Sponsored by

Advertising

As U.S. election looms, political advertisers shift focus to CTV
The Current
"CTV political ad spend growth in particular is projected to increase by roughly 506% between 2020 and 2024, and make up 45% of digital advertising spend this election cycle. During the 2020 cycle, CTV political ad spend only made up 19%."

Feds Targeting Disclosure Requirements For AI Use in Campaign Advertising
Campaigns & Elections
"Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) are pushing the “AI Transparency in Elections Act” in the Senate, which would require disclaimers on campaign ads “with images, audio, or video that are substantially generated by artificial intelligence (AI),” according to a release."

Campaigns

Trump Stays Calm in Court. His Emails Tell a Different Story.
New York Times
"A Trump campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss data that was not yet public, said the campaign was raising approximately $1 million each day of the Manhattan trial."

Biden’s grassroots fundraising has yet to take off
Politico
"Biden’s campaign and his principal joint fundraising committee, Biden Victory Fund, saw around 100,000 first-time givers on the online portal ActBlue in April, according to an analysis of ActBlue’s FEC filings. That was down from nearly 250,000 donors who gave to Biden’s campaign or his joint fundraising committee for the first time in March."

Nikki Haley gathers her donors and ignores Trump
Politico
"Around 300,0000 donors gave to the campaign — 145,982 of which were new Republican digital donors “added to the GOP fundraising ecosystem,” according to the presentation."

R.F.K. Jr. Is 2024’s X Factor, New Polls Show, Fueled by Young Voters and Social Media
New York Times
"Mr. Kennedy is clearly getting a boost from the rise of social media and the ability to communicate his message directly to voters. Among the roughly one in six voters who said they consumed most of their news from social media, Mr. Kennedy was getting 16 percent of the vote, nearly equal to Mr. Biden’s 18 percent."

Keep up with AI

How do you keep up with the insane pace of AI? Join The Rundown — the world’s largest AI newsletter that keeps you up-to-date with everything happening in AI with just a 5-minute read per day.

Sign up with one click.

International

Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded With Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve
Wired
"Jadoun was trying to capture enough audio and video data to build an AI deepfake of Rathore that would convince 300,000 potential voters around Ajmer that they’d had a personalized conversation with him—but excess movement would break the algorithm."

Facebook Campaigning in the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Federal Elections
Politics & Governance
"Canada’s federal elections in 2019 and 2021 produced a similar outcome—a minority Liberal government. These back-to-back elections provide an ideal context to understand trends in digital campaigning strategies and assess how the pandemic influenced campaigns’ use of social media."

Security

U.S. elections face more threats from foreign actors and artificial intelligence
NPR
"In addition, she said the rise of new AI technologies that can create realistic ‘deepfakes’ targeting candidates and of commercial firms through which foreign actors can launder their activities are enabling more sophisticated influence operations at larger scale that are harder to attribute."

Social Media

The real numbers Democrats should be freaking out about
FWIW
"Buried in Palmeri’s story is another interesting data set: there are ‘10.5 million TikTok users in Pennsylvania, 3.4 million in Nevada*, 2.4 million in Arizona, 5.4 million in Georgia, and 3.7 million users in Michigan.’ Political campaigns would be wise to bookmark those numbers."

Technology

A.I. Promised to Upend the 2024 Campaign. It Hasn’t Yet.
New York Times
"Jeanine Abrams McLean, the president of Fair Count, the nonprofit that led the A.I. experiment in Mississippi, said the pilot project had involved 120 voice memos recorded after meetings with voters that were transcribed by A.I. Then, the team had used the A.I. tool Claude to map out geographic differences in opinion based on what canvassers said about their interactions."