a previously planned stop in Macon, he used the new reporting to argue that Collins’s associations were disqualifying, not only for the Senate but for the office he already holds. His campaign turned that response into content for its own YouTube channel, while C-SPAN posted its own clip.

Creators carried the argument even further. Philip DeFranco, with 6.64 million subscribers, folded the staffer story, past controversies, Ossoff’s criticism and Collins’s responses into a broader news roundup that pulled 489,252 views. Political commentary channels gave the story dedicated treatment. TabithaSpeaksPolitics devoted an entire video to the company Collins keeps, while Jesse Dollemore built a 12-minute segment around Ossoff’s response. Those videos received 23,630 and 61,095 views, respectively.

Collins’s associations have become more than a campaign liability. They’ve become the story. Ossoff is using them to question whether Collins belongs in public office at all, and YouTube content is carrying and reinforcing that case.

What Democrats can learn from Georgia

We haven’t yet seen how Collins will respond to this latest barrage of negative content. But with videos about Ossoff drawing nearly 7x as many views in our study, Collins already faces an uphill battle to get his own narrative heard on YouTube.

For Ossoff, the task at hand is pretty straightforward: keep showing Georgians what he’s doing with the seat they gave him. Take clear positions, stand up for constituents, challenge a controversial administration when it matters. The positive narratives surrounding Ossoff on YouTube offer Democrats a lesson in giving people something concrete to support.

Voters need something they can point to and share, something that lets them say, “My senator does that.” Showing what you’re doing for the people you represent matters, especially when you’re asking them to believe that participating in politics is worthwhile.

We can’t say whether the attention Ossoff has generated translates into votes, but we can see how that attention builds a story about a candidate with support, conviction, and a willingness to fight.

If you want to delve further into the data on which narratives are driving the conversation around a competitive race, issue or organization, or you have a client who needs help breaking down negative narratives across the media ecosystem, reach out at info@groundtruthai.org to learn more!

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Hi, I’m Amb. (ret.) Nina Hachigian, CEO of Alliance for Local Leaders International (ALLIES), a new organization connecting mayors around the world so they can learn from each other and share best practices as democracies backslide. Previously, I served as the first U.S. Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy under the Biden Administration and as the second U.S. Ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations under the Obama Administration.

Mayors are on my mind constantly these days—specifically, how they’re stepping up at a moment when democracy is under strain. Their leadership, creativity, and commitment to protecting their residents show what democracy looks like at its most local level. There’s a lot the rest of us can learn from them as we navigate this uncertain moment.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $11.3 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Our “Spender of the Week” is America PAC, Elon Musk’s mega-entity. Musk only recently announced plans to spend big this cycle, and it’s already begun. The PAC has spent $250k on Meta so far, largely focused on broad mobilization efforts and criticizing Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $24.5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The Environmental Defense Fund catapulted into the top ten here with last week’s investments. Their Google spend has been remarkably focused, with every dollar going against Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH). Interestingly, their Facebook approach has been quite different and predominantly centered on educating voters about the Arizona Corporation Commission.

On CTV platforms, U.S. political advertisers spent an estimated $50.6 million last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

One Nation continues to pour serious money into the Georgia Senate race, even if the spending has slightly tapered off. The GOP PAC spent $1.19m on CTV in Georgia, targeting Sen. Jon Ossoff. The only state where they spent more was Ohio ($1.3m).

Other major One Nation targets last week? Iowa ($470k), New Hampshire ($260k), Maine ($220k), and Alaska ($140k).

Notably absent: Texas, Michigan, and North Carolina. That doesn’t mean Republicans have stopped spending in those states however. The latter two have been propped up by our second highest spender, the Senate Leadership Fund ($1.1m in North Carolina and $860k in Michigan).

…and lastly, on Snapchat, here’s YTD data for the top 10 spenders:

Last week, we highlighted the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the GOP counterpart to Democratic group Senate Majority PAC (SMP).

SMP has always been active on Snapchat: they’re the sixth highest spender of all time on the platform, with more than $1m spent since the start of 2021.

This cycle is no different, as SMP is the eighth highest spender since the start of the year at $80k spent. SLF, in comparison, has only spent $9k.

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The Mayors’ Guide to Communications

Every election cycle, campaigns and politicians in both parties spend enormous amounts of money trying to answer the same question: How do you sound authentic? How do you get people to believe you in a media environment designed to make belief—and persuasion—nearly impossible?

Mayors have some answers. National political discourse tends to overlook them, but that’s a mistake. They experiment with communications tactics elected officials at every level of government could learn from.

Trust is paramount. Americans trust their mayors far more than their governors, senators, or president, at a rate of about 70%, more than 30 points higher than federal officials. Some of that gap is sheer proximity. People run into their mayor at Little League or the grocery store. They’re members of the same community. As Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly puts it, mayors have to “eat their own cooking.”

But increasingly, trust is also being built and defended online, through digital communication tactics many national figures still haven’t fully embraced.

As someone who runs the Alliance for Local Leaders International (ALLIES), an organization that works with mayors around the world, I see this up close. Many of them are fighting to keep their residents’ trust through very difficult circumstances. And under real pressure, they’ve come to understand what actually lands online.

For politicians trying to rebuild credibility with disengaged voters, there are some lessons worth paying attention to.

Speak like a person, not a politician.

When federal immigration operations turned violent in Minneapolis earlier this year, Mayor Jacob Frey didn’t reach for the usual carefully crafted language. He bluntly told federal agents to get out of his city. The remark drew criticism and international attention precisely because it was quotable and so direct. It sounded like something he would say, unlike the sanitized statements most national figures issue after a crisis.

Frey followed it with something more calculated: a preliminary assessment putting the economic cost of the federal operation at over $200 million in a single month. The combination worked because it paired emotion with something concrete. One statement was raw and memorable. The other gave people a number they could remember and repeat.

Don’t wait for the media to tell your story. Tell it yourself, all the time.

When President Trump described Portland as “war-ravaged,” Mayor Keith Wilson didn’t issue a rebuttal through a spokesperson and hope a few reporters decided it was worth covering. He posted ordinary, idyllic photos of the city with the hashtag #WarRavagedPortland and asked residents to do the same. It spread fast enough that a federal judge later cited its prevalence in a ruling, noting the “war-ravaged” claim seemed unmoored from the facts. It worked because the mayor wasn’t the only one telling the story. There were thousands of residents posting evidence in their own voices.

On the other side of the world, Sofia, Bulgaria’s Mayor Vasil Terziev consistently takes a version of the same approach. He repeats the same simple, factual claims across every platform his residents use—TikTok, Instagram, print, radio—tailoring them to each audience. He’s also taken to publicly predicting, often correctly, what lies the national government is about to say about him. By getting ahead of the attack, he drains some of their power before they land. Terziev treats message discipline and offense as the weapon it should be for any elected leader.

During the height of the COVID pandemic, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti held a press conference every day at 5:30 p.m. He led with the numbers—deaths that day, hospital beds available, ventilators free—then walked through testing, stay-at-home orders, masks, vaccine sites, senior meal deliveries, and more. And he always took questions from journalists. Angelenos scheduled their evenings around it.

Mayors Wilson, Terziev, and Garcetti were dealing with very different situations, but they understood the same basic principle: Don’t leave a vacuum for someone else to fill.

Show up constantly, even when nothing’s on fire.

Not every mayor is fighting off a hostile national government or managing a pandemic. And the strategy may look different when you’re not. Most of the time, the challenge is much more mundane: How do you convince people you’re actually doing the job?

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie took office pledging to turn around a city widely seen as declining, and his approach has been fairly simple. He posts short, often unpolished videos touring a project, stopping into a local restaurant, or walking through a neighborhood. His tone is warm and upbeat rather than combative—closer to a small-business owner’s Instagram than a politician’s press shop.

It’s paid off. Mayor Lurie has drawn well over 200,000 Instagram followers without spending a dime on ads in a little over a year. At the same time, his approval rating has held in the low-to-mid 70s, among the highest of any recent San Francisco mayor at this point in a term.

It sounds simple, but a leader showing up on- and off-camera, unscripted, sometimes unpolished, day after day, week after week, builds a familiarity and sense of trust with residents that a biannual town hall can never match. That can and should be replicated everywhere.

Invest in new and creative ways of communicating.

In a saturated, fragmented media environment, reaching constituents is no longer just about press releases and traditional coverage. Leaders need to think creatively about where people actually get their information—and build communications channels they actually control. That means investing in new media: working with content creators and showing up on podcasts, YouTube, and TikTok, wherever people actually get their news.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani offers a masterclass here. He’s consistently invested in new media and even created a dedicated New Media Director role focused on engaging creators, podcasters, and YouTube shows. The lesson extends well beyond any one mayor: new media should be a core part of public engagement, not an afterthought.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson made a similar bet during her 2025 campaign. While her opponent, then-incumbent Bruce Harrell, mostly stuck to traditional media, Wilson leaned into short-form video and interviews with local content creators to reach younger voters. Her clearest hit was a two-minute video of her walking down the street with an $8 slice of pizza, arguing that Seattle’s housing costs were quietly inflating everything else. It wasn’t polished and that was the point. The policy argument was something anyone who’d recently paid for lunch could understand. The video pulled nearly 100,000 views on Instagram and over 50,000 on TikTok.

