It links to a website called fultongrandjury.com, which I at first thought would be an official government website, and what initially made me curious was the idea of spending money to advertise a government website, getting this additional credibility. Like, if the facts are so strongly on your side that you merely need to spend ad money to point people to official sources, that's a strong signal.
> Fulton County Jury is a project of Our Community Media, Small Town American Media, and Small Town Truth.
None of these are linked, but they can be found with Google. Our Community Media appears to be a website with stories scraped from Google News, one even has the Google News default image. Small Town America Media claims to support Small Businesses, Telehealth in Rural America and Digital Literacy. Their latest news: Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws Are Political Theater by State Politicians.
Small Town Truth is probably the most inspiring:
> For over 200 Years
> American has fought for truth
> Now....
> We need you to help
They have page dedicated to "discovering truth", telling it apart from "russian fake news"[1] which is copied from and links to a medium post.
None of these websites have information about who's behind them. No person. No address. They have contact pages, but these are just forms, probably to add you to some spam mailing list.
So, searching via that Exempt Organization Search led to a 501(c)(3) letter being issued to Small Town Truth, mailed to a residential address in the care of the "Better Narrative Group" - another "interesting" site[0].
Doing a little more searching, I've found another 501(c)(3) in care of Better Narrative Group: Soul of a Nation Media. Similar setup. In trying to find more information to connect some dots, I found Soul of a Nation Media's taxes were filed by ChurchBiz[1], but this hasn't led to anything interesting.
Both Small Town Truth and Soul of a Nation Media changed addresses to a PO Box in Virginia in 2022.
Oh, and here are another two I just found related to Better Narrative Group: American Volunteer Corps[2], Better Neighbors Network[3].
To not assume malice, maybe it's a concerned citizen trying, in their own way, by establishing these organizations. Something feels off about the sites, though - not much content, a little dead behind the eyes, and I can't put my finger on the actual purpose of the sites. Odd.
Not at my desktop, so I can’t really dig into the technical details of these sites, but by the look of them, they were all made either with the same tool and general components OR they were all made by the same group (maybe the same contracting firm or something)
When I see .com I immediately assume it's not a government site until proven otherwise. It's sometimes done, particularly for affiliated and contracted sites, but also anyone can just go register a .com (see the history of whitehouse.com - from porn to gambling and more) plus government ones overwhelming tend to be .gov, .org, .us, etc anyways. (.gov is really the only one of those that's a particular guarantee of much but the others are at least slightly more likely to be real sites).
>They have page dedicated to "discovering truth", telling it apart from "russian fake news"[1] which is copied from and links to a medium post.
Okay, so maybe not. Or maybe it is, and they expected people to be suspicious, so they're the wolf in sheep's clothing warning the other sheep about the wolf to gain trust. It's all too much.
Population being split on the available options is the basis of democracy and is a feature not a bug. Otherwise we might as well just have a CCP style single party.
Population being split is what Putin and other directorship wants. Ever heard about Philippe de Macédoine "divide and conquer" ?
They are doing the same in Europe, because divided we wouldn't be able to merge our force and push them back.
If half of America is for helping Ukraine and half against, it makes it even tougher to do anything. Not enough and people get mad about Ukrainian dying, too much and people get mad about the money spending, everytime you get chaos.
I'm sure we don't need to argue semantics here as you very well understand what I mean. The American public wasn't as divided as now.
Heck, if Watergate were to have happened now, Nixon would have escaped scotch free - as Trump has.
Joe Biden might even forever be remembered as the Neville Chamberlain of USA (even though Neville doesn't deserve his reputation while Biden absolutely does).
> Are you mad the US hasn't declared war on Russia and worried that it is going to have dire consequences for the US?
We've absolutely been slow rolling aid to Ukraine because the Biden White House bought Putin's bullshit. If we'd provided the weapons we're providing Kyiv with now at the outseet they would have been able to capitalise on the Russian army's lack of preparedness to draw frontlines much more advantageously, possibly even end the 'special operation' before it became entrenched.
> Have you thought to consider that the slowness in aiding Ukraine is a feature, not a bug?
Yes. Unless the goal is undermining American and NATO interests, it doesn't make sense. One could conclude from that corrupt motives. Hanlon's razor suggests a more parsimonious solution. (The same folks who were convinced Russia would be in Kyiv in weeks in '22, and then '23, and then '24 keep getting quoted as experts.)
> fultongrandjury.com, which I at first thought would be an official government website
Are you being straight serious here, or are you doing a rhetoric thing where "I was confused" is just a shorthand for "I think some people might plausibly be confused"?
I could see some people who aren't net-saavy thinking that domain looks like a government website, but I'm surprised that anybody here might see a .com like that and think it an official anything. Official government websites in America almost always use a .gov, and when they don't they usually have some goofy long string of subdomains like www.courts.state.md.us (I'm not 100% sure that is actually official, but it's in the style government websites use and if an unofficial website used that style I'd definitely consider it an attempt to deceive people.)
usps.com. amtrak.com. mta.info. These were just the first that came to mind.
I think there are specific reasons behind each of these, but the fact is that I am used to interacting with government websites that end in .com, so it wouldn't surprise me if some county's court system also used a .com.
Political advertising just makes democracy look like a total joke. If you can buy votes by shoving ads in peoples’ faces that’s not a democracy, that’s an oligarchy.
Political advertising emerged within a decade of the birth of the republic. Abraham Lincoln famously had his face plastered everywhere, and his campaign monikers like "Honest Abe" are still in use today.
The real push toward oligarchy, in my opinion, is the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs FEC. The only available remedy at this point is for the American electorate to stop relying on political ads and make a decision on policy alignment alone (like the Founding Fathers did) - this is a totally unrealistic goal in today's polarized environment.
This. Something like 5 people are almost entirely funding Trump's slump (hard to call this mess a campaign) towards the White House and for sure they are going to want pay back. This is what oligarchy looks like.
5 people? Last time I was on X, nearly every Silicon Valley/tech billionaire was crooning from the rooftops for Trump.
You could argue it's the native X bias, but these were all the famous billionaires and multimillionaires who are top names in the SV space. All rooting for a Trump win, perhaps anticipating a quick Vance presidency.
A lot talk but only a ~half dozen actually bother to put together 100s of millions where their mouths are about it. I haven't looked this year but usually Bloomberg tops the chart on the blue side.
Entirely possible - I spend as little time as possible thinking about this and am just looking forward to our national nightmare of Trump being a plausible president candidate being over the week after next.
You mean the betting markets the oligarchs have gamed? :)
Though I will agree with you that he has a coin flip chance of being president, which is totally terrifying. Is that what it felt like to be in Germany with Hitler?
I do believe that something like 70% of SV can't stand Trump. You can see that in the insane amount of money Kamala has raised from SV (which probably even dwarfs Trump's XX person oligarch haul).
It is largely the sociopaths at the very very top that are Trump donors.
SV only cares about whoever will help them make more money. Everything else is virtue signaling by champagne socialists pretending to care about current day social issues and the struggles of the lower classes.
Of course all of the billionaires are rooting for Trump, because they want to be in business next year. Harris will understand voting for other parties, but Trump punishes disloyalty.
Germany doesn't have negative ads criticizing opponents (at least it didn't have them when I lived there). This makes them refreshingly boring. I would guess at least 90% of the US ads are basically "the other guy is bad. Be afraid" without much content. Getting rid of the negative ads would help a lot.
"Negative campaigning has been a feature of German political campaigns from the very beginning of the Federal Republic... the central idea of this paper is to examine the considerable difference between negative campaigning in Germany compared with that in the US."
It seems like you're correct that German political ads are almost never US-style 'attack ads' because among Germans, "negative campaigning in Germany is much more risky for the attacker than the impact it may have on the attacked party"
Political advertising is just the tip of the corruption iceberg. When lobbying and gerrymandering is legal, can you really claim you're living in a democracy?
