Advertising
I’m a media consultant who tells clients to spend less on broadcast television...
Will Robinson
“Even when broadcast had the World Cup and the NBA Finals, four out of every five minutes of television viewing happened somewhere else.”
Campaigns
Inside Ossoff’s meticulously viral campaign
POLITICO
“Really any speech should be, because at the end of the day you’re talking about maximizing clippable sound bites. It’s almost what a cable news hit was, except now you can control a lot more of the scene and what you’re saying.”
Political Work Became a Career. Campaigns Haven’t Gotten the Memo
Campaigns & Elections
“While 84 percent of professionals working at established organizations or consulting firms receive employer-sponsored health insurance and 80 percent receive some sort of paid time off, nearly two-thirds of campaign staffers surveyed say they receive no benefits whatsoever.”
Content
The Internet Knows You’re Faking It
FWIW
“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.”
Google Just Made It Easier for Campaigns to Send You Fund-Raising Emails
New York Times
“Google’s new program will require that candidates, PACs and party committees register the domain they send emails from and that their spam rates, the percentage of emails that users mark as spam, remain below 0.3 percent, according to the policy.”
Fundraising
Hook and Squeeze
Adam Bonica
“Less than 1 percent of all Democratic donors account for almost half of the $1.4 billion raised by spam PACs since 2017. Put more precisely, roughly 138,000 donors averaging 75 years of age have each donated to these PACs one hundred times or more.”
Women Outraise Men in Competitive 2026 Races, Analysis Finds
Campaigns & Elections
“Across both parties, women raised a higher average share of their money from contributions of $200 or less, according to CAWP’s analysis. Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) led all incumbent women on that front, drawing about 68 percent of her funds from small contributions.”
International
Why we should all be worried about AI in elections
Rest of World
“The results were staggering: Roughly 5.5 million voters were deleted from rolls in two states, many without any notice or path to reinstatement, before India’s Supreme Court halted the program. Right to Information disclosures later revealed that the matching algorithm’s failure rate was as high as 93%.”
Polling
Polling Group Released Fake Data in Hong and Bass Races as a ‘Social Experiment’
New York Times
“The revelation of such an experiment, and how easily the false results spread, exposed a challenge in a polling world where incentives are high to produce polls that attract attention, and the cost of a low-quality poll is relatively modest.”
Security
An Algorithmic Failure Beneath the Secret Ballot
Princeton CITP
“I am not a security researcher, and I have never been to Georgia. Yet within a few hours, using AI tools and nothing but public records, I was able to reconstruct the order in which 1.5 million ballots were cast in Georgia’s May 2026 primary–98.9% of the in-person ballots.”
Social Media
X’s Algorithm Feeds Off Ragebait and Impacts Democrats More, Study Finds
404 Media
“Most of the participants liked and reposted content on X and got served more of the same sort of content. Replying was rare, just 6.8% of the interactions according to the study, but had an outsized impact on the algorithm.”
Technology
Google’s new AI tool helps fact-checkers investigate AI fakes
Nieman Lab
“After uploading an image and entering a basic question, Backstory can automatically run checks to determine whether the image is AI-generated, whether it shows signs of manipulation, and where else the image has appeared throughout its lifetime on the internet.”
AI slop is swamping a House office that drafts US laws
POLITICO
“In the last Congress, Burke’s office of 61 attorneys and 19 support staff prepared over 30,000 bills, nearly three times as many as were actually introduced.”