None of this requires a giant budget, either. Istanbul offers a more dramatic example of why diversified infrastructure matters. After Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was arrested by Turkish authorities and his X account—with more than 10 million followers—was blocked, his team turned to Instagram and TikTok to keep communicating with the public.

They even experimented with AI-generated videos that let his voice and likeness continue appearing in conversations about city events while he was detained. It’s a controversial tactic, for good reason, given the destructive potential of deepfakes, but it illustrates a broader point. Politicians must utilize all the levers of communication to get messages to the public. If you rely on one platform, one outlet, or one channel, you’re vulnerable to losing your audience overnight.

To be clear, none of this is about mayors being better people than senators or presidents. It’s about incentives. Local leaders answer to the same residents every day, often in person. That forces a level of directness that national politics has largely engineered out of itself. Mayors also have a built-in advantage: the progress they make in their cities happens in real time, in ways residents can see and touch.

But the tools they’re using—plain language, community-sourced testimony, repetition across platforms, owning your channels, radical transparency—aren’t unique to city hall. These are not “local government” tactics. They’re just good comms strategies.

As national campaigns spend heavily trying to manufacture authenticity, mayors, out of necessity, are demonstrating what it actually looks like—often while facing direct attacks from the governments above them. If national leaders want to reach people who’ve stopped listening out of apathy or distrust, the mayors’ playbook is right there.

Democracy, after all, is built from the ground up.

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Hi! I’m Danielle Butterfield, Executive Director of Priorities USA. I got my start working on digital ads back in 2011 on the Obama campaign and joined the Priorities team in 2017 to help Democrats make better investments online. Today, I want to talk to you about breaking through to less engaged voters online.

There’s a major disconnect in modern political communication: most political strategists like me, my team, and my friends live in a high-information bubble and we incorrectly assume voters follow headlines the way we do.

They don’t.

The good news? We can authentically reach them online, and my team has done the work to find them.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $10.3 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

While Senator Ossoff’s fundraising machine tops the spending charts, PACs owned the persuasion and mobilization lanes on Meta platforms.

One Nation is all in on Senate battlegrounds. Georgia is of particular interest; the group was first-on-the-air with major GOP post-primary spending this month at more than $9.1m and counting.

The other major persuasion PACs in the top ten were Americans for Prosperity and American Bridge, with a much more diverse set of hits — the former up and down the ballot, the latter in Senate and House battlegrounds.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $21.5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The Senate was (mainly) the name of the game this week, with a few House and gubernatorial races cracking the top tier as well. Choose Freedom is the newcomer to watch. Its biggest investment was in Ohio’s Senate race, but the PAC spent even more overall across ~20 House battlegrounds. What are they spending this money on, you ask? Praising Republicans for their votes to ban stock trading. They’ve dropped $14.8 million so far—and they’ve only been up for two weeks.

On CTV platforms, U.S. political advertisers spent an estimated $45.5 million last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

It was mostly the usual suspects at the top of the list, but one in particular caught our attention: America Next. We’ve seen them before: in Missouri in 2024 and in West Virginia and Nevada in 2022. So far this cycle they’ve landed in Michigan’s gubernatorial race. It’s not completely clear, but they may be the same America Next which has existed since 2015, founded by former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (remember him?).

…and lastly, on Snapchat, here’s YTD data for the top 10 spenders:

Our most interesting piece of intel here is a launch on the traditionally Democratic platform by the Republican Senate Leadership Fund. While spending hasn’t been dramatic so far, the move could be an early sign that Republicans are testing a youth-focused persuasion lane in Maine’s Senate battleground.

The new silent majority? Voters who don't seek out news.

Let’s talk about “Swing Voters”

The classic image of the “swing” voter that many operatives still hold — actively following the news, genuinely undecided, torn between the two parties — is increasingly rare. In our recent polling, just 3% of registered voters fit that description (and in reality, it’s likely an even smaller share of the electorate).

Let’s dive into how news consumption actually plays out amongst voters, from our own research:

• 46% are active news seekers. They skew older, more educated, and more invested in politics. When they consume political news, they’re doing it intentionally.

• 54% are passive consumers or avoid news altogether. They are less politically invested and mostly encounter political news by stumbling across it. 12% actively avoid news, a group especially concentrated among parent-aged women.

However, that 54% of voters aren’t “low-information.” They’re online. A lot. They spend hours scrolling every day. The difference is that they just skip, mute, or scroll past anything that looks and feels like traditional politics or news.

That 54% is most valuable to us because they’re less likely to be hardened partisans, more likely to hold mixed or conflicted political views, and are ripe to be swayed by new information.

So where does their attention go?

Video. Streaming platforms and YouTube dominate their screen time.

Democrats have always tried to reach these voters by throwing money at traditional political channels. If we want to succeed, we have to rethink where the money is going in the first place. Meeting voters where they are means prioritizing video-first, non-political environments, and delivering content that fits naturally into the feeds they already enjoy watching.

The Digital Divide: Commentators vs. Pop Culture

One of the most illuminating views we’ve gotten into this audience came from our study of hundreds of adults’ YouTube watch histories. The contrast was pretty stark. While active news seekers head to YouTube for political commentary like The Daily Show or MeidasTouch, passive news consumers occupy an entirely different corner of the internet. They’re entertainment-first: tuning in for music, pop culture, and lifestyle content.

So when they do get news, where does it come from?

The short answer? The algorithm decides.

Our research shows that passive news consumers generally open apps to relax, be entertained, or learn something useful. They avoid content that appears negative or stressful. Political news reaches them through algorithmic recommendations, shared clips, or non-political creators. This doesn’t mean they aren’t coming across politics — it’s just much more passive and less explicit.

Unsurprisingly, these voters over-index on short-form platforms:

• TikTok: 47% of less engaged voters used it in the past week, compared to 39% of active news seekers.

• Snapchat: 31% of less engaged voters used it in the past week, compared to 24% of active news seekers.

In other words, political content isn’t necessarily absent from their feeds; it just blends in with what they’re already consuming. That’s the opportunity.

Trying to break through to the 54%

My team has been testing a simple hypothesis: Content that blends in moves passive news consumers better than content that’s overtly political.

In Ohio, we set out to reach young men on YouTube in popular and not traditionally political content-niches: sports, gaming, and fitness. Then we built ads to fit those niches.

Picture this running ahead of a video game clip on YouTube:

At first glance, you might not even realize it’s political — very different from a traditional political ad that would disrupt your feed.

The ads linked Ohio Sen. Jon Husted to rising energy costs and the FirstEnergy scandal. The results were promising. Reaching young men in their content niches led to a more than 5% increase in disapproval of Sen. Husted and drove substantial engagement, including a 224% increase in Google searches for Husted/FirstEnergy.

Why this matters now

Our Ohio test and the other small bets we’ve taken throughout 2026 aren’t just about the midterms. They’re helping us understand how Democrats need to communicate when voters are tuning out.

The old playbook assumed that whatever tested best would break through. But in today’s world of streaming, multiple screens, and shorter attention spans, the best-tested message doesn’t mean much if people scroll right past it. That’s why we’re doing everything we can to understand what voters are consuming — and how — so that our messages can be more contextually relevant.

We try our best to break out of our own bubble and step inside voters’ shoes. Our political world lives on Substack and Bluesky, just like our competitors exist on Truth Social, but most voters don’t. We kept hearing about how 2024 was the “podcast election,” but most of the people listening to those shows are already news junkies!

If we don’t build strategies for the 54% of people who tune out the news, we are walking away from the voters who decide elections.

They won’t come looking for us. We have to fit into their world.

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Hey everyone, Denny Carter from BadFaithTimes.com here. A while back I wrote for FWIW about media – particularly TV ads – reflecting a supposed right-wing culture shift in the early days of Trump’s second term. My background is in journalism and social justice issues, while my day job is as a sportswriter and football podcaster. I can be found posting incessantly on Bluesky, which I have dubbed The Official App of Sports, at @dennycarter.bsky.social.

Today I look at just how dramatically our information environment has changed since 2020, when guardrails on social media platforms and news outlets stopped Republicans from overturning a fair and free election.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $15.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

One Nation, a GOP dark money group, takes the top spot this week; otherwise, it’s mostly business as usual. American Bridge PAC, the Democratic super PAC that has spent the past year studying working-class voters, is kicking off a roughly $50 million ad campaign targeting Republicans in more than a dozen House districts and four Senate races — most of them in traditionally red territory. So this probably won’t be the last time we see them on this chart. Here’s hoping their efforts pay off in November!