Have you ever given money to the EFF? They're lobbyists. Call your represenatative? That's lobbying. Lobbying, i.e. constituents talking to electeds, is fundamental to democracy.
A huge industrial corporation spending millions on lobbyists in order to make it easier to dump pollutants into the environment without consequence, increasing their profits at the expense of local populations, is also a form of lobbying. I would bet that amoral corporate lobbying accounts for far more activity than good mission driven orgs like the EFF.
> huge industrial corporation spending millions on lobbyists in order to make it easier to dump pollutants into the environment without consequence, increasing their profits at the expense of local populations, is also a form of lobbying
Yes. You're describing a policy disagreement between a polluter and everyone else. Pick any political system and you'll have the same divide. (Again, lobbying involves hiring someone to present the case to an elected. It's categorically distinct from giving to a PAC or campaign.)
> would bet that amoral corporate lobbying accounts for far more activity than good mission driven orgs like the EFF
I mean sure, for a given value of "good." Social policy lobbying tends to vastly outstrip commercial lobbying, in part because the latter is more focussed.
Gerrymandering isn't legal. The Constitution says that the states shall have a republican form of government. The founders intended this to mean an elective republic. If the government chooses its own electors, then it's not a republic by any wild stretch of the imagination.
Well there is no way to ban political messaging in-practice, so we have to regulate it. Also, imo, making education accessible to the masses is important for combating the effectiveness of straight-up misinformation. Right now a good chunk of the population doesn't even seem to understand why they believe things generally, so there's plenty room to improve.
Even the Biden DOJ only warned him that it "might be illegal". They're stretching the law, trying to apply a law against paying people to register to vote, but Elon will pay people who are already registered so that's quite a stretch.
I think the movie The Insider expressed it well: "The press is free, for anyone that owns one."
Apparently that comes from an older expression dating back at least to a 1960 quote in The New Yorker: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
There is a perspective from which all politics is just entertainment with audience participation, while The Powers That Be control the things that actually matter.
(I'm not saying I endorse this view, I'm just trying to explain)
Fortunately our government can't force private entities to sponsor specific political candidates, due to our constitutional right to freedom of speech.
Honestly it doesn't work that well. Far-rights channels will push left-wing candidates to graveyard slots, or put them against 3 trained "interviewers", etc.
Maybe it's still better than in the US? It's far from perfect.
In Spain at least, radio and TV time slots for political ads are assigned by the Electoral Commission in a session which can be attended by representatives of each candidacy.
Ah yes, I'm extremely glad that both myself and Charles Koch have the equal right to buy ads. I see no problems that could ever occur because we're equally legally allowed to spend unlimited money on political advertising.
Now... How many ads will 5 bucks buy? I'm pretty deeply in debt, but I could probably skip a meal in order to fully exercise my political freedom.
How about advertising anything other than a product or service is illegal? No more campaign ads, period. You want to know more about a candidate? Go research her yourself!
anyone can buy ads but who buys the majority of ads and ads with the greatest overall impact and impression? That is very obviously skewed. Campaigns directly have limitations on these things, PACs however, do not.
and to your question there, one example is to look at Japan. They give candidates an allotted minimum amount of time on TV for free. A candidate gets platformed purely by running. Not only that but we already do grass roots calling/texting/door-knocking campaigns... it is all definitely possible, but unlikely given that the current organization of elections heavily favors the entrenched two party system and the structures that back them (corporations, PACs, private interests, party structures etc...)
When our entire system requires billions to run and win an election, we are guaranteeing ourselves that we will continue to live in an Oligarchy.
> and to your question there, one example is to look at Japan. They give candidates an allotted minimum amount of time on TV for free. A candidate gets platformed purely by running.
I would be willing to try it in one of our laboratories-of-democracy, but my expectation is that a lot of people would run just for the free opportunity to self-promote. "Hi my name is Ron Popeil and I'm running for city council. I firmly believe that every homeowner deserves, nay, needs a Ronco food dehydrator!"
Interesting to compare the top ads when sorting "Amount spent: high to low" and "Number of times shown: high to low". Political ads from 4 years ago appear to have been shown many more times for much less cost. This year's ads seem considerably more expensive while also reaching a smaller audience.
I'm talking banner ads. I block almost everything everywhere, except my work. My boss (who doesn't block anything and accepts all tracking everywhere) doesn't get their ads. So I think they just have a scattershot approach.
Competition might be part of that too: more money chasing the same number of eyeballs as the election season ramped up (for that matter, probably chasing a smaller number of eyeballs, as critical segments of swing voters became more clear)
Looks like it's primarily the "location" demographic that is actually different. Neither ad excludes any demographics for Age or Gender but the 2024 includes specific locations for advertisements. So maybe fewer people in Europe and elsewhere seeing American political ads, which I'd assume is preferred by the advertisers. I can see how that would compound to this effect; fewer valuable targets and more value per target.
(Another thing I notice is the ad run length. The 2020 ads ran for a single day (with over 10M views!) and the 2024 ads have been running for weeks or months. Not sure if that's relevant to the expenditure but it's interesting to note.)
Covid was a catalyst for bigger changes to go potentially unchallenged and opportunity for extra greed.
1 company dared do a thing and no one batted eye. Then 2nd. Domino's of greed and fake excuse on supposed inflation. But it was just domino's of greed
While rates were low they could offset nickel and diming consumers by handing them cheap cash in the form of inflated wages to work lame jobs. Now rates are high, jobs cut, less consumer nickel and diming as consumers are tapped out
For the time being it’s back to the old way of screwing the public by over charging government for consulting work
boiling the frog slowly. if you start out being more expensive than traditional media, they won't use you.
same thing with streaming. start out cheaper/more convenient/more comprehensive than traditional media - and an enormous market to grow into, so your shareholders are happy even with a reasonable price. wait a few years until you have saturated the market, and now the only way to achieve the holy growth is to raise the prices indefinitely.
It's fascinating. I'm at home and my pi-hole ad-blocking rules apparently trigger for that page, so although I can see the titles, all the images just fail to load.
California is strongly "blue" on the national issues these days, but that doesn't mean that there aren't hotly contested elections and ballot measures at issue within the state.
Seperately, it brings potential as a source of funding to spend elsewhere specifically because some of the national questions aren't really open. If you are confident in the ROI, you can run ads there to drive fundraising -- especially early on -- and then spend those raised funds in contested elections elsewhere.
The same dynamic happens in soundly "red" markets, although that may not be apparent in this dataset because of the specific demographics of Google advertising.
> Seperately, it brings potential as a source of funding to spend elsewhere specifically because some of the national questions aren't really open. If you are confident in the ROI, you can run ads there to drive fundraising -- especially early on -- and then spend those raised funds in contested elections elsewhere.
IMO this year the ballot props are much more meaningful to the average person than usual. The perennial niche prosp about kidney dialysis aren't making a showing for what feels like the first time in a decade.
There are some big proposed changes to how local bond measures work, rent control, and the criminal justice system, IMO those are the ones spending the most time researching and considering the consequences.
As far as the more niche ones this time around, there's the same-sex marriage prop (which I believe is purely symbolic and doesn't have an actual impact on same sex marriage in California) and the prop designed to force the AIDs Healthcare Foundation to spend more money on AIDS healthcare (IIUC currently they spend most of their money on political causes like lobbying against rezoning that would allow denser housing)
> same-sex marriage prop (which I believe is purely symbolic...
Same-sex marriage is currently outlawed by the California constitution as a result of Prop 8 from 2008. That clause is void as a result of the Hollingsworth and Obergefell decisions, but there are multiple members of the Supreme Court who have explicitly said that they would like to overturn Obergefell, so it's a good idea to get ahead of the potential catastrophe by taking the bad law fully off the books, rather than relying on a capricious and extremist court to stick to a rights-defending decision for any amount of time.
