Advertising
The 2026 Political Ad Tally So Far: $3.8B and Counting
Campaigns & Elections
“Political advertisers have spent nearly $900 million more targeting congressional races this cycle than at the same point in 2024, an explosive increase driven by cash-rich outside groups and a rapidly changing advertising landscape.”
Campaigns
On Texas TikTok, It’s All About Talarico
New York Times
“The Times found dozens of accounts on TikTok that were paid $4 per 1,000 views to post positive clips about Mr. Talarico, according to a job posting and online records of creators who accepted the job.”
Why one spoiler candidate is now trying to replicate his work nationwide
Semafor
“Day’s strategy is simple: Use his Stark Freedom PAC to spend relatively small amounts on online ads made with AI that boost name ID for spoiler candidates, figuring he can do just enough to hand those races to the Democrats.”
Fundraising
The Conduit Candidate
SSRN
“Run, self-fund, transfer the money to a party, and let the party spend it in coordination with the real candidate of choice. Each step is legal; the combination guts contribution limits.”
Small Donors Aren’t the Democratic Cure We Imagined
The Democracy Project
“The result can be a collective-action problem: a system very good at generating political participation can be surprisingly poor at directing resources where they might be most useful.”
Why Am I Getting So Many Scammy Texts From Groups I’ve Never Heard Of?
John Hall
“Republicans are spending millions of dollars building fundraising businesses that compete with the very candidates those businesses are supposed to help.”
Social Media
To persuade voters, campaigns and PACs make their own news brands
Chaotic Era
“When Democrats first started doing this back in 2018, reporters and political operatives considered it an avant-garde tactic. In 2026, though, strategists on both sides of the aisle treat it as just another way to reach voters.”
Technology
How a Chatbot Knows to Tell You Where To Vote
Katie Harbath
“And that’s before you get to agents. Most election websites are barely mobile-friendly, let alone built for an agent to crawl and parse on someone’s behalf.”
Voters Aren’t Comfortable With the Most Public-Facing Uses of AI In Politics, Poll Finds
Campaigns & Elections
“Sweet said that one of the overarching takeaways of the findings is that voters tend to be more comfortable with campaigns’ AI use when it comes to backend work – tasks, like drafting emails, analyzing data or brainstorming fundraising appeals. The more public-facing AI use becomes, however, the more voters worry that they’re being misled.”
How RumbleUp’s AI Strategist Builds a Ready-to-Send Texting Project With L2 Voter Data in One Conversation
RumbleUp
“Three jobs used to sit between a new texting account and a sent message, and each one could stall a program in peak season. AI Strategist folds them into one parallel process, saving you valuable time and human resources.”
Preparing for the 2026 US midterms
Anthropic
“This sample suggests people rarely ask Claude whom or what to vote for. These kinds of requests showed up in about 0.01% of US Claude conversations.”