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $19.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

One Nation tops this chart too, with $1.14M in spending. Texans for Greg Abbott comes in second as the Republican governor faces Trump in a showdown over the former’s decision to pause new data center projects pending a state audit. OpenAI sent Abbott a letter this week committing to pay their own infrastructure costs, along with a bunch of other stuff. Worth a read if data centers sucking up power and water, spiking electricity bills, and tech companies making promises to politicians are your idea of a relaxing evening (no judgment here!).

…and lastly, on Snapchat, the glitch continues, so we don’t have the total YTD, but here’s the data for the top 10 spenders:

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What a poisoned media environment means for the midterms

There were information environment guardrails, however shaky and battered, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election and in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s victory, as the Republican Party and its vast media apparatus became increasingly coup-curious.

Those guardrails on the American right’s election lies have since been crushed by those who simply could not accept that Donald Trump had lost his re-election bid. Elon Musk parted with $44 billion to ensure Twitter – the veritable nerve center of American politics – would no longer have the informational guardrails necessary for a functioning democracy. Mark Zuckerberg did away with any and all political fact-checking in the years after the 2020 election. Together, Musk and Zuckerberg – obscenely wealthy men who control the algorithms of our lives – made a conscious decision to let misinformation run free across our timelines, normalizing lies and half-truths about election integrity.

The result, as intended, is that any Democratic victory is seen by much of the U.S. voting population as illegitimate and corrupt. Headed into a 2026 midterm election that could be an historic wipeout for Republicans, our information environment – poisoned by a billionaire class hell-bent on ending representative democracy in the Western world – is going to matter. The guardrails are gone, replaced by algorithmic boosting of lies and conspiracies that are now treated with the same respect as the truth. Chaos could reign in the weeks after November’s midterms.

With election denialism now a feature of the Republican Party and right-wing media telling its gullible audience that Democrats steal elections with regularity, nearly half of Republicans now believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Fully two-thirds of co-called MAGA Republicans say that election was illegitimate, with just 2 in 10 MAGA Republicans conceding that their guy – wildly unpopular outside his hardcore base – did, in fact, lose his re-election bid.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how insidious the idea of stolen elections has become on the American right over these past six years. Recent polling from Bright Line Watch, an organization that measures Americans’ views on the strength of the country’s democracy, showed that a mere one in four Republicans believe “elections are free from pervasive fraud or manipulation, down from 50% in February 2025.”

It’s not just GOP voters who won’t acknowledge the results of the free and fair 2020 election. The president’s judicial nominees have humiliated themselves before U.S. Senate subcommittees by carrying on the farce that the Biden campaign somehow cheated its way to victory. Asked by Democratic senators to say affirmatively that Biden won that race against Trump, these judicial nominees – afraid of drawing the ire of the tyrant who appointed them – dance around the question.

They say Biden was “certified” as the winner of the Electoral College. They say Biden was sworn into office. What they won’t say: Biden won a fair election against the kingpin of their party. The language is careful, calculated, meant to never concede for a moment that the results of the 2020 election were legitimate.

It is a matter of dogma among every part of the American right that Donald Trump cannot fail; he can only be failed. Jurists – upholders of the constitutional order – engaging in outright election denialism is a deeply dangerous development, made possible by the acquiescence of major media outlets and the outrage-fueled social media algorithms that often (tragically) serve as assignment editors for the country’s foremost publications and news networks.

It’s notable that the right’s rampant election denialism – supercharged by loyal Trump allies Musk and Zuckerberg, along with the rest of Silicon Valley’s anti-democracy oligarchs – has not yet broken containment and significantly affected self-identified Independents and Democrats, according to polling data. But even that should be cold comfort: 23% of Independents and an absurdly high 14% of Democrats are “not sure” about whether the 2020 presidential election was free and fair. That’s because their social media timelines and the news they consume have winked and nodded and suggested for years that something fishy went on in Georgia and Michigan and other states in which Biden pulled off narrow wins.

Maybe these Independents and Democrats couldn’t even tell you what exactly happened to put Biden over the top in those critical swing states. But something happened. Maybe. No one knows for sure. The uncertainty is the whole point, and creates a path – however narrow – to denying Democrats’ election victories.

America’s information environment is about to get even worse, somehow, just in time for a potentially apocalyptic midterm election for the GOP. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced in July that it would partner with far-right conspiracy outlet NewsMax as part of Meta’s AI news-content partnership. Meta, according to a press release, “will be able to draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support Al queries across Meta’s apps and devices.”

What this means in practical terms is that Meta will train its AI news products using information from an outlet that violates the most basic journalistic standards as a business model, carries water for the president and his allies, and floods its audience with lies about Democrats and pro-democracy forces not only in the United States, but across the world. Newsguard, which ranks the reliability of news outlets, gave NewsMax a score of 20 out of 100, correctly charging that the outlet “is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalism standards.”

Perhaps your parents or grandparents watch the nightmarish NewsMax cable channel and you are aware of all this. I would guess most people consuming news on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram are not. I would guess they’d never know the CEO of NewsMax is a close friend of the president who regularly dines with him.

There also looms the threat of election-denying bot swarms on social media sites, particularly microblogging platforms like Threads and X. These bots are trained to mimic not only right-wingers, but constituencies aligned with the Democratic Party. Bot swarms, according to research from Harvard Business School, are “deeply embedded manipulation that lets operators nudge public discourse almost invisibly over time. ... In cognitive warfare, AI’s relentless operational endurance becomes a weapon against limited human efforts.”

These bots learn how to talk like specific online communities before subtly suggesting that an election may have been crooked or outright stolen. The Harvard paper on bot swarms says:

Reinforcement-learning agents could run thousands of experiments per hour, iteratively adjusting content while mining engagement and responses to infer voting intent and tactical success. Taken to extremes, coordinated doubt may corrode institutional legitimacy and invite ‘emergency’ rule. By coordinating subtle, growing doubts about electoral commissions, courts, or statistics bureaus, swarms could corrode procedural trust. As confidence falters, “emergency” measures (such as postponing elections or rejecting certified results) may become palatable, especially if deepfake endorsements from fabricated civic leaders amplify the call.

None of this is going to be regulated by the Trump regime, which relies on a corroded information environment now free of the loose guardrails we had at the end of Trump’s first term. How elected Democrats deal with an information ecosystem that is in no way compatible with representative democracy is going to determine whether election denialism persists as a mainstream political idea or whether it’s reigned in, as we’ve seen in stronger democracies, namely Brazil.

An unregulated social media environment in which election lies are spread to millions without consequence represents an existential threat. Here’s hoping Democrats treat it as such.

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Hi y’all! I’m Dillon St. Bernard, the Digital Director of Team DSB, a Gen Z-led communications agency helping organizations and campaigns engage young, multicultural folks online.

I’ve led the digital team for the largest network of young activists, a coalition of 500+ climate organizations, and insurgent congressional campaigns. My days are currently spent advising campaigns and advocacy groups on how to turn views into real-world engagement.

Political campaigns and organizations are pushing out more content than ever, but it’s not going as smoothly as they imagined.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $16 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Abdul El-Sayed takes the top spot this week as Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee gears up to take on Mike Rogers in November. Next door, in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong lost the Democratic primary for governor to David Crowley on Tuesday night, the first DSA defeat after a string of progressive wins in New York, Colorado, and Michigan.

Gina Hinojosa, Democratic nominee for governor of Texas, appears on the charts as her race with Greg Abbott heats up. A recent poll shows the two in a dead heat, putting the national spotlight on a race that could produce one of the biggest political upsets in Texas history.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $17.3 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

In Maine, Majority Forward Fund is going after Susan Collins, claiming she “is trying to keep it so senators can get rich playing the stock market.” FactCheck.org reviewed the ad and found the attack gets a little ahead of itself: it’s true that Collins does not support a full ban, but she has previously backed some restrictions on congressional stock trading.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, there was a glitch this week, so we don’t have the total YTD, but here’s the data for the top 10 spenders:

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The Internet Knows You’re Faking It

We can’t afford to ignore this lesson.

We’ve spent years analyzing the shifting media landscape and diagnosing what went wrong in past elections. The postmortem has been performed by everyone, including those of us who live and breathe digital comms and the several politicos whose complicity helped spur us into this mess.

One of the biggest takeaways has been a mandate for comms teams to expand the tactics they use to reach people: more appearances on new media, more coordination with creators, more direct-to-camera videos. More, more, more.

Campaigns and organizations are increasingly producing daily content across every possible platform, complete with a meticulous content calendar, an underfunded communications budget, and a dream.

Here’s the problem: being fluent in the tactics without first establishing your values is why so much content continues to underperform, even when it looks technically “good” on paper.

Too many people are putting out communications without knowing what they actually want to communicate, so the content they publish is devoid of any principles or conviction. AI may have nothing to do with it, but it’s slop all the same.

The result is an inauthentic online presence that feels hollow. As elections get closer and trust in legacy institutions and systems continues to erode, principles and conviction are what truly resonate with audiences and make (or break) their trust.

You can borrow tactics. You can’t rent trust.

The principle that communications should be polished within an inch of their lives does not translate well to today’s digital-first universe.

