Advertising
2026 Cycle: Political Video Spend Projections
Cross Screen Media
“Despite the absence of a presidential race, political video spend for the 2026 midterms is projected to nearly equal the record-breaking levels of 2024.”
Campaigns
Digital Campaign Tools and Performance in Virginia’s 2025 Elections
Center for Campaign Innovation
“At the structural level, the findings suggest that Democrats are running digitally institutionalized campaigns, while many Republicans continue to operate in a more fragmented, vendor-driven environment. The correlation between professional-grade websites and stronger electoral performance underscores that digital presence is no longer ancillary, but is a proxy for campaign capacity.”
How I helped Zohran Mamdani turn 45,000 social media DMs into a real-life army of volunteers
FWIW
“We were able to automatically capture emails natively inside Instagram’s direct messaging platform, without the user needing to click through to any website. In Facebook Messenger, 23% of recipients handed over their email address right in DMs.”
How Mamdani's Campaign Used a New Instagram Feature to Swell Its Follower Count
Campaigns & Elections
“The feature, called Trial Reels, is intended to allow users to test content with non-followers to see what kind of material performs best.”
Social Media
Architects of Online Influence: How Creators, Platforms, and Policymakers Shape Political Speech
Center for Democracy & Technology
“Almost 30% of US creators were solicited by a political organization during the 2024 election, according to a creator agency’s survey.”
Technology
The ‘Do My Own Research’ Voter Has a New Research Assistant
Campaigns & Elections
“For 2026 campaigns the lesson is clear: if you don’t fill the space with accessible, authoritative content, AI will now do it for you — and there’s a good chance you won’t like the answer.”
A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On
404 Media
“As the press release for the paper notes, for the seven major national polls before the 2024 election, adding as few as 10 to 52 fake AI responses would have flipped the predicted outcome.”