Advertising
YouTube ’28 & The Search for the Swing Voter
Puck
“But on ChatGPT and Gemini, the data shows that Americans are asking more comprehensive questions and revealing more of their personal stories than they would in a search on Google or TikTok.”
Democrats Score Victory in Campaign Finance Court Case
New York Times
“The two parties can both still buy unlimited television ads, but no longer at the favorable rates. Across multiple races, the difference in price could add up to tens of millions of dollars.”
Campaigns
You Are Not a Presidential Campaign
Epolitics
“Regardless of the specifics of the race, successful strategies come down to managing and allocating the resources you have to maximize the benefits they can give you.”
Synthetic Everything Is Warping America
Axios
“An AI-enabled flood of synthetic and outright fabricated content is wreaking havoc on reality, poisoning the signals people rely on to understand politics, business and culture.”
Fundraising
‘With 1,000% Certainty’: Voters Say Candidates Faked Their Donations
Arizona Mirror
“The Mirror attempted to contact more than 50 voters who reportedly gave qualifying contributions to all three candidates and found none who said the contributions listed in their name were legitimate.”
Polling
Prediction Markets Are Still Falling On One Classic Bias
Noah Wyhof-Rudnick
“Now the difference is pretty clear where challengers systematically did better than odds and incumbents did worse. There are a few outliers like NY-4 or NE-2 having more public polling that influenced the market, but the odds gap between the two in races where they had the same margin is a whopping 20%!”
Website Behind Widely Shared Fake Election Polls Run by 21-Year-Old
The Guardian
“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily.”
Why Polling Chaos Could Create Big Problems for American Politics
New York Times
“Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.”
Social Media
Young Voters Get Their Politics From Creators
Rainey Center
“What separates them is persuasion. 35% of young Trump voters say a creator changed their mind, compared with 19% of young Harris voters. Same media diet, different effect.”
Cory Booker, TikTok Slop Aggregator
Chaotic Era
“Whatever you make of the approach, Booker has racked up more than 329 million views across his two TikTok accounts this year, a record for a Democratic politician in 2026.”
Technology
‘Have the Balls to Try’: The Democrats Bucking AI Skepticism
POLITICO
“Others are finding success in school board races and other local campaigns, where cash-strapped candidates are more willing to incorporate AI tools as a cost-saver.”
AI Chatbots May Be the Next Voter Guide
Washington Post
“In 2024, one-third of Americans said they had used a chatbot at least once, and a tiny fraction turned to them for election information. Two years later, roughly half of Americans report using chatbots, with almost one-quarter using them daily.”
NGP VAN Wants Campaigns to Chat With Its CRM
Campaigns & Elections
“The new feature, dubbed Navigator, is essentially a natural-language search assistant baked into NGP VAN’s core segmentation tool, Create a List. It lets fundraisers and digital directors describe in plain language who they’re looking for rather than manually building searches through filters and criteria.”