RIP Politwoops

Advertising

Digital Advertising in the 2022 MidtermsdeGruyter.com"Our analysis uncovered declines in federal candidate spending on digital advertising (defined as the combined spending on Meta’s and Google’s platforms) in 2022 as a share of media spending compared to 2020. This finding may be driven more by decreases in spending on Meta in particular as there is some evidence that Google spending increased. Still, general election candidates in U.S. House and U.S. Senate races devoted nearly $150 million to digital ads on these platforms over the full 2021–2022 election cycle."

Campaigns

How John Fetterman’s campaign used Slack to crowdsource memes and engage volunteersCampaigner.Substack.com"The campaign relied on the messaging tool as its central hub for engaging volunteers - where staff would crowdsource memes, recruit volunteer shifts, and build a sense of community among supporters. At its peak, the Fetterman Slack workspace had over 9,000 members and extremely high levels of engagement and conversation."

Trump's Truth Social DilemmaNewsweek.com"Now, just one year after Truth Social launched, there have been reports that Trump may be prepared to ditch his own platform and fully return to mainstream social media to boost what critics are already saying is a floundering 2024 presidential campaign."

Data

How The Cool Kid Of Progressive Politics Gambled It All AwayFiveThirtyEight.com"The backlash was hurting Data For Progress’s reputation, and senior leadership at the firm began to strategize around getting McElwee out. At the same time, they began an internal review to ensure the founder hadn’t influenced any of the firm’s polling in order to, say, increase his earnings on a particular bet."

Fundraising

Gmail creates online fundraising “apocalypse”FWIWNewsletter.Substack.com"Another digital fundraising consultant I spoke with said that on that day, one of their major clients had been averaging a respectable Gmail open rate of around 20%. Immediately over the next four days, every email sent was opened by less than 1% of Gmail recipients. Those results were far worse than the campaign’s previous open rates before VSP enrollment. 'The difference was night and day.'"

Social Media

After a decade of tracking politicians’ deleted tweets, Politwoops is no moreNiemanLab.org"Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the platform has disabled the function we used to track deletions — and the new method that Twitter says should identify them appears to be broken. We have been unable to find anyone who can help us, and with Twitter surprising developers by announcing a move to a paid model for gathering tweet data, it’s no longer clear that Twitter is a stable platform on which to maintain this work. It seems fitting to give Politwoops a sendoff, a farewell to not exactly a friend but an odd part of our national political discourse for a decade."

Campaign Social Media in 2023: Naturally, It’s ComplicatedCampaignsAndElections.com"In the end, the content always interacts with the strategy. Particularly down-ballot, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok may be a campaign’s most-consistent forms of communication with supporters, volunteers and donors. Feature them! Get people fired up, get them on camera and get the images and video out where others can see how excited they are."