Candidates As Content Creators

Advertising

How Political Campaigns Use Your Phone’s Location to Target YouTheMarkup.org"Campaigns are eager to layer additional personal information on top of this foundation to try and determine who you likely voted for in the past, how you might vote in the future, what motivates your choices—and if you can be persuaded to vote for their candidate or, even better, donate money. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that the campaign gets the most bang for its buck, spending its money efficiently to target the most receptive audience."

People respond better to ads across multiple platforms, study saysDigiday.com"Consumers were more likely to respond to ads if they saw them across different screens, with 41% of survey respondents claiming better recall when they saw the same spot across linear, CTV and mobile."

Campaigns

The midterms turned politicians into content creatorsTheVerge.com"It’s a sign of how pivotal online platforms have become to the business of politics. Campaigns have dabbled in influencer marketing and digital outreach for several cycles now, but this midterm season, those skills became a necessity. More than 8 million young people became eligible to vote this year, and with turnout expectations scrambled after Trump, their support is imperative for battleground races."

Fed Up With Political Text Messages? Read On.NYTimes.com"In October, people in the United States received an estimated 1.29 billion political text messages — about twice as many as in April — according to RoboKiller, an app that blocks Robocalls and spam texts. Many voters have complaints about it."

Data

Quantifying the Persuasive Returns to Political MicrotargetingPsyArxiv.com"Together, these results suggest that political microtargeting can confer a sizable persuasive advantage over more traditional messaging strategies and furnish new insights about the potential societal impacts of this increasingly common campaign practice."

Fundraising

WinRed Processes $1.2 Billion in 2022 Cycle, Raises More per Donor than ActBlueWinRed.com"51 House campaigns raised more than $1 million online, 70% more than the 30 in 2020."

Inside the political fundraising machine that is flooding your inboxGrid.News"At the same time, the total raised per individual email seems to be going down, creating a vicious cycle where campaigns must send more messages to rake in the same amount of cash. With a few exceptions, an email that would raise $25,000 a few campaign cycles ago now brings in just a few thousand dollars, a senior adviser to several national-level Democratic campaigns and organizations told Grid. This means campaigns need to send more messages just to hit the same goals."

Social Media

Social media's role in America's polarized political climateCBSNews.com"Each individual term referring to your political out-group increased the odds of that post being retweeted or reshared by 67%."

Trump once reconsidered sticking with Truth Social. Now he’s stuck.WashingtonPost.com"Trump has told his allies that he can’t leave Truth Social, because he’s propping it up, and he doesn’t want a site so closely associated with his brand to collapse, according to people familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters."

Technology

Democracy Gone Digital: The Election Season OnlineTechPolicy.Press"In the span of a human lifetime, computers have evolved from glorified calculators to pocket-sized knowledge management hubs that process terabytes of information in milliseconds. In one decade, smartphones went mainstream. We would be naive to believe this transition has not posed profound challenges to human cognition and the subsequent ability of citizens to engage in democracy."