Thanks for the clarification. I still wonder if it matters all that much. You only need one state to allow non-residents to marry on Zoom, and it's a non-issue in practical terms.
States banning same-sex marriage within their borders takes away the dignity and respect of same-sex marriages and couples, so it's quite awful. But they can't actively prosecute people for crossing state lines to marry. They have to provide them the same rights as hetero-married couples, even for things like state benefits and taxes.
> there's the same-sex marriage prop (which I believe is purely symbolic and doesn't have an actual impact on same sex marriage in California)
It removes an on-the-books clause that was rendered inoperable by a SCOTUS decision. I think it’s a step above symbolic since any future changes in SCOTUS jurisprudence reversing or partially reversing Obergefell (which I don’t think are at all likely with this court on this issue, but it doesn’t hurt to be prudent) could make it operable again.
I think prop 8 was previously nullified by Hollingsworth v. Perry?
Not saying it'll never matter, but if OP has a finite amount of focus IMO it's better to spend it on laws that will have an immediate impact over ones that require multiple hypotheticals to come into play
It revises one statement in the state constitution in a very straightforward way.
It takes an infintessimal amount of focus to decide if you're in favor of that change or not.
Whether the reason it's on this year's ballot is neurotic or strategic is on a level with whether you should buy 4 or 6 rolls of toilet paper next time you're at the store. You already know if you need toilet paper or not, so that difference is relatively inconsequential.
> California is not even close to being a swing state, afaik?
As the most populous state, California has a lot of political donors - likely the most registered members in a state for both major parties. 1 in 8 Americans are in California. Those many small-value & high-roller donors help finance the swing state operations, but need to be activated. Donors are why both Republican and Democratic party candidates held events in California, when it's not in play.
> There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.
If anyone is interested in connecting with someone working in this space, please hit me up. We’ve been building tools for political media buyers for the last several years. We draw data from the Google Transparency DB, Meta’s equivalent and other disparate sources to allow campaigns to analyze the spending in greater detail. It has been really interesting from an engineering perspective, but also just to learn more about how this industry operates.
If the spend figure is right the difference between the money spent in the USA and UK is larger than I expected.
Highest weekly spend in the UK is just under £1M (Dec 2019) while in the US it’s £50M (Oct 2024). That’s 10 times more spending with only 5 times the population.
Seems like a general handy site in general as a sort of Google Trends alternative. I know it's not an actual alternative but to pick up on certain trends from advertizers.
In Norway it's forbidden with political ads on TV. Reasoning being that live images can have a huge influence, while also possibly being inflammatory and dumb down the debate. But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.
However, this law hasn't been updated in decades. So it's still only TV ads that's illegal. So it feels like a quite arbitrary restriction now.
Not saying it should be illegal on other media as well, but I do like the idea of it not being the size of your pockets determining the election. I guess that would be hard to police anyways now, with how influencers can sway stuff without it being an "ad", or how algorithms drive you into a rabbit hole of tailored content anyways.
Kind of new in the US, you can't stop people in the US from spending money on ads that amplify there speech. [1]
Political spending is regulated, but we now have "political action committees" that can support candidates but can't coordinate with them. They can accept money from anyone in any amounts. Its brought tons of money from wealthy doners into polics in the US.
Adding some context here - TBane stations (the subway) in Oslo have posters that show live videos - usually static images with dynamic attention-grabbing effects but sometimes full blown videos too.
They're different as in a video can influence you much stronger than a poster. But maybe you misunderstood me, my point was that the way we have it today isn't necessarily good either. Just curious about how one can give people good information, without it being too inflammatory, and without making an election a race about who has the most money.
No, I agree with your remark completely but I'm still ambivalent about the tradeoff.
We agree there should at least be one medium of advertising for political parties. But where do we draw the line?
For instance, I would be happy with making all ads plain text, standard font and size so that the ads won't abuse human attention by showing bright colors, happy images etc.
> But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.
I think the main reason for rules like this is because it's literally politicians and political parties shoveling huge amounts of cash to the media, and 1) one of the purposes of the media is to inform people about politicians and politics, and 2) the politicians who are elected will oversee the media and their mergers. An intimate relationship is created where democracy demands an adversarial one.
It's rotten. It's the same reason no media can criticize any drug in the US, since they were allowed to advertise to the public. I'm sure there's some value in having people ask for specific drugs from their doctors, but that's minimal; the main value is being immune to any criticism unless an e.g. television station wants to lose 20% of their income.
Also media outlets are free to propagandize all day. You can't restrict that because we don't want to restrict freedom of the press. But then that begs the question, don't all companies and individuals have the same freedom of the press that media companies do?
This is the most shocking part from an outsider POV. In Europe* mainstream media must obviously be neutral about each candidate but also give the same amount of airing time to each candidate. So like if candidate 1 is invited for a 10 min interview, candidate 2 must be invited too and offered the same airing time. Meanwhile here Fox can just call Harris "stupid" (and CNN reciprocally call Trump whatever they want), lie to make them look good/bad and support their candidate all day long while spitting on the other one, and it's fine.
Edit: my bad for generalizing all countries of Europe
In Spain, public TV must show a list of parties with a minimum same time for even the tiniest craziest parties several times a day. After that, they are free to keep doing their thing.
But the biggest parties can buy more time by several subterfuges. In resume they can pay somehow for receiving a special treatment. Every politician has a market value and TV programs always compete for showing adds to the most eyeballs possible, so they will try to fill their programs with the more popular politicians 'for free'.
If I'm not wrong, private channels, funded without public money, can show people making pancakes all day it they want, but they will also try to maximize their advertising revenues.
How much do they have to be "neutral" when there are multiple candidates with significantly different popularity?
If there are three candidates polling about equal then okay, it's easy to be neutral. But what if they're |40, 35, 25| or |60, 20, 20| or |55, 40, 5|?
When does a minor candidate drop out of their neutrality?
I'm not saying the general idea is bad but just pointing out that neutrality is kind of a vague concept. It's a bit like giving climate change deniers equal airtime with serious scientists.
I don't know if I follow you. My point was that TV networks can't do propaganda for a candidate, i.e. they can repeat the policies of each candidate (without giving you their opinion on those policies and trying to convince you if it's good or bad or modify them) and fact check what they say, but they can't tell you who to vote for or blatantly lie about them. Hence they are neutral. Meanwhile here Fox will just tell you to vote for Trump to save America and that if Harris wins she will turn America into communism, and millions of people are watching and believing it.
Not in Poland. Before the last election we had 100% partisan media with the public media campaigning for the ruling party and the opposition controling the private media. Both had the Fox News/CNN/Pravda levels of objectivity showing a strange propaganda version of reality.
Comparing what works in one with what works in the other is meaningless at best. The idea that any of these concepts could be generalized between the two is silly.
I can't instinctively imagine how the size of a nation could realistically impact the results of this particular decision (banning political ads). Could you perhaps propose a realistic theory?
Well, there's an enormous amount more money to be made in the United States with political advertising, so you're going to get a great deal more pushback from advertisers on any such attempt /s
I didn't say it worked, rather I said it kinda doesn't because it's so limited compared to where people get their ads nowadays. It also wasn't really meant as a comparison, more of a segue into a discussion around if the huge ad spending and influencing is good or bad.
How “expensive” (in the sense of total spend) an ad is is entirely driven by what budget you allow for the order.
But without targeting constraints you will get essentially remnants and are unlikely to reach any of your actual target, e.g. undecided likely voters in swing states
A lot of nationwide ads aren't intended to directly influence voting. Rather they are campaign donation solicitations to get more money to run future ads targeted to undecided voters in swing states. Just about everyone 18+ nationwide could afford to make a small campaign contribution if they care about the outcome.
