Advertising
Time for the Political World to Play Catch-Up
Campaign Trend
"Digital can target registered voters in your exact district, then narrow by partisanship, voting history, age, gender, and top issues. Campaigns can test languages, creative formats, and even influencer partnerships—ads with influencer content, for example, have produced 42% higher engagement than standard creative."
Advocacy
The Government Just Made it Harder for The Public to Comment on Regulations
404 Media
“Regulations.gov removed the POST function from its API, a critical piece of tech that allowed third party organizations to bypass the website’s terrible user interface.”
Campaigns
How Gavin Newsom trolled his way to the top of social media
Politico
“As of this writing, the ‘Governor Newsom Press Office’ account has 408,000 followers on X. Since the beginning of August, it has gained more than 250,000 followers and earned more than 225 million impressions, according to Newsom’s office.”
Data
The Democratic Party’s Voter Registration Crisis
New York Times
“That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.”
Fundraising
The Small Dollar Revolution Might Have Been Bad, Actually
Medium Data
“Per OpenSecrets, small dollar donors (defined as under $200) gave about 4 billion dollars in 2020, compared to 1 billion in 2016. In 2024, Harris alone got 468 million dollars from small donors.”
🔥 BREAKING: Only a $5 Gift Can Stop the Lies About Mothership!
The Connector
“Mothership also insists that most of the $159 million that it has received in consulting fees from client PACs—one of Bonica’s harshest findings—has not settled in its pockets but instead represents ‘pass-through’ expenses that it pays to other vendors for things like Facebook and Google ads, email and text-messaging platforms, and list acquisition.”
Spam PACs Raise Money by Deceiving Seniors.
On Data & Democracy
“One 89-year-old woman from Indianapolis has made 7,532 separate donations totaling $68,666. That's an average of over 10 donations per day, every day, for more than two years.”
Technology
Your Polls On ChatGPT
Verasight
“On topline distributions: 39% of the synthetic respondents in our best-performing model approve of Donald Trump, versus 42% in the actual data; Trump gets a 55% disapproval rating in our actual data, but 60% in the LLM sample.”
iOS 26 has political groups panicking over fundraising. The truth might surprise them
Fast Company
“In other words, just because someone installs iOS 26 on their iPhone, texts from the NRSC or other political fundraising groups won’t be automatically filtered out.”
White House
The White House Is On TikTok: Is TikTok Safe? What's Next?
Content Is Not King
Aaron says the launch of the White House TikTok account “will set the stage for members of Congress, potentially other executive agencies — like the State Department or the Department of Commerce — to make their own official TikTok account.”
I made memes for the White House. Here’s what I learned
Fox News
"In just six months, the administration’s platforms added over 16 million new followers, with the fastest growth among Americans aged 18–34. We generated billions of video views and gained more than half a million new YouTube subscribers – nearly triple the previous administration’s total growth over four years."