A walk-and-talk video scripted word for word won’t resonate. Neither will a content creator who isn’t allowed to make your campaign’s talking points their own. You can borrow the formats and tactics that work, but you can’t rent the trust that made them work in the first place.

It’s why a “Get ready with me while we talk about corporate greed” video from a lifelong U.S. Senator would have the internet cringing. People would see through it right away. It’s the “right” tactic, but the wrong messenger.

Voters are crying out for authenticity, driven by clear and consistent values. They want disciplined messengers who speak to what keeps them up at night and who sometimes go off script (rightfully leading to rising blood pressure among comms professionals). They want nuanced conversations and a chance to have their questions answered. They want to see the folks vying for their trust be undeniably human. They don’t want us to just meet them where they are. They want their distrust of the establishment and abandonment by those in power addressed head-on.

This is especially true for the audiences I specialize in engaging: Gen Z and people of color who have continued to navigate a broken civic landscape. When people aren’t engaged as voters, fingers are pointed at them. Disengagement gets framed solely as a cultural problem or a lack of motivation rather than as a systemic failure. Instead of addressing the concerns of folks who have been systematically excluded, structural change is traded in for ad hominem attacks, leaving us with more of the same.

If we want to communicate online effectively and build relationships that extend offline in 2026 and beyond, we have to give people the authenticity they demand. That only works if we say what we mean and mean what we say.

A five-part playbook (to use as you create content).

I know well that there are best practices for engaging audiences, such as strong video hooks, automations, and creators. But, most importantly, I’ve found it critical to set up a container for digital comms team I lead to execute those tactics effectively:

1. Plan content with precision.

   I design my content in thirds. 33% is proactive (to introduce the candidate or organization and what they stand for); 33% is reactive (to position the candidate or organization as a trusted voice in the cultural conversations and rapid response moments people are paying attention to); the final 33% is the equivalent of an “About You” section (to communicate the grit, vision, professional know-how, and lived experiences that make the candidate or organization worth trusting).

2. Overplan, so you’re ready for “organic” moments.

   My team’s three top-performing pieces of content for a recent Congressional race were shot by our traveling videographer: our candidate with a voter in front of an early-voting site, at the beach, and at a town hall. These moments were only possible because of our “always-on” content approach, where we capture everything, including unplanned behind-the-scenes and “between-the-scenes” moments. That means prioritizing the limited time our team has with a candidate or principal, and doing it enough times that they grow comfortable enough to forget they’re on camera.

3. Pass the mic to others to talk about you.

   Many candidates and organizations do one thing really well: talk about how great they are. For politicians who aren’t exactly known for their humility, it’s especially important to leave space for everyday people to share why they’ve joined or support your work. It’s even more important to foster an environment where those people jump at the opportunity to do so. People want to see themselves in your content. Literally.

4. Bring new people in.

   The barrier to entry is often too high for folks to find and join us. I usually create a “Start Here” section on our partners’ platforms that answers the questions their audience is already asking: Who are you, really? What are you fighting for? What can I do *right now* to join your movement? If your only points of engagement are newsletter signups, donations, and an ask for their vote, your audience will drop off and you won’t get another chance to engage them.

5. Speak to everyone, one person at a time.

   Every piece of content should answer your audience’s central question: “Why should I care?” Providing value is about creating content your audience actually wants to engage with. It should inform, entertain, or inspire. It should be thumb-stopping. It should give your audience a reason to care. And most importantly: it should feel like you’re speaking directly to another person on the other side of the phone. This illusion of one-to-one engagement is the magic of digital communications. And that magic is driven by specificity, which creates authenticity.

Let’s remember what’s at stake.

Doing digital communications in 2026 is a game of whack-a-mole. The tactics and platforms will continue to shift. What works today may not work six months from now.

But the values we create our content with can outlast any single election cycle or algorithm change… only if those values are a true reflection of what we believe. Audiences are better at reading through messaging than we give them credit for. They’re savvy enough to see through the platitudes and political games.

As conversations about the horse race of the midterms and 2028 intensify, the work that will shape election outcomes begins with communicating clear, consistent values that speak to the wants and needs of the people we hope to engage. We can only build trust when we invite our people in. Because ultimately, we’re not fighting for better engagement. We’re fighting to move people and progress forward.

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Hi, I’m Jiggy Geronimo, a progressive narrative strategist, consultant, and, most recently, a budding content creator 🫣. You might know me from one of those traumatizing webinars during the Count Every Vote campaign in 2020 or my time as Executive Director of the Research Collaborative. Now I spend my time as a freelance progressive comms consultant focused on how to source, curate, and deliver content at scale to defeat fascism.

But true to form, I’m thinking a lot about what happens after ballots are cast this November. When the biggest sore loser to walk this earth sees that MAGA is in for a shellacking in the midterms, we know what he will do. He will lie, lash out, and try to cheat. And we need to start planning now for how to stop him.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $15.76 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The DNC takes the top spot on Meta this week, just as Michigan’s Democratic primary wraps up (bless) and the political world collectively turns its attention to November. Progressive physician Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary, defeating Haley Stevens despite more than $60 million in outside spending — including a record $30 million from AIPAC’s election arm. He’ll now face Republican Mike Rogers in a race that could decide control of the Senate.

The rest of the chart is mostly the usual suspects, with the exception of the K.A. Whitmore Information Network. The group barely seems to exist online, and their ads have been pulled down by Meta for not complying with advertisement standards. Cracking the top ten only to flame out almost instantly is… an interesting strategy (?) to say the least.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $16.9 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The AIPAC-aligned United Democracy Project slots in at #3 after pouring nearly $800,000 into a campaign that ultimately came up short (sorry, Haley Stevens). Meanwhile, SLF PAC, the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund, announced a $17 million opening ad buy for Michael Whatley in North Carolina. Former Dem Gov. Roy Cooper currently leads in the polls, so it’s safe to predict that we’ll be seeing SLF consistently on the charts from here on out.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, there was a glitch this week, so we don’t have the total YTD, but here’s the data for the top 10 spenders:

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Preparing for election sabotage and enforcing our win

If you close your eyes and transport yourself back to November 3, 2020, here’s what you might remember: the elevation of your heart rate as the early vote counts showed Trump ahead, panicked texts from friends asking if we were going to lose, and the shock of watching Trump confidently declare his victory in the middle of the night with millions of ballots still left to count.

The next two months brought a stop at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, attempts to pressure Michigan GOP leaders to overturn the election, a demand that Georgia’s Secretary of State find Trump 11,000 votes, and a deadly assault on our nation’s Capitol. But in the end, lawmakers certified Joe Biden’s win, he was sworn into office in January 2021, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

Don’t hate me for saying this, but I think 2026 is going to make the 2020 election look like child’s play 😬. It’s not enough to just win anymore. We have to win by margins that are too big to rig and prepare the American public to defend and enforce the outcome of our elections en masse.

The bad news: election sabotage is well underway

In 2020, the election sabotage really started on Election Day. This time around, it started on Inauguration Day. The Trump regime has already seized ballots from Fulton and Maricopa counties, launched investigations into election workers in several swing states, demanded voter rolls from states across the country while threatening to withhold funding from those that do not comply, tried to direct the USPS not to deliver mail ballots from counties that resist his orders, greenlit racial gerrymandering to eliminate Black districts in the South, and attempted (but failed) to require Americans to show a birth certificate or passport to vote.

The good news: we are winning

These are not the actions of a winner – they are the desperate actions of someone who knows they can’t win a fair fight. He’s doing these things because he knows he’s losing.

The structural fact that states control our elections is still standing between our shaky democracy and an autocrat dead set on controlling the outcome. Trump may be trying to nationalize the elections, but the Constitution clearly says elections are up to the states. And we will still count every vote. Our drumbeat from the aftermath of the 2020 election hasn’t changed and will apply come November this year too: Every ballot must be counted, period, no matter how long it takes or how loudly Trump and MAGA lie about the results.

In 2020, America hadn’t experienced a contested presidential election or insurrection in recent memory. We’re veterans now. Expectations for election sabotage are now baked into our plans and we now know that the midterm election isn’t truly over until the new Congress is seated on January 3, 2027. At the same time, six years have passed (though it might feel more like 20) and MAGA has refined their strategy, so it’s not enough to just run the exact same playbook.

The outcome we’re looking for is action, not trust.

In 2020, part of what got us through was a baseline assumption that the system would hold — that courts, secretaries of state, and election officials would do their jobs regardless of party. MAGA has spent the last six years relentlessly trying to take over control of elections and install election traitors in those very same offices. Fortunately, most election officials can still be trusted to do the right thing. We can and should remind people that election workers are our neighbors and that there are checks and balances in our election system. But we’re not trying to restore faith that the system will enforce itself. We’re trying to build a country full of people who understand that we are the enforcement mechanism. We need people ready to act when something happens — not people waiting patiently for institutions to save us.

That means shifting the entire emotional posture of this fight. We don’t build the people power necessary to enforce the results of this election through blind trust in the system. We build it through defiant energy and with millions of people who understand that protecting a free and democratic result is their responsibility, not someone else’s.