Democrat, Republican, or Independent, Google gets rich either way. You can clearly see price per view has gone up dramatically from the historical comparison. $2B in Google ad spend so far this cycle.
Also interesting, the New York Times is the most viewed ad of this election season, having been seen 10M+ times.
It appears the only true winners of US presidential election mania are Google and the Media.
In the middle of the 2008 Dem primaries (H. Clinton vs Obama) it was obvious it won't be much of a race anymore, Obama was going to clinch it, but the media narrative was still portraying it as one... it made me wonder how much of it came because if the audience thinks it's a race, then they'll tune in, and more eyeballs = better ad sales.
Ah, Allah bless the everlasting Attention Economy!
In the age of information warfare, ads are a weapon and Google is the modern day Colt. If you sell guns to the North, the South needs more guns from you. If you sell to the criminals, the cops need more guns from you.
Not sure what this is called but it's definitely not "don't be evil"
The term I heard was fence-setters. It's a little off though, becsuse it implies your allegiance changes. Google allegiance is always clearly on money.
NFL is a microcosm of american politics. Two opponent teams, each has a trainer, a rich donor, some ideology and millions of fanatics who vote for their team no matter what. It may seem like the goal is to win the game on the stadium, but behind the scenes it's a well calculated auction of advertisements.
In my view, money might once have, but the number of persuadable voters is quite low. If someone has decided to vote for Trump, it's unlikely they will change their mind. And if someone is undecided, they'll probably vote for Trump, because let's face it, most people voting for Harris aren't voting because they like her platform - they're voting because they dislike Trump. If you don't dislike Trump, Harris's platform is nothing world-changingly new or different.
> most people voting for Harris aren't voting because they like her platform - they're voting because they dislike Trump
That seems to be a popular conclusion by people who are on the Trump side. I see little evidence for it in real life. Many factors go into a political choice, and sure, disliking Trump is one of them, but most Harris supporters would not be voting R in any case because they do not agree with that platform.
Money has an influence but it's not decisive. In the 2016 presidential election, the Clinton / Kaine campaign spent about twice as much as their opponents but still lost. Could they have won with even more money? Maybe?
I'd expect the demographics of google ad viewers to be more or less "the internet at large, minus a few markets like China were Google is much less prevalent, and a few groups techy enough to disproportionately run adblockers"
You’d be amazed. A surprising number of people, particularly older people, do not use the internet as such all that much; they use Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, or YouTube.
I was completely shocked to find out how many people use search in those apps to query open questions rather than 'search the web' via something like Google
I bought a Kagi subscription when I discovered that Google was de-indexing Covid podcasts that it didn't like. I doubt that the population who moved on from Google is demographically neutral.
"Facebook users" or "Google users" are way too broad for a political campaign ad to target. Party A's ad will go to too many of Party B's users and vice versa. They need to be much more carefully targeted to be effective.
The purpose of a political ad is not to convince undecided people to vote for [party]. The number of undecideds is vanishingly small, so there's no ROI there. The purpose of a political ad is to convince people who have already picked a side to actually vote vs not voting. So you need to carefully target your "go vote" message to your own team.
Keep in mind it is only google. Trump has been developing his comms channels for a decade with a core base composed of people who hate 'the media' in every form. And he has gotten pretty good at using those channels. It's also the case that everyone has heard of him now (you may recall that he was recently The President).
Harris was put into candidacy at the last second and needs to speedrun building a president's worth of goodwill from scratch against a guy who functionally already has it. That means her marketing base is 'the entire country' and you need to hit that as hard as possible as fast as possible, which is expensive.
Fascinating stuff.
I went down a rabbit hole with this particlar ad: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR132650406472...
It links to a website called fultongrandjury.com, which I at first thought would be an official government website, and what initially made me curious was the idea of spending money to advertise a government website, getting this additional credibility. Like, if the facts are so strongly on your side that you merely need to spend ad money to point people to official sources, that's a strong signal.
> Fulton County Jury is a project of Our Community Media, Small Town American Media, and Small Town Truth.
None of these are linked, but they can be found with Google. Our Community Media appears to be a website with stories scraped from Google News, one even has the Google News default image. Small Town America Media claims to support Small Businesses, Telehealth in Rural America and Digital Literacy. Their latest news: Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws Are Political Theater by State Politicians.
Small Town Truth is probably the most inspiring:
> For over 200 Years
> American has fought for truth
> Now....
> We need you to help
They have page dedicated to "discovering truth", telling it apart from "russian fake news"[1] which is copied from and links to a medium post.
None of these websites have information about who's behind them. No person. No address. They have contact pages, but these are just forms, probably to add you to some spam mailing list.
[1]: https://www.smalltowntruth.org/discover-truth
Small Town Truth says it's a registered 501(c)(3). I just found it by searching here: https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/
It leads to further rabbit holes I don't have the time to dig into now, but I might later, because now I'm very curious where it leads.
Meetings ended and I couldn't wait to get back!
So, searching via that Exempt Organization Search led to a 501(c)(3) letter being issued to Small Town Truth, mailed to a residential address in the care of the "Better Narrative Group" - another "interesting" site[0].
Doing a little more searching, I've found another 501(c)(3) in care of Better Narrative Group: Soul of a Nation Media. Similar setup. In trying to find more information to connect some dots, I found Soul of a Nation Media's taxes were filed by ChurchBiz[1], but this hasn't led to anything interesting.
Both Small Town Truth and Soul of a Nation Media changed addresses to a PO Box in Virginia in 2022.
Oh, and here are another two I just found related to Better Narrative Group: American Volunteer Corps[2], Better Neighbors Network[3].
To not assume malice, maybe it's a concerned citizen trying, in their own way, by establishing these organizations. Something feels off about the sites, though - not much content, a little dead behind the eyes, and I can't put my finger on the actual purpose of the sites. Odd.
[0] https://www.betternarrativegroup.org
[1] https://www.churchbiz.com
[2] https://www.americanvolunteercorps.org/
[3] https://www.betterneighborsnetwork.org/
edit: formatting
Not at my desktop, so I can’t really dig into the technical details of these sites, but by the look of them, they were all made either with the same tool and general components OR they were all made by the same group (maybe the same contracting firm or something)
> Both Small Town Truth and Soul of a Nation Media changed addresses to a PO Box in Virginia in 2022
What else is at that P.O. box?
It seems to be the work of a man named Scott Shalett.
https://www.publicdemocracy.io/scottshalett
Edit: found from 2023 tax filings from the 501c3
When I see .com I immediately assume it's not a government site until proven otherwise. It's sometimes done, particularly for affiliated and contracted sites, but also anyone can just go register a .com (see the history of whitehouse.com - from porn to gambling and more) plus government ones overwhelming tend to be .gov, .org, .us, etc anyways. (.gov is really the only one of those that's a particular guarantee of much but the others are at least slightly more likely to be real sites).
That sounds like a Russian misinformation webs-
>They have page dedicated to "discovering truth", telling it apart from "russian fake news"[1] which is copied from and links to a medium post.
Okay, so maybe not. Or maybe it is, and they expected people to be suspicious, so they're the wolf in sheep's clothing warning the other sheep about the wolf to gain trust. It's all too much.
Vote Trump or vote Harris, at the end of the day, the American population is irrevocably split, serving Russian interests.
Population being split on the available options is the basis of democracy and is a feature not a bug. Otherwise we might as well just have a CCP style single party.
Population being split is what Putin and other directorship wants. Ever heard about Philippe de Macédoine "divide and conquer" ?
They are doing the same in Europe, because divided we wouldn't be able to merge our force and push them back.
If half of America is for helping Ukraine and half against, it makes it even tougher to do anything. Not enough and people get mad about Ukrainian dying, too much and people get mad about the money spending, everytime you get chaos.