Voting is a tool and an act of defiance

Let’s be real, fam, the vibes are kind of bad. They want to overwhelm us, make us feel defeated, and silence us into submission. They’re doing everything they can to take away our votes and control the outcome. But telling people, “This is the most important election of our lifetimes” and that voting is the magic bullet isn’t the answer. Our big middle finger is to vote anyway, in the face of it all, as an act of defiance. And not only to vote, but to vote by margins that are so overwhelming that even the desperate cheeto can’t rig the outcome. That’s the vibe shift we need: from fatigue to determined defiance. Remember, Hungary ousted Orbán through an election with 80% voter turnout. Luckily for us, hearing about Trump’s desperate efforts to rig the midterms is actually motivating to most Americans, so there’s no need to shy away from talking about it.

What we need to do between now and Election Day

There are four things we need to do now – and I mean now, not in October.

• Inoculate against the lies. We already know what he’ll say: some new iteration of the Big Lie. The goal isn’t to repeat the lie in order to debunk it. It’s to expose the motivation behind it (his desperation to hold onto power). If people have already internalized that by November, they’ll be primed to reject his lies.

• Build social proof. People do things when they see other people doing things. Part of our job is making it visible, everywhere, that huge numbers of Americans across this country are showing up, voting, and refusing to accept a rigged election — through local organizing and mass distribution of content online.

• Prime people for action. This is different from asking people to simply vote and wait for the outcome. We need people mentally and emotionally ready to do something concrete the moment it’s needed: show up to a rally, flood a county elections commission meeting, call their state legislator, join a coordinated action, or even, if it comes to it, shut the country down. We have to build that readiness ahead of time by explaining what to expect and preparing them for the actions we will need to take.

• Build our coordination. Sure, we can build coordination on the fly (we did it in 2020), but it will be far more effective if we prepare now. Our organizations, coalitions, and communications networks will need to move quickly in November and December. The infrastructure for that coordination needs to come together now.

The core narrative

Here’s the story we need to be telling, over and over, between now and Election Day:

Trump and MAGA are losing and they’re desperate. Seizing ballots, demanding voter rolls, and postponing elections are not the actions of a winner — they’re the desperations of a loser. ​​He’s trying to control the outcome of the midterms because it’s the only way he gets to hold onto power and keep enriching himself and his billionaire friends. They can try all they want, but we’re turning out in massive numbers and they can’t stop us.

Every time there’s election news, we just return to this drumbeat. We already have proof that this works. A few weeks ago, Trump delivered a primetime Big Lie address falsely claiming foreign interference in the 2020 election that he lost. Major news outlets didn’t even air it. We analyzed social media data and found that nearly 60% of content from left-leaning accounts delivered our inoculation messaging. We mocked Trump, named his intentions for meddling in 2026, and reminded audiences that he is full of hot air. As a result, what he hoped would be a bombshell moment turned out to be the biggest nothingburger ever.

It’s our job to make his efforts in November fall just as flat. And we do that by actively priming Americans right now to reject the lies that are coming and to be ready to enforce the results once they’re in. Because they can try all they want, but they can’t stop us.

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Hi everyone! I’m Gabriella Zutrau, Principal and Founder of Weird LLC, and part-time dog. You may know me as a Digital Strategy Advisor to campaigns and organizations, or maybe you read my FWIW newsletter last year about building Zohran Mamdani’s social media chatbot infrastructure. My agency, Weird LLC, helps leftists and progressives do what works online right now. It’s also totally possible you know me from my work pretending to be a dog on the internet all day on my Edna the Runt dogfluencer accounts, which I use as a lab to experiment with new tools and tactics before trying them with my clients. But I’m not just a propagandist who moonlights as a dog.

I’m also The Diarrhea Parasite.

I’m gonna break down how and why I organically grew my brand new political diarrhea RFK Jr. troll account from zero to 43,000 followers–and 2 million views–in two weeks flat.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $14.36 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Last week was a busy (and tbh kinda rough) one for the DNC—between rolling out a new early-state primary calendar and grappling with new reporting that the party is, well, “broke.” A widely-circulated New York Times story detailed the DNC’s significant financial troubles, noting that while the RNC has roughly $130 million on hand (not including Trump’s super PAC), the DNC is $2 million in debt. This is particularly alarming in light of the recent SCOTUS ruling removing limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates. And yet, the Dems remain a reliable top spender on Meta platforms week after week. So here’s to getting ready for yet another “most important election of our lifetime.”

The bottom of the chart isn’t exactly a source of optimism either. Missouri Promise is helping Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe make good on his campaign promise to eliminate the state’s income tax, a matter that will be left to voters to decide in next week’s primary.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $13.5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

United Democracy Project cracks the top 5 again this week with just over $500,000 in spend—worth nothing because folks, we are (thankfully) less than a week out from Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. The AIPAC-affiliated PAC has already poured nearly $15 million into the race, with over $9 million supporting Haley Stevens and over $5 million opposing Abdul El-Sayed.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent about $3.23 million on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Reach the right voters. Measure what moves them. Optimize in real-time.

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Zero to 43K followers in 2 weeks: What the Diarrhea Parasite Teaches Us About Winning Online

I started my new RFK Jr. trolling account, @thediarrheaparasite, on July 14th, 2026. Today is July 31st, 2026, and the account has over 43,000 followers. Let’s add some context to these numbers.

According to one social listening company, the cyclospora outbreak, beyond this single account, generated over 46 million impressions across social platforms between July 22nd and July 28th alone. With around 11,000 confirmed cases of the parasite across the US since May, the pathogen became a meme because it has a particularly strong story, and a very visual, visceral vibe. Also, politics aside, who doesn’t like a good poop joke?

I used lots of social media tips, tricks, hacks, and best practices to produce this explosive growth, and I’ll get into all of that in a bit. But first, we need to address the shitty messaging elephant in the room.

Establishment political figures avoided the cyclospora topic at first, just because it was gross. Broadly speaking Dems and Dem-aligned groups still have not systematized something that the right has mastered: moving at the speed of the internet. While a culture of risk aversion continues to plague Democratic communications, contributing to electoral and cultural losses, the right has built its entire online strategy on exactly the opposite instinct: claim the joke, name the villain, and move before the moment passes.

When everyone started talking about the cyclospora outbreak a few weeks ago, it was obvious that it wasn’t just a meme. It was a public health crisis. As a political communicator, I was hopeful (but not optimistic) we’d see some great content about it from Democratic lawmakers and candidates–after all, the messaging opportunity was practically gift-wrapped: Trump and RFK Jr. cut parasite prevention funding, leading to the spread of the diarrhea parasite sweeping the nation. Clear villains. Clear victims. Clear heroes. This was an obvious opening–a real public health failure with an unmistakable culprit and a genuinely gross, shareable hook. And yet, key voices were largely quiet on it until it became impossible to ignore.

I started @thediarrheaparasite because I wanted to help inextricably link Trump and RFK to this outbreak. Supporters flooded in to help make sure everyone knew this wasn’t just any diarrhea parasite, it was Trump’s Diarrhea Parasite. RFK Jr.’s appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services allowed for the mainstream platforming and spread of his “Make America Healthy Again” tagline. And, being that his career has been defined by anti-scientific rhetoric and medical conspiracy theories, MAHA is a brand that is just screaming to get brand-jammed. It’s incredibly low-hanging fruit.

So when I saw that the @thediarrheaparasite handle was available on Instagram, I couldn’t resist the opportunity, and I hard launched the account with a single video that brought in over 20,000 followers in one day–a strong sign that people want us to Make Public Health Fun Again. The video described our only goal and challenge: help us get more followers than RFK Jr. so we can troll him every day of his life.

The observant reader will recognize this as the same follow-challenge strategy Amanda McGonigle used with her JD Vance troll account, @catsonacouch. What started as an account dedicated to trolling JD Vance and getting more followers than him has grown into an account with millions of followers across platforms–and eventually helped spark a First Amendment lawsuit. Amanda, with the support of the ACLU, is now suing the federal government after being barred by theSecret Service from attending an official vice presidential event.

The best political accounts online have real-world impacts–but that doesn’t always come in the shape of a lawsuit.

During my time consulting on the Mamdani campaign, I saw what’s possible when we bring a genuine culture of experimentation to political communications. We all saw what happened when the campaign left poll-tested messaging and traditional wisdom behind for a culture of “that’s a great idea–how do we make it happen?”

Whether it’s Mayor Mamdani cheering for the Knicks, Taco Bell’s $1 lettuce-free Mexican Pizza promo, or brand-jamming RFK Jr., the common thread isn’t just “being good at social media.” It’s having fun. As social media consultant Rachel Karten recently referenced: you can’t compete with a brand that’s having fun.