I'm sure we don't need to argue semantics here as you very well understand what I mean. The American public wasn't as divided as now.
Heck, if Watergate were to have happened now, Nixon would have escaped scotch free - as Trump has.
Joe Biden might even forever be remembered as the Neville Chamberlain of USA (even though Neville doesn't deserve his reputation while Biden absolutely does).
What analogy are you proposing with the Chamberlain thing?
Are you mad the US hasn't declared war on Russia and worried that it is going to have dire consequences for the US?
> Are you mad the US hasn't declared war on Russia and worried that it is going to have dire consequences for the US?
We've absolutely been slow rolling aid to Ukraine because the Biden White House bought Putin's bullshit. If we'd provided the weapons we're providing Kyiv with now at the outseet they would have been able to capitalise on the Russian army's lack of preparedness to draw frontlines much more advantageously, possibly even end the 'special operation' before it became entrenched.
Have you thought to consider that the slowness in aiding Ukraine is a feature, not a bug?
> Have you thought to consider that the slowness in aiding Ukraine is a feature, not a bug?
Yes. Unless the goal is undermining American and NATO interests, it doesn't make sense. One could conclude from that corrupt motives. Hanlon's razor suggests a more parsimonious solution. (The same folks who were convinced Russia would be in Kyiv in weeks in '22, and then '23, and then '24 keep getting quoted as experts.)
> fultongrandjury.com, which I at first thought would be an official government website
Are you being straight serious here, or are you doing a rhetoric thing where "I was confused" is just a shorthand for "I think some people might plausibly be confused"?
I could see some people who aren't net-saavy thinking that domain looks like a government website, but I'm surprised that anybody here might see a .com like that and think it an official anything. Official government websites in America almost always use a .gov, and when they don't they usually have some goofy long string of subdomains like www.courts.state.md.us (I'm not 100% sure that is actually official, but it's in the style government websites use and if an unofficial website used that style I'd definitely consider it an attempt to deceive people.)
usps.com. amtrak.com. mta.info. These were just the first that came to mind.
I think there are specific reasons behind each of these, but the fact is that I am used to interacting with government websites that end in .com, so it wouldn't surprise me if some county's court system also used a .com.
Political advertising just makes democracy look like a total joke. If you can buy votes by shoving ads in peoples’ faces that’s not a democracy, that’s an oligarchy.
Political advertising emerged within a decade of the birth of the republic. Abraham Lincoln famously had his face plastered everywhere, and his campaign monikers like "Honest Abe" are still in use today.
The real push toward oligarchy, in my opinion, is the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs FEC. The only available remedy at this point is for the American electorate to stop relying on political ads and make a decision on policy alignment alone (like the Founding Fathers did) - this is a totally unrealistic goal in today's polarized environment.
This. Something like 5 people are almost entirely funding Trump's slump (hard to call this mess a campaign) towards the White House and for sure they are going to want pay back. This is what oligarchy looks like.
> Trump's slump [...] towards the White House
Somehow my mind supplies "slouch" instead, probably because of a poem [0]:
> And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
> Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
5 people? Last time I was on X, nearly every Silicon Valley/tech billionaire was crooning from the rooftops for Trump.
You could argue it's the native X bias, but these were all the famous billionaires and multimillionaires who are top names in the SV space. All rooting for a Trump win, perhaps anticipating a quick Vance presidency.
A lot talk but only a ~half dozen actually bother to put together 100s of millions where their mouths are about it. I haven't looked this year but usually Bloomberg tops the chart on the blue side.
Entirely possible - I spend as little time as possible thinking about this and am just looking forward to our national nightmare of Trump being a plausible president candidate being over the week after next.
He's a plausible candidate and he's at worst a coin flip to win. Almost a 3-2 favorite based on betting markets.
https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-t...
You mean the betting markets the oligarchs have gamed? :)
Though I will agree with you that he has a coin flip chance of being president, which is totally terrifying. Is that what it felt like to be in Germany with Hitler?
Which is ironic since in 2016 everyone on SV was holding back tears of sadness over Trump getting elected. Oh how the turntables.
I do believe that something like 70% of SV can't stand Trump. You can see that in the insane amount of money Kamala has raised from SV (which probably even dwarfs Trump's XX person oligarch haul).
It is largely the sociopaths at the very very top that are Trump donors.
SV only cares about whoever will help them make more money. Everything else is virtue signaling by champagne socialists pretending to care about current day social issues and the struggles of the lower classes.
Of course all of the billionaires are rooting for Trump, because they want to be in business next year. Harris will understand voting for other parties, but Trump punishes disloyalty.
Germany doesn't have negative ads criticizing opponents (at least it didn't have them when I lived there). This makes them refreshingly boring. I would guess at least 90% of the US ads are basically "the other guy is bad. Be afraid" without much content. Getting rid of the negative ads would help a lot.
You might find this interesting!
"The Impact of Negative Political Advertisement on Voter Behaviour in Germany – an Experiment"
https://www.kas.de/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=f8324712...
"Negative campaigning has been a feature of German political campaigns from the very beginning of the Federal Republic... the central idea of this paper is to examine the considerable difference between negative campaigning in Germany compared with that in the US."
It seems like you're correct that German political ads are almost never US-style 'attack ads' because among Germans, "negative campaigning in Germany is much more risky for the attacker than the impact it may have on the attacked party"
Political advertising is just the tip of the corruption iceberg. When lobbying and gerrymandering is legal, can you really claim you're living in a democracy?
> When lobbying and gerrymandering is legal
Have you ever given money to the EFF? They're lobbyists. Call your represenatative? That's lobbying. Lobbying, i.e. constituents talking to electeds, is fundamental to democracy.
A huge industrial corporation spending millions on lobbyists in order to make it easier to dump pollutants into the environment without consequence, increasing their profits at the expense of local populations, is also a form of lobbying. I would bet that amoral corporate lobbying accounts for far more activity than good mission driven orgs like the EFF.
> huge industrial corporation spending millions on lobbyists in order to make it easier to dump pollutants into the environment without consequence, increasing their profits at the expense of local populations, is also a form of lobbying
Yes. You're describing a policy disagreement between a polluter and everyone else. Pick any political system and you'll have the same divide. (Again, lobbying involves hiring someone to present the case to an elected. It's categorically distinct from giving to a PAC or campaign.)
> would bet that amoral corporate lobbying accounts for far more activity than good mission driven orgs like the EFF
I mean sure, for a given value of "good." Social policy lobbying tends to vastly outstrip commercial lobbying, in part because the latter is more focussed.
Gerrymandering isn't legal. The Constitution says that the states shall have a republican form of government. The founders intended this to mean an elective republic. If the government chooses its own electors, then it's not a republic by any wild stretch of the imagination.
The alternative to buying ads is buying newspapers and other media outlets.
Well there is no way to ban political messaging in-practice, so we have to regulate it. Also, imo, making education accessible to the masses is important for combating the effectiveness of straight-up misinformation. Right now a good chunk of the population doesn't even seem to understand why they believe things generally, so there's plenty room to improve.
Bezos simply told one of the leading newspapers what to do. Musk buys votes. Oligarchy is about to become reality, and it's powered by useful idiots.
its been reality...
Musk pays people to sign a petition, which is legal.
So legal that he stopped after being warned by the feds.
Who says he stopped? I can't find that in the news, and the offer is still up at:
https://petition.theamericapac.org/
Even the Biden DOJ only warned him that it "might be illegal". They're stretching the law, trying to apply a law against paying people to register to vote, but Elon will pay people who are already registered so that's quite a stretch.
Yet when another country does it? "You're meddling in the election!".
Mhmm, okay.
Yeah, freedom of speech is a joke.
The concept of freedom of speech does not imply a free platform to spread your speech.
I think the movie The Insider expressed it well: "The press is free, for anyone that owns one."
Apparently that comes from an older expression dating back at least to a 1960 quote in The New Yorker: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
Circenses et panem
I'm confused how that applies to political ads.
There is a perspective from which all politics is just entertainment with audience participation, while The Powers That Be control the things that actually matter.
(I'm not saying I endorse this view, I'm just trying to explain)
t. Kooky conspiracy theory collector
Well anyone can buy ads so it's not really an oligarchy.
What alternative would you propose for candidates to get they're name out?
Equal time on national television, by law. Like they do in France for example.
So replace oligopoly with gerontocracy? Who consumes national television?
Then enforce equal slots per online platform and forbid targeting by demographic cohort.
Fortunately our government can't force private entities to sponsor specific political candidates, due to our constitutional right to freedom of speech.
I'm genuinely curious how this works. What constitutes a platform?
Is TikTok a platform? Reddit? HN?
Why don't you make a proposal for what you think is the best approach?
As in state sponsored television? No one is watching CSPAN to learn anything about candidates.
Yes, that's the problem. American media is a sewer which tends inexorably toward the lowest common denominator, with dismal effects on its polity.
Honestly it doesn't work that well. Far-rights channels will push left-wing candidates to graveyard slots, or put them against 3 trained "interviewers", etc.
Maybe it's still better than in the US? It's far from perfect.
In Spain at least, radio and TV time slots for political ads are assigned by the Electoral Commission in a session which can be attended by representatives of each candidacy.
Ah yes, I'm extremely glad that both myself and Charles Koch have the equal right to buy ads. I see no problems that could ever occur because we're equally legally allowed to spend unlimited money on political advertising.
Now... How many ads will 5 bucks buy? I'm pretty deeply in debt, but I could probably skip a meal in order to fully exercise my political freedom.
How about advertising anything other than a product or service is illegal? No more campaign ads, period. You want to know more about a candidate? Go research her yourself!
anyone can buy ads but who buys the majority of ads and ads with the greatest overall impact and impression? That is very obviously skewed. Campaigns directly have limitations on these things, PACs however, do not.
and to your question there, one example is to look at Japan. They give candidates an allotted minimum amount of time on TV for free. A candidate gets platformed purely by running. Not only that but we already do grass roots calling/texting/door-knocking campaigns... it is all definitely possible, but unlikely given that the current organization of elections heavily favors the entrenched two party system and the structures that back them (corporations, PACs, private interests, party structures etc...)
When our entire system requires billions to run and win an election, we are guaranteeing ourselves that we will continue to live in an Oligarchy.
> and to your question there, one example is to look at Japan. They give candidates an allotted minimum amount of time on TV for free. A candidate gets platformed purely by running.
I would be willing to try it in one of our laboratories-of-democracy, but my expectation is that a lot of people would run just for the free opportunity to self-promote. "Hi my name is Ron Popeil and I'm running for city council. I firmly believe that every homeowner deserves, nay, needs a Ronco food dehydrator!"
Interesting to compare the top ads when sorting "Amount spent: high to low" and "Number of times shown: high to low". Political ads from 4 years ago appear to have been shown many more times for much less cost. This year's ads seem considerably more expensive while also reaching a smaller audience.
The politicians are having to bid against Temu this year and by god do they spend a lot on ads.
It's kinda crazy. We are in Germany, so no US ads. But even 8€ eCPM floor still makes temu show up.
The only Temu ad I've ever seen was during the Super Bowl. I'm guessing I'm in the wrong demographic?
I'm talking banner ads. I block almost everything everywhere, except my work. My boss (who doesn't block anything and accepts all tracking everywhere) doesn't get their ads. So I think they just have a scattershot approach.
Sounds like Google is making good money on this then
Gold rush shovels
Competition might be part of that too: more money chasing the same number of eyeballs as the election season ramped up (for that matter, probably chasing a smaller number of eyeballs, as critical segments of swing voters became more clear)
More targeted, perhaps. “Meh, whoever” has always been cheaper per view than targeted.
I think you're right. I've been comparing these two directly:
2020: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR123656109299...
2024: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR104621681140...
Looks like it's primarily the "location" demographic that is actually different. Neither ad excludes any demographics for Age or Gender but the 2024 includes specific locations for advertisements. So maybe fewer people in Europe and elsewhere seeing American political ads, which I'd assume is preferred by the advertisers. I can see how that would compound to this effect; fewer valuable targets and more value per target.
(Another thing I notice is the ad run length. The 2020 ads ran for a single day (with over 10M views!) and the 2024 ads have been running for weeks or months. Not sure if that's relevant to the expenditure but it's interesting to note.)
Inflation is part of that.
Nah, I think this one is just greed.
what caused this sudden change in greed? Were these actors not greedy before 2019?
Covid was a catalyst for bigger changes to go potentially unchallenged and opportunity for extra greed. 1 company dared do a thing and no one batted eye. Then 2nd. Domino's of greed and fake excuse on supposed inflation. But it was just domino's of greed
While rates were low they could offset nickel and diming consumers by handing them cheap cash in the form of inflated wages to work lame jobs. Now rates are high, jobs cut, less consumer nickel and diming as consumers are tapped out
For the time being it’s back to the old way of screwing the public by over charging government for consulting work
boiling the frog slowly. if you start out being more expensive than traditional media, they won't use you.
same thing with streaming. start out cheaper/more convenient/more comprehensive than traditional media - and an enormous market to grow into, so your shareholders are happy even with a reasonable price. wait a few years until you have saturated the market, and now the only way to achieve the holy growth is to raise the prices indefinitely.
https://imgur.com/presenting-recent-findings-by-fucking-magn...
Why can't they show the ads that violated policy on the ads transparency page? Seems like part of the transparency would be seeing what they removed.
Now THAT would be extremely interesting.
Kudos to Google. We also need this for all the non-Google outlets.
Here's the equivalent from Meta: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&a...
Here's one from X via CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics/doj-alleges-russia-f...
It's fascinating. I'm at home and my pi-hole ad-blocking rules apparently trigger for that page, so although I can see the titles, all the images just fail to load.
From the insights tab, with a date range of the past year, the state where the second most ad money was spent was California (after Pennsylvania).
California is not even close to being a swing state, afaik?
California is strongly "blue" on the national issues these days, but that doesn't mean that there aren't hotly contested elections and ballot measures at issue within the state.
Seperately, it brings potential as a source of funding to spend elsewhere specifically because some of the national questions aren't really open. If you are confident in the ROI, you can run ads there to drive fundraising -- especially early on -- and then spend those raised funds in contested elections elsewhere.
The same dynamic happens in soundly "red" markets, although that may not be apparent in this dataset because of the specific demographics of Google advertising.
> Seperately, it brings potential as a source of funding to spend elsewhere specifically because some of the national questions aren't really open. If you are confident in the ROI, you can run ads there to drive fundraising -- especially early on -- and then spend those raised funds in contested elections elsewhere.
Exactly. A lot of the ads are fundraising ads, like this one: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR059412260615...
I'm probably going to mail my ballot on Monday. Are there any particular hot button issues in California to look out for?
IMO this year the ballot props are much more meaningful to the average person than usual. The perennial niche prosp about kidney dialysis aren't making a showing for what feels like the first time in a decade.
There are some big proposed changes to how local bond measures work, rent control, and the criminal justice system, IMO those are the ones spending the most time researching and considering the consequences.
As far as the more niche ones this time around, there's the same-sex marriage prop (which I believe is purely symbolic and doesn't have an actual impact on same sex marriage in California) and the prop designed to force the AIDs Healthcare Foundation to spend more money on AIDS healthcare (IIUC currently they spend most of their money on political causes like lobbying against rezoning that would allow denser housing)
> same-sex marriage prop (which I believe is purely symbolic...