To be fair, a diarrhea meme page will of course always be a more risk-tolerant undertaking than most political digital ventures should be. That said, it’s clear how much online and cultural territory we’ve ceded to the right over the last fifteen years because of our inability to move fast and meet the moment. It’s so clear that over 170 social media professionals, content creators, and new media figures recently signed a letter to the Democratic establishment, urging them to shift 15% of paid media budgets towards investing in organic social and creator engagement. Consider this account exhibit A: two million views, zero dollars spent, all in the time it takes some teams to get a single video through legal review.

So what would it look like if our campaigns and organizations took bigger swings online and leaned into the zeitgeist, instead of jumping on trends after a week of weighing the pros and cons? Taking risks online will always feel scary–it’s important to remain discerning and appropriately cautious. But there are two things I hope our side will weigh as we look towards better digital, and the second is more important than the first.

1. The internet is forever.

2. The internet is right now.

For @thediarrheaparasite, here are a few things that made the biggest difference in our explosive growth:

• We had an incredibly simple call to action: “follow us so we can troll RFK Jr. together.” Follow-challenges are becoming fairly commonplace, though they produce varying results.

• Because I absolutely do not have the time to run yet another social media account, after a couple days, I passed much of the coordination and content creation off to my favorite person to make poop jokes with–my sister. She now texts me diarrhea memes all day in the most chopped approvals process on Earth. For another example of how successful and burnout-proof a multi-contributor social account can be, look no further than @prettyinfformedgirls, who recently grew to over 210K followers in under a year.

• We made constant requests (in comments, in DMs, in content, in bio) for other accounts to collab with us. This meant we didn’t have to come up with all of the content by ourselves, but could maintain a consistent posting cadence.

• We used a mix of content formats and optimized for the three most algorithmically important signals on Instagram: skip rate, watch time, and share rate.

• We moved fast. We weren’t precious about content quality. This is a diarrhea account for god’s sake.

If you want to keep up with my work, you can sign up for my email list, get real time reflections on my LinkedIn, or find plenty of free digital strategy advice, plus the occasional political shitpost, on my Instagram, @extremelyonlinefriend. But, of course, if you’d rather watch me politically post about shit, please follow our RFK Jr. trolling journey at @thediarrheaparasite.

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Hi, I’m Nourbese Flint, president of All* Above All, an abortion-forward reproductive justice organization working toward a world where abortion care is affordable, available, and supported for everyone who needs it. COURIER handed me the keys to the newsletter this month, so buckle up. We’re going for a ride with this repro girly.

More from me below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

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

Jon Ossoff leads the pack on Meta this week by a significant margin, outspending the next closest advertiser by more than 160k — a sign that Georgia’s Senate race is heating up fast. The question now is whether Ossoff’s war chest is loud enough to drown out Trump’s ridiculous primetime address and bogus claims that China interfered in the 2020 election.

As we take a collective deep breath this week, now that we’re on the other side of the Unhealthy Air Quality alerts ushered in by the Canadian wildfires (mayhaps we shouldn’t have defunded the National Weather Service, Mr. Trump!), a new name has climbed to the top of the charts. Wildfire Victims First is a utility-funded advocacy group that is facing pressure from wildfire survivors who allege the group is disguising industry lobbying as victim advocacy.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $11.4 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

He’s a recurring character on these charts, but we just haven’t been ready to talk about Vivek Ramaswamy of DOGE fame (read: weather service). But we’re sucking it up this week in light of new reporting from the Ohio Capital Journal, which found that Ramaswamy — backed by the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Ackman — spent nearly $9 million on ads over a six-week period during which his Democratic opponent Amy Acton had spent just $100k.

And shoutout to Katie Hobbs, another reliable here, who now officially knows who she is going to be spending her $$$ against. Andy Biggs handily defeated David Schweikert (73.6% to 14.7%) in Tuesday’s primary and now heads to the general, bringing his Trump endorsement and election denialism along for the ride.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent about $3.06 million on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

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What we can learn from zombies, body snatchers and vampires

One of my favorite movie genres is mystery horror, especially when science fiction or the supernatural is involved. Not the kind where humanity immediately splinters into factions and starts killing each other. I prefer the slow-burn stories where something is clearly wrong, but no one can quite name it yet. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers, World War Z, or Sinners: the clues are scattered, the threat is hiding in plain sight, and a small group of people is racing to understand how it’s all connected.

There’s always a moment near the beginning when the audience can see the danger, but the characters cannot. A door is left open. A familiar person begins acting strangely. A warning is dismissed as paranoia. I find myself willing the characters to listen. You in danger, girl. Run. Hide. Do something!

Which brings me to my point.

In recent years, reality has mimicked fiction. When it comes to women’s health and rights, we’re in the opening act of a deadly horror mystery movie - except this one is real.

The threat isn’t a horde of mindless zombies. It is a coordinated campaign to shrink women’s freedom, control our bodies, and make gender inequality feel inevitable or grotesquely, desirable.

It is quite simply a war on women, updated for the algorithmic age.

Walk with me for a moment.

At first, the clues don’t seem connected. A woman tells a doctor something is wrong and is told it’s probably stress. Another spends years fighting for a diagnosis. A pregnant patient enters a medical emergency and discovers that the law has followed her into the exam room. A woman’s body is kept functioning as an incubator after she has passed away. Clinics close across the country. Women, particularly Black women, are killed by the men who claimed to love them. Algorithms tell women that their value is only as servants. An online platform teaches men how to drug and rape their wives. Roe is dismantled while states push legislation trying to equate abortion care to homicide. Federal policies make it harder for women to vote.

Viewed one at a time, each story is easy to dismiss as a bad policy, an isolated tragedy, a fringe opinion, or just another grotesque corner of the internet.

But mysteries teach us to ask a better question:

What if these are not separate events?

What if they are clues?

When we look at all these incidents in totality, a different, much darker picture emerges.

The modern attack on women is not one villain sitting in a dark room somewhere. It is an ecosystem: white Christian nationalism; decades-long legal strategies backed by enormous wealth; anti-abortion extremism; the manosphere; “tradwife” propaganda; pronatalist attacks on LGBTQ+ people; and politicians eager to convert resentment into power. Social media and massive data sets tie these movements together like the Power Rangers’ Megazord.

These forces do not agree on everything. They don’t need to. But they do share a central belief: that women’s bodies are meant to be controlled, policed and subjugated, much like a farm workhorse used for servitude.

And why is this central to the fight for reproductive rights? Abortion is an important pillar of this story because bodily autonomy is a linchpin right. When the government can compel the use of your body against your will, every other freedom becomes less secure: the freedom to work, to learn, to leave a relationship, to care for the children you already have, to protect your health, to imagine the life you want and then build it.

Pregnancy can have multiple outcomes; abortion is one of them. Comprehensive pregnancy care is connected to maternal health systems. Maternal health is connected to racism in medicine. Gender-based violence is connected to economic security. Economic security is connected to childcare, paid leave, housing, and the ability to leave an unsafe home.

Mental health, physical safety, spiritual well-being, LGBTQ+ freedom, racial justice, disability justice, voting rights, and reproductive freedom are not competing causes. They are chapters in the same story about who gets to live safely, fully, and freely.

That is why we cannot fight these battles in silos.

So what do we do?

Turns out, we can draw a little inspiration from the movies here as well. Take the Zombie rule of threes: 1) Stay Alive 2) Stay Together and 3) Build Tomorrow.

Stay Alive

Very similar to most good horror films, we need to learn the rules of engagement. Similarly in real life we need to learn the rules of the game. Then we fight back. That means showing up in statehouses, clinics, schools, workplaces, faith communities, and group chats. Protect one another. Fund local organizers. Tell the truth about what is happening. Refuse to let the villain’s evil- doing go unanswered.

For us in the digital world, that means learning the rules of the algorithms and robin hooding them. Build out your own networks of people who are willing to amplify stories, social media posts and other important issues online to make sure truthful information spreads just as (or more) effectively as misinformation.

Stay Together

Horror movies always go sideways the moment someone says, “Let’s split up.” Our opponents benefit when we’re divided by issue, race, geography, income, generation, or identity. We need durable, committed relationships across movements and neighborhoods that are resourced for the long-haul, not just emergency coalitions that spring up when the monster is already inside the house.

At All*, we started a virtual book club as a way to create a cultural home/community. More than a year later, many of our book club participants have become some of our most reliable volunteers, helping us turn out votes between reads. People are hungry for community, and they are looking to find it through the things they love to do. Using the full spectrum of tools to world-build online, helps us create community, both online and offline, in ways that scale with our work and our budget. You can start by simply polling your email actives about their hobbies and interests and seeing where that leads you.

Build Tomorrow

Unlike the movies, our lives don’t stop at the end credits. Our goal isn’t just surviving the apocalypse; it’s building something worth surviving for, both for ourselves and the generations to come. We have to stop organizing only around what we’re trying to prevent and become equally clear about what we’re trying to build: a world where healthcare is accessible; abortion is available without shame or financial barriers; pregnancy and childbirth are safe and supported; families have what they need to thrive; and no one’s destiny is dictated by gender. Survival without purpose, survival without joy, survival for the sake of survival, is just another kind of death.

As with most horror movies, it’s not the people with the biggest shotguns that win the day; it’s the ones who notice the patterns, follow the clues and interrupt the looming crisis. I only hope America recognizes its unfurling women’s rights horror story before it’s too late.

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Hi everyone! We are the digital team at America’s Voice, a national immigration advocacy organization that uses research, communications, and digital organizing to build public support for immigration reform. Over the past year, we’ve worked with over a hundred creators – including immigration lawyers, journalists, teachers, veterans, faith leaders and lifestyle creators – to tell immigration stories that reach audiences far beyond the usual political sphere.

That work has fundamentally changed how we think about creator partnerships and digital organizing: The best immigration messengers often aren’t immigration experts. They’re trusted voices who understand how to connect with their communities by talking about immigration as a human experience rather than a political issue.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $11.8 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Call us obsessive or call us trend experts, either way we’re not done calling attention to the LLCs that keep popping up among the top spenders — especially now that numbers have normalized post-holiday dip. Last week, we reported that MAPA Web Marketing was coordinating ads encouraging seniors to take advantage of recent court rulings by applying for concealed carry permits. The following week, the group spent more than 7 times as much and was joined by 4936 Ventures LLC, which promoted a very similar CTA. Much of 4936 Ventures’ six-figure spend ran through the Facebook page belonging to a Dale Williams, who has a little over than 300 followers. This past week’s ads celebrate the passage of new legislation from Trump, the America 250 Bill, allowing for online permits valid in all 50 states— but we can’t find a record of such a bill passing (even Firearms News can’t).

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $8.3 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

As Kalshi tops the Google & YouTube chart, spending more than 3x times as much as the next biggest advertiser, we’d like to give a quick shout out to Popular Information’s great piece from earlier this month, “How Kalshi Infects the News.” The article details how CNN and CNBC have promoted Kalshi “extensively, frequently vouching for its accuracy” since signing landmark deals with the prediction market, while inconsistently disclosing their financial ties. So you can add that to the list of things to be alarmed about!

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $2.95 million on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

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The Best Immigration Messengers Often Aren’t Immigration Experts

Prioritizing Values, Not Expertise

People often ask how we’ve been able to grow our creator program at America’s Voice and how we’ve mobilized people online who usually wouldn’t engage with immigration issues. The answer usually surprises them.

We rarely start by talking about recruiting strategies or platform trends. Instead, we talk about the types of creators we’re building close relationships with and the audiences we’re trying to reach.

We talk about a pastor. A soccer fan. An animal welfare activist. A military veteran.

None of them built their audiences by posting about immigration law or breaking down the latest USCIS memo. None of them wake up thinking about asylum policy or the newest instance of unjust detention. And yet, some of the most meaningful conversations about immigration we’ve helped spark online have come from creators who had never posted about it before.

That may sound counterintuitive, especially for advocacy organizations that are instinctively looking to partner with creators already speaking about their issue. Ultimately, our goal isn’t to keep having the same conversations with the same people. It’s to bring new people into the fold.

That’s why we (strongly!) recommend spending less time looking for issue experts and more time looking for values-aligned communicators.

The reality is that immigration is often framed as one of the most fraught and polarizing issues in our country. Most creators aren’t going to become immigration experts overnight, and they shouldn’t have to. Asking them to memorize legal terminology or recite talking points rarely makes for compelling content. More often, it results in their audiences not being able to connect with the issue.

Our job as digital strategists isn’t to turn lifestyle creators into immigration experts. It’s to help them recognize where immigration already intersects with the communities they’ve spent years building. That’s a very different approach.

A parenting creator doesn’t need to explain humanitarian parole; they can talk about family separation. A veteran doesn’t have to talk about court cases; they can talk about service, sacrifice, and the values we cherish as a nation. And a sports creator can tell the story of immigrant athletes who have shaped America’s teams.

One of the clearest examples of this approach was our collaboration with Isabel Klee, an animal welfare creator and author known for fostering some of the hardest-to-place dogs and helping people connect with rescue animals.

On the surface, immigration policy seems like an odd fit for her audience. But the underlying values were already there: compassion, caretaking, and family. Instead of asking Isabel to explain immigration law or recount the day’s headlines, we provided her with reporting, first-hand stories, and examples from animal shelters documenting the growing trend of families facing detention or deportation being forced to surrender beloved pets, leaving shelters to absorb the fallout.

The resulting video helped her audience understand the human impact of immigration enforcement through a point of connection they already cared about.

For us, this partnership was a huge lesson: the strongest entry point into an issue isn’t always the issue itself – it’s the values, communities, and experiences it intersects with.

Our Takeaways

If there is one thing we’d encourage other digital teams to think through, it’s this: stop trying to find the perfect messenger or get your talking points repeated word for word. Instead, become a resource. Help creators find the intersection between your issue and the communities they already know how to reach.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Recruit for trust, not expertise:

  Find creators whose communities trust them, not just creators who already know everything about your issue only.

• Lead with values:
  Discuss with creators why the issue is important and how it intersects with their own stories and niches.

• Offer resources, not scripts:
  Introduce creators to people affected by the issue and provide them with real-life examples. Then, trust them to tell that story in their own voice.

• Measure who you’re reaching:
  Success is more than just views. For us, it’s reaching people who never would’ve sought out immigration content in the first place.

The challenges facing immigration advocates aren’t going away anytime soon. If anything, they’re becoming more complex. But that also creates an incredible opportunity to rethink who gets to tell these stories and how we reach new audiences.

The internet has fundamentally changed how people build trust. Organizations and legacy media are no longer the only – or even the primary – sources of information for folks. People are increasingly turning to creators, neighbors, pastors, teachers, athletes, and friends.

That means advocacy organizations have to let go of the idea that we need to be the loudest voice in the room or that there’s a silver-bullet fix to our communications problem. Our role is increasingly to humanize the issue and provide the context and the facts for others to tell stories in ways only they can.

If we do that well, we won’t just create better content. We’ll build broader, more resilient movements.

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Hi all — I’m Stasha Rhodes, Executive Director of United for Democracy. We are a national coalition of 160+ organizations — spanning labor, reproductive rights, climate, education, civil rights, and economic justice — working to build a political system that works for everyday people, not the wealthy and well-connected. The Supreme Court’s 2026 term just ended. The consequences for working families are real and immediate. This is the same Court that was built — deliberately, over decades — by dark money and concentrated wealth to deliver for the powerful. And this term, it delivered.

This is not a MAGA problem. It is a structural one. And it demands a structural response.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $1.65 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Meta political spending plummeted faster than expectations for The Great American State Fair. At just 10% of the weekly totals we’ve reported recently, it appears much of the political world knew that audiences were ready to tune out ahead of the long weekend — well that and a lull in the July primary calendar. That didn’t stop a few seemingly innocuous LLCs from throwing their weight around though.

Success Vida LLC wouldn’t interpret the heat wave canceling DC’s Independence Day parade or the storm delaying Trump’s primetime remarks as biblical messages. No, its ads urge viewers to purchase a pro-Trump hat as “a testament to God’s divine will — worn out loud for the whole world to see.” Meanwhile, MAPA Web Marketing LLC is targeting senior Americans, encouraging them to take advantage of recent court rulings by applying for concealed carry permits. Here’s to 250, America.

Moving over to Google and YouTube, political advertisers spent around $9 million on ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

While the primary season cools off for the next few weeks, Michigan and Minnesota’s Senate races are heating up ahead of their August primaries, offering a glimpse into what lies on the other side of Midwest-nice. In Michigan, Stevens kept her ads pretty positive in the days before McMorrow dropped out; but, two states over, North Star Dawn was running both pro-Craig and anti-Flanagan ads. The Minnesota Super PAC drew scrutiny last month after Flanagan alleged they used an AI deepfake of her in their advertising.

Over on Snapchat political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $2.9 million in 2026:

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SCOTUS Rewrote the Rules of the Game. Here’s How We Galvanize Working People to Stop Paying the Price.

“Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decision making.”

— Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting in Payne v. Tennessee (1991)

Grocery prices are crushing families. Wages haven’t kept up. Drug companies keep raising prices while Congress looks the other way. No matter who gets elected, the system never seems to change in working people’s favor.

There is a reason for that. And the Roberts Court just spent nine months cementing it.

Yes, Trump won major victories this term. The Court handed him sweeping new power, weakened voting protections, and limited the independence of agencies designed to protect ordinary people from corporate abuse. But if we make this story only about Trump, we make a serious mistake. We allow the people and institutions that spent decades reshaping our system to escape accountability.

Long before Trump entered politics, a determined movement of wealthy donors, corporate interests, and ideological operatives understood something many Americans did not: the Supreme Court is not simply a referee standing above the political fray. It is one of the institutions that determines the rules under which our economy, our democracy, and our society operate.

The Court shapes whether working people can organize for better wages, whether corporations can be held accountable when they harm consumers or employees, whether voters have meaningful power, whether communities can protect their air and water, and whether fundamental rights are protected.