Same-sex marriage is currently outlawed by the California constitution as a result of Prop 8 from 2008. That clause is void as a result of the Hollingsworth and Obergefell decisions, but there are multiple members of the Supreme Court who have explicitly said that they would like to overturn Obergefell, so it's a good idea to get ahead of the potential catastrophe by taking the bad law fully off the books, rather than relying on a capricious and extremist court to stick to a rights-defending decision for any amount of time.
Doesn't the Respect for Marriage Act [1] ensure they can't roll back same-sex marriage like they did abortion?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_for_Marriage_Act
> Doesn't the Respect for Marriage Act [1] ensure they can't roll back same-sex marriage like they did abortion?
No. RMA lets states ban gay marriage. It just requires them to honour other states' gay marriages.
Thanks for the clarification. I still wonder if it matters all that much. You only need one state to allow non-residents to marry on Zoom, and it's a non-issue in practical terms.
States banning same-sex marriage within their borders takes away the dignity and respect of same-sex marriages and couples, so it's quite awful. But they can't actively prosecute people for crossing state lines to marry. They have to provide them the same rights as hetero-married couples, even for things like state benefits and taxes.
> there's the same-sex marriage prop (which I believe is purely symbolic and doesn't have an actual impact on same sex marriage in California)
It removes an on-the-books clause that was rendered inoperable by a SCOTUS decision. I think it’s a step above symbolic since any future changes in SCOTUS jurisprudence reversing or partially reversing Obergefell (which I don’t think are at all likely with this court on this issue, but it doesn’t hurt to be prudent) could make it operable again.
I think prop 8 was previously nullified by Hollingsworth v. Perry?
Not saying it'll never matter, but if OP has a finite amount of focus IMO it's better to spend it on laws that will have an immediate impact over ones that require multiple hypotheticals to come into play
> Finite amount of focus.
It revises one statement in the state constitution in a very straightforward way.
It takes an infintessimal amount of focus to decide if you're in favor of that change or not.
Whether the reason it's on this year's ballot is neurotic or strategic is on a level with whether you should buy 4 or 6 rolls of toilet paper next time you're at the store. You already know if you need toilet paper or not, so that difference is relatively inconsequential.
California has an enormous economy and holding office at any level of government there opens a lot of "doors".
There are a ton of smaller races in California that end up hotly contested. The state has big money on both sides of those smaller races.
> California is not even close to being a swing state, afaik?
As the most populous state, California has a lot of political donors - likely the most registered members in a state for both major parties. 1 in 8 Americans are in California. Those many small-value & high-roller donors help finance the swing state operations, but need to be activated. Donors are why both Republican and Democratic party candidates held events in California, when it's not in play.
California has over 10 million people more than Texas. It’s huge, so absolute number comparisons are often confusing.
As usual, XKCD (can’t find the comic) - https://x.com/xkcd/status/1339348000750104576?lang=en
Sure, but it's a winner-takes-all situation.
(That tweet is excellent.)
> can’t find the comic
The tweet quotes the alt-text of https://xkcd.com/2399/ “2020 Election Map”:
> There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.
There are lots of people on the ballot besides Harris and Trump.
If anyone is interested in connecting with someone working in this space, please hit me up. We’ve been building tools for political media buyers for the last several years. We draw data from the Google Transparency DB, Meta’s equivalent and other disparate sources to allow campaigns to analyze the spending in greater detail. It has been really interesting from an engineering perspective, but also just to learn more about how this industry operates.
If the spend figure is right the difference between the money spent in the USA and UK is larger than I expected.
Highest weekly spend in the UK is just under £1M (Dec 2019) while in the US it’s £50M (Oct 2024). That’s 10 times more spending with only 5 times the population.
Why in the world is a generic NY Times ad categorized as a political ad?
Good question. These ads don't look political to me:
The New York Times: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR047539896236...
The Economist: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR129237820966...
Seems like a general handy site in general as a sort of Google Trends alternative. I know it's not an actual alternative but to pick up on certain trends from advertizers.
In Norway it's forbidden with political ads on TV. Reasoning being that live images can have a huge influence, while also possibly being inflammatory and dumb down the debate. But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.
However, this law hasn't been updated in decades. So it's still only TV ads that's illegal. So it feels like a quite arbitrary restriction now.
Not saying it should be illegal on other media as well, but I do like the idea of it not being the size of your pockets determining the election. I guess that would be hard to police anyways now, with how influencers can sway stuff without it being an "ad", or how algorithms drive you into a rabbit hole of tailored content anyways.
Kind of new in the US, you can't stop people in the US from spending money on ads that amplify there speech. [1]
Political spending is regulated, but we now have "political action committees" that can support candidates but can't coordinate with them. They can accept money from anyone in any amounts. Its brought tons of money from wealthy doners into polics in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Comedey Centrals Colbert Report (Colbert playing a Conservative pundit) once set one a PAC with a political lawyer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colbert_Super_PAC
I'm not a lawyer..
As someone who is "swing state adjacent", and avoiding them mostly this year, I feel for those under the crush of political ads.
PACs can now coordinate with campaigns! What could possibly go wrong?
How are TV ads any different from MDG posters or the AP ads at bus stops? We allow the latter in Norway and they're not that much cheaper than TV ads.
Reasoning being that live images can have a huge influence
Adding some context here - TBane stations (the subway) in Oslo have posters that show live videos - usually static images with dynamic attention-grabbing effects but sometimes full blown videos too.
They're different as in a video can influence you much stronger than a poster. But maybe you misunderstood me, my point was that the way we have it today isn't necessarily good either. Just curious about how one can give people good information, without it being too inflammatory, and without making an election a race about who has the most money.
No, I agree with your remark completely but I'm still ambivalent about the tradeoff.
We agree there should at least be one medium of advertising for political parties. But where do we draw the line?
For instance, I would be happy with making all ads plain text, standard font and size so that the ads won't abuse human attention by showing bright colors, happy images etc.
> But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.
I think the main reason for rules like this is because it's literally politicians and political parties shoveling huge amounts of cash to the media, and 1) one of the purposes of the media is to inform people about politicians and politics, and 2) the politicians who are elected will oversee the media and their mergers. An intimate relationship is created where democracy demands an adversarial one.
It's rotten. It's the same reason no media can criticize any drug in the US, since they were allowed to advertise to the public. I'm sure there's some value in having people ask for specific drugs from their doctors, but that's minimal; the main value is being immune to any criticism unless an e.g. television station wants to lose 20% of their income.
Also media outlets are free to propagandize all day. You can't restrict that because we don't want to restrict freedom of the press. But then that begs the question, don't all companies and individuals have the same freedom of the press that media companies do?
This is the most shocking part from an outsider POV. In Europe* mainstream media must obviously be neutral about each candidate but also give the same amount of airing time to each candidate. So like if candidate 1 is invited for a 10 min interview, candidate 2 must be invited too and offered the same airing time. Meanwhile here Fox can just call Harris "stupid" (and CNN reciprocally call Trump whatever they want), lie to make them look good/bad and support their candidate all day long while spitting on the other one, and it's fine.
Edit: my bad for generalizing all countries of Europe
In Spain, public TV must show a list of parties with a minimum same time for even the tiniest craziest parties several times a day. After that, they are free to keep doing their thing.
But the biggest parties can buy more time by several subterfuges. In resume they can pay somehow for receiving a special treatment. Every politician has a market value and TV programs always compete for showing adds to the most eyeballs possible, so they will try to fill their programs with the more popular politicians 'for free'.
If I'm not wrong, private channels, funded without public money, can show people making pancakes all day it they want, but they will also try to maximize their advertising revenues.
How much do they have to be "neutral" when there are multiple candidates with significantly different popularity?
If there are three candidates polling about equal then okay, it's easy to be neutral. But what if they're |40, 35, 25| or |60, 20, 20| or |55, 40, 5|?