And while much of the country focused elsewhere, the right’s judicial machine methodically moved to capture it. They understood that courts write the rules of the game and if you control the rules, you can shape the outcomes — even when you lose elections.

They funded law schools, built legal pipelines, and spent forty years patiently installing judges who would deliver for them. They played the long game — and they won.

What we are witnessing today is a crisis, but not an unexpected one. It is the harvest of decades of patient investment. The Roberts Court is not a reaction to Trump. Trump is a beneficiary of a movement that spent decades building the conditions for this moment.

Look at what this term actually delivered. And look at who paid the price.

The Court expanded presidential power over independent regulators —the agencies that investigate corporate abuses, protect consumers, and enforce workplace and environmental safeguards. They are often the only counterwright to powerful corporations with virtually unlimited resources.

The Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Callais, and within weeks, a wave of Southern states moved to redraw maps and erase Black political representation. The communities most likely to demand higher wages, better schools, and accountable government were stripped of leverage across an entire region.

The Court also continued its decades-long expansion of protections for money in politics, allowing wealthy interests to wield enormous influence over the candidates and policies that shape taxes, labor rules, healthcare, and economic opportunity.

And it issued a dangerous ruling targeting transgender athletes, not to resolve a meaningful question of equal treatment, but to deliver a culture-war victory to the movement that built its majority.

These rulings are not isolated events. Together, they reflect a consistent philosophy: limit the power of workers and communities to challenge concentrated wealth, weaken the government’s ability to act as a check on corporate power, and strengthen the influence of the interests that spent decades shaping the judiciary. Every one of these decisions affects whether families get a fair shake in a system that increasingly feels tilted against them. Each one raises the same fundamental question: who has the power to shape the rules that govern our lives?

The answer, too often, has been the people with the most resources to influence the system.

The Supreme Court is not separate from the broken political system working people experience every day. It is one of the engines driving it.

That was not an accident. It was the result of a long-term strategy.

Now it is time to build a movement of our own — to build institutions that serve the American people, strengthen democratic accountability, and give working people lasting power.

That work begins with how we communicate about the Court. If we want people to see what’s at stake, we have to stop treating Supreme Court decisions as isolated legal stories and start explaining them as the choices that shape power in their everyday lives.

First, dig deeper than the headline.

Chief Justice Roberts understands how to shape public attention. While the country focused on the birthright citizenship ruling, the Court quietly issued other decisions that further weakened campaign finance laws and expanded presidential control over independent regulators—rulings that may have an even greater impact on who holds power in our democracy. Organizers can’t just react to the loudest case. We have to explain the decisions that quietly rewrite the rules of the game.

Second, connect every decision to everyday life.

Most people will never read a Supreme Court opinion, nor should they have to. What they understand is whether groceries cost more, whether their drinking water is safe, whether a dangerous product can be recalled, and whether their vote counts. When the Court expands presidential control over independent agencies, it is not just changing the structure of government. It’s changing who stands between ordinary people and powerful corporations when something goes wrong. Our job is to tell that story—to show how decisions that sound technical can have very real consequences for working families. When we make these decisions about kitchen tables instead of courtrooms, people begin to see why they matter.

Finally, give people somewhere to put their outrage.

The Supreme Court has no switchboard to flood and no bill to vote against, but that does not mean people are powerless. Congress can respond through legislation, oversight, and structural reform. After the Court’s decision in Callais, we launched an online petition urging Congress to act, and more than 80,000 people signed it in less than 24 hours. That response reinforced an important lesson: people stay engaged when they are given something meaningful to do.

Awareness without action leads to frustration. Action is what builds movements. Rebuilding the courts is not a niche issue or afterthought. It determines whether every other fight — for better wages, affordable healthcare, housing, workplace power, and the right to vote — can actually be won. You cannot build a fair economy inside an unfair system. You cannot win when the rules have been written against you.

Our task is not simply to win the next election. It is to build institutions that ensure working people have power long after any one election is over.

The question is not whether we can rebuild. The question is whether we are finally ready to begin.

“As a democracy, the people are supposed to be the rulers. The people are supposed to be leading in terms of the policies and the way in which our government operates. And so, the more that people are engaged with our institutions the better.”

— Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, ESSENCE Festival, July 2025

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Hey y’all, it’s Max Levy! I’m an independent digital strategist and author of The Short Answer newsletter. In my work with progressive campaigns, organizations, and causes, I’m always on the lookout for innovative ways the left can reach people in today’s attention economy (like paid clipping, which I wrote about for FWIW last year). I’m back today to talk about another fun, creative tactic — and just how much one grassroots group was able to accomplish with only a webcam and some good old fashioned hustle to bring people together around Trump’s name coming off the Kennedy Center.

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:

Last year, we got “Diet Pepsi” by Addison Rae by Ben Platt (IYKYK) as the song of the summer. Now, Bigger Picture US, Inc. is working spending overtime, dropping over $224K on Meta political ads just to promote their new song, ”Gotta Be Us (Be The People).” Guess you gotta do whatever it takes to beat out Meg Stalter’s “Prettiest Girl in America.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Annie Andrews landed at the #7 spot (not on the music charts). With her ad dollars and 350K Meta platform followers, she is gearing up to unseat Sen. Lindsay Graham. It’s a race Cook Political Report deems a “Solid R.”

Moving over to Google and YouTube, political advertisers spent around $12.2 million on ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC, came in second on last week’s Google and YouTube charts. Its heaviest spending came in Michigan ($293K) and Maryland ($99.3K). In Maryland, most of that money flowed into three Congressional races, with the greatest focus on the 5th District in support of Adrian Boafo, who went on to win the Democratic nomination.

In Michigan, their spending was spread more evenly across a wider range of races, but the 12th District — home to Rep. Rashida Tlaib — stood out, drawing more $$$ than the rest.

Over on Snapchat political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $2.7M in 2026:

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We pointed a webcam at a wall — and activated more than 100,000 people

As a longtime Kennedy Center fan, I’d been brainstorming with the local group Hands Off the Arts about creative ways to draw attention to their fight to stop Donald Trump’s closure of the cultural center and save hundreds of jobs. In addition to their weekly Friday protests, we were looking for something that could break through online. Then the perfect opportunity presented itself.

A federal judge ruled that Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center was illegal and ordered his name be removed from the building within 14 days.

Not only was this a huge win for Kennedy Center workers specifically, it also resonated symbolically, and the internet lit up with people saying they would pay to watch Trump’s name come down.

Clearly, there was interest. The question was how to channel it.

I’d seen enough PandaCams, Casey Wilson’s Rat-Watch, and 24/7 streamers to know there was a tool most progressive organizations overlook that could be the perfect play here: an always-on livestream pointed at the Kennedy Center until they took the name down.

Alongside a scrappy team of volunteers and video pros, we sprinted to launch a livestream that ultimately ran for 3 days. And even though Trump still used a massive (embarrassing) tarp to block the final view, the effort was still a huge success. More than 100,000 people tuned in at some point, Hands off the Arts’ email list grew by 40% overnight, and its social channels also saw real growth.

Always-on livestreams like these are a great tool that more progressive organizations and candidates should take advantage of. Here are some key takeaways for anyone looking to jump in:

In-person organizing is essential. We were operating under a 14-day timer to station a camera, set up the stream, and get out the word. The only reason we were able to find a place where we could leave a camera unsupervised 24/7 with a very specific view of the Kennedy Center in time was because of the relationships Hands off the Arts had built over the last year. Then, when construction started and we wanted to get an even better angle, a dedicated group of volunteers took time away from work to man multiple cameras from the Kennedy Center plaza, in addition to other folks remotely monitoring the livestream itself. This effort required real, on-the-ground hustle, and that kind of infrastructure doesn’t just appear overnight.

Be there first, and build an online community. Eventually, major media outlets set up their own cameras and streams to try and get in on the action, but by the time they arrived, we’d already been live for more than a day. And even though their shots were “nicer,” people stuck around with us — because we had a chat. They wanted to experience the moment together, and our chat was a real way to be in community with other people.

Capture interest for future engagement in as many ways as possible. We didn’t just stream directly to YouTube. We put the stream on TakeTheNameDown.org, which gave us a place to introduce Hands Off the Arts, collect email signups, and tell a deeper story. We also had a QR code on the feed for signups at all times, plus a rolling ticker at the bottom of the screen reiterating the “Stop the Closure, Save the Jobs” message.

Digital stunts can garner earned media to push reach even farther. What started as a single Washingtonian article announcing the stream turned into an avalanche of print, radio, digital, and television coverage, both about the livestream and for Hands Off the Arts spokespeople in general. That brought more viewers to the stream, which helped more press discover us, and the cycle repeated.

Most importantly: have fun! At its core, the livestream was about capturing an important moment on video. But it was also about creating a shared experience and bringing people across the country together to celebrate a moment of joy. Not everything in politics needs to be doom and gloom all the time — sometimes you just need to point a webcam at a wall and invite the internet to have a little fun. And if you can get a drag queen like Tara Hoot to join in too, even better!

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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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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…

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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.