When does a minor candidate drop out of their neutrality? I'm not saying the general idea is bad but just pointing out that neutrality is kind of a vague concept. It's a bit like giving climate change deniers equal airtime with serious scientists.
I don't know if I follow you. My point was that TV networks can't do propaganda for a candidate, i.e. they can repeat the policies of each candidate (without giving you their opinion on those policies and trying to convince you if it's good or bad or modify them) and fact check what they say, but they can't tell you who to vote for or blatantly lie about them. Hence they are neutral. Meanwhile here Fox will just tell you to vote for Trump to save America and that if Harris wins she will turn America into communism, and millions of people are watching and believing it.
If that's what the Fox presenters truly believe, should the government be allowed to censor them?
Not in Poland. Before the last election we had 100% partisan media with the public media campaigning for the ruling party and the opposition controling the private media. Both had the Fox News/CNN/Pravda levels of objectivity showing a strange propaganda version of reality.
This is certainly not true for the mainstream media in all of europe. It might be true for public television stations in some countries.
The population of all of Norway is substantially less than that of the New York, LA, Chicago, or Houston metro areas.
The scale of these markets or the spending related thereto is not comparable at all.
Could any of these metro areas ban political ads on TV locally?
?
What is your point?
Comparing what works in one with what works in the other is meaningless at best. The idea that any of these concepts could be generalized between the two is silly.
Ah, scale-ism. ;-)
I can't instinctively imagine how the size of a nation could realistically impact the results of this particular decision (banning political ads). Could you perhaps propose a realistic theory?
Well, there's an enormous amount more money to be made in the United States with political advertising, so you're going to get a great deal more pushback from advertisers on any such attempt /s
:-)
I didn't say it worked, rather I said it kinda doesn't because it's so limited compared to where people get their ads nowadays. It also wasn't really meant as a comparison, more of a segue into a discussion around if the huge ad spending and influencing is good or bad.
The top-spent ad in the last 7 days included no targeting other than "nationwide, 18+." That seems folly, doesn't it? Huge waste?
Wouldn't an essentially untargeted ad be the most expensive to run? Meaning that something like that will always be the top-spent?
Not necessarily. If you bid low, you're effectively picking up "remnant" inventory that no one else was willing to pay to target.
How “expensive” (in the sense of total spend) an ad is is entirely driven by what budget you allow for the order.
But without targeting constraints you will get essentially remnants and are unlikely to reach any of your actual target, e.g. undecided likely voters in swing states
A lot of nationwide ads aren't intended to directly influence voting. Rather they are campaign donation solicitations to get more money to run future ads targeted to undecided voters in swing states. Just about everyone 18+ nationwide could afford to make a small campaign contribution if they care about the outcome.
Democrat, Republican, or Independent, Google gets rich either way. You can clearly see price per view has gone up dramatically from the historical comparison. $2B in Google ad spend so far this cycle.
Also interesting, the New York Times is the most viewed ad of this election season, having been seen 10M+ times.
It appears the only true winners of US presidential election mania are Google and the Media.
In the middle of the 2008 Dem primaries (H. Clinton vs Obama) it was obvious it won't be much of a race anymore, Obama was going to clinch it, but the media narrative was still portraying it as one... it made me wonder how much of it came because if the audience thinks it's a race, then they'll tune in, and more eyeballs = better ad sales.
Ah, Allah bless the everlasting Attention Economy!
In the age of information warfare, ads are a weapon and Google is the modern day Colt. If you sell guns to the North, the South needs more guns from you. If you sell to the criminals, the cops need more guns from you.
Not sure what this is called but it's definitely not "don't be evil"
The term I heard was fence-setters. It's a little off though, becsuse it implies your allegiance changes. Google allegiance is always clearly on money.
NFL is a microcosm of american politics. Two opponent teams, each has a trainer, a rich donor, some ideology and millions of fanatics who vote for their team no matter what. It may seem like the goal is to win the game on the stadium, but behind the scenes it's a well calculated auction of advertisements.
Your first sentence is spot on. Your analysis is dead wrong.
Am I reading this wrong or does it seem like the majority of these are for Harris/Democrats?
When one campaign raises 3 times as much money as the other campaign, that tends to happen.
Interesting that money is considered to have a large influence on US elections, one side has a lot more money, and yet the race is incredibly close.
The polling may be close, but we really won't know if the election is close until the final numbers come out.
In my view, money might once have, but the number of persuadable voters is quite low. If someone has decided to vote for Trump, it's unlikely they will change their mind. And if someone is undecided, they'll probably vote for Trump, because let's face it, most people voting for Harris aren't voting because they like her platform - they're voting because they dislike Trump. If you don't dislike Trump, Harris's platform is nothing world-changingly new or different.
> most people voting for Harris aren't voting because they like her platform - they're voting because they dislike Trump
That seems to be a popular conclusion by people who are on the Trump side. I see little evidence for it in real life. Many factors go into a political choice, and sure, disliking Trump is one of them, but most Harris supporters would not be voting R in any case because they do not agree with that platform.
Money has an influence but it's not decisive. In the 2016 presidential election, the Clinton / Kaine campaign spent about twice as much as their opponents but still lost. Could they have won with even more money? Maybe?
Money is a lot in US politics, but Michael Bloomberg will tell you himself that it isn't everything. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg_2020_preside....
Yes remember when billionaire money interfering in election campaigns was considered a bad thing?
I suspect that the given the different demographics of the voting population, the republican side probably advertises more on Facebook.
Or day time TV, yeah.
What do you think the demographics are of Google ad viewers vs Harris / Trump potential voters?
But also, yes, the Harris campaign has spent about 2x as much in aggregate: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/elections/kamala-harri...
I'd expect the demographics of google ad viewers to be more or less "the internet at large, minus a few markets like China were Google is much less prevalent, and a few groups techy enough to disproportionately run adblockers"
You’d be amazed. A surprising number of people, particularly older people, do not use the internet as such all that much; they use Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, or YouTube.
I was completely shocked to find out how many people use search in those apps to query open questions rather than 'search the web' via something like Google
At least YouTube is Google...
Heh, interesting, the lords of the Attention Economy is Zuck, Google and TikTok. And Musk, but he's busy burning his kingdom.
I bought a Kagi subscription when I discovered that Google was de-indexing Covid podcasts that it didn't like. I doubt that the population who moved on from Google is demographically neutral.
> I doubt that the population who moved on from Google is demographically neutral.
They are however, a relatively small group. I suspect more people have moved to ChatGPT than to Kagi.
> more or less "the internet at large"
Right.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
Older voters are less likely to use the internet (and those who do use it probably use it less). And there's a small urban/rural divide still.
If I were in the Trump campaign I'd be targeting Facebook over Google by a fair margin. A lot of older folks live on there.
"Facebook users" or "Google users" are way too broad for a political campaign ad to target. Party A's ad will go to too many of Party B's users and vice versa. They need to be much more carefully targeted to be effective.
The purpose of a political ad is not to convince undecided people to vote for [party]. The number of undecideds is vanishingly small, so there's no ROI there. The purpose of a political ad is to convince people who have already picked a side to actually vote vs not voting. So you need to carefully target your "go vote" message to your own team.
Keep in mind it is only google. Trump has been developing his comms channels for a decade with a core base composed of people who hate 'the media' in every form. And he has gotten pretty good at using those channels. It's also the case that everyone has heard of him now (you may recall that he was recently The President).
Harris was put into candidacy at the last second and needs to speedrun building a president's worth of goodwill from scratch against a guy who functionally already has it. That means her marketing base is 'the entire country' and you need to hit that as hard as possible as fast as possible, which is expensive.
You are reading it right
Talk about normalized bad behavior.
This is the data Googles (and others’) models are trained on
Extreme biases in data mean extreme biases in inference
Gerson