Tom Steyer is airing an ad centered around President Trump’s record as “failed” businessman during “Fox and Friends” and “The Sean Hannity Show” on Fox News, The Hill reports.
Said Steyer in the ad: “Unlike other candidates, I can go head to head with Donald Trump on the economy and expose him for what he is — a fraud and a failure.”
Some Democratic presidential candidates “are in danger of being ‘bled dry’ by spending well more than $1″ on social media advertising in an attempt “to get a $1 contribution and meet the debate criteria,” Bloomberg reports.
Politico: “The campaign has gone without an outside polling firm, and says it has no plans to hire one, even though it is standard operating procedure for most serious candidates. Instead of initially stockpiling resources for a home-stretch TV ad blitz, she’s amassed a payroll of 300-plus staffers in the early months of the campaign — overhead that could overwhelm her coffers if her fundraising ever falters.”
“And now, the campaign… is shunning the typical model for producing campaign ads, in which outside firms are hired and paid often hefty commissions for their work. Instead, Warren’s campaign is producing TV, digital and other media content itself, as well as placing its digital ad buys internally.”
“Taken together, Warren’s approach is a rebuke of the consultant-heavy model of campaigns — an often lucrative arrangement in which the people advising campaigns invariably tell candidates that the best political strategy is to buy what they sell, namely TV ads and polling.”
CBS News: “A series of Facebook video ads for President Donald Trump’s re-election efforts shows what appears to be a young woman strolling on a beach in Florida, a Hispanic man on a city street in Texas and a bearded hipster in a coffee shop in Washington, D.C., all making glowing, voice-over endorsements of the president.”
“There’s just one problem: The people in the videos that ran in the past few months are all actually models in stock video footage produced far from the U.S. in France, Brazil and Turkey, and available to anyone online for a fee.”
Politico: “Advertising Analytics, a political ad-tracking firm, expects the total cost of TV and digital ads for the next election to hit over $6 billion — a 57 percent increase over the total in last year’s hotly contested and expensive midterm elections, driven by a huge jump in digital video advertising.”
“Over one-quarter of the $6 billion total, $1.6 billion, will be spent on digital video platforms, primarily Facebook and Google, while broadcast and cable TV stations will take in a whopping $4.4 billion — more than twice as much as Democrats and Republicans spent on TV in the last presidential elections.”
President Trump’s campaign bought nearly $1 million in Facebook ads urging users to sign a birthday card to commemorate his 73rd birthday, Vice News reports.
“The users who click through to sign such ‘cards’ have offered gobs of contact information to help the president’s re-election effort build out voter lists that will be crucial to raising money. Imposing an arbitrary deadline for supporters to act, the birthday ads have been essential to a digitally savvy Trump campaign that strategists say has built out a sizable early lead over Democrats in collecting voter data.”
Quartz: “Google has been treating Beto’s campaign ads as if they weren’t political content, raising questions over whether Google is capable of keeping its already anemic promise of transparency for political ads. Google has promised to put ads it receives from candidates for U.S. federal political offices in its political ad archive, for transparency’s sake.”
“But the Beto ads reviewed by Quartz were missing from the archive—until we alerted Google to their existence. Google’s own rules don’t allow any political content in Gmail ads, but Beto’s campaign ads kept showing up there.”
“Political ad spending will increase to $9.9 billion in 2020,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“That would be up from $8.7 billion in 2018, the year of the most recent midterm Congressional elections, and $6.3 billion in 2016.”
“Facebook said it stopped paying commissions to employees who sell political ads, as the tech giant overhauls how it engages with campaigns ahead of elections in 2020,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Once seen as a growth area, political ads are now viewed within Facebook as more of a headache.”
“A Danish politician has found a unique way of attracting potential voters — posting a campaign ad on a porn site,” Politico reports.
His slogan is translated to the suitably highbrow: “When you finish wanking, vote for Jokke” — a nickname given to people called Joachim.
NBC News: “Trump’s spending in early 2019 was more than the Democratic campaigns combined, but he has been outspent by some candidates in recent weeks. Beto O’Rourke outspent Trump two weeks ago, dropping $157,000 on Facebook compared to Trump’s $109,000. Last week, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), spent $198,000 to the president’s $150,000.”
“While Democrats’ campaign launches have sucked up national attention, President Trump’s re-election campaign has quietly spent nearly twice as much as the entire Democratic field combined on Facebook and Google ads,” Axios reports.
“Political advertising strategists say that this level of ad spend on digital platforms this early in the campaign season is unprecedented. The data (captured between December 2018 and now) provides a window into the Trump campaign’s 2020 strategy, which until now has been virtually invisible aside from a few rallies.”
Los Angeles Times: “Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages.”
“Campaigns don’t match the names of voters with the personal information they scoop up — although that could be possible in many cases. Instead, they use the information to micro-target ads to appear on phones and other devices based on individual profiles that show where a voter goes, whether a gun range, a Whole Foods or a town hall debate over Medicare.”
Politico: “Priorities USA Action, the top Democratic super PAC targeting President Trump in 2020, is promoting its head of digital operations to a new role overseeing all paid media — something akin to a watershed moment in presidential politics.”
“The move to install Danielle Butterfield as paid media director leading the organization’s integrated marketing effort… is a tacit acknowledgment of the growth of digital spending as a share of campaign ad dollars.”
Joshua Green: “Democrats built a midterm electoral wave by centering their message around health care. But since the Nov. 6 election, many Democratic ads have shifted focus from protecting health insurance to protecting special counsel Robert Mueller.”
“In the past several weeks, prominent Democrats have run thousands of Facebook ads urging viewers to sign petitions in support of Mueller, who may be vulnerable to political interference by the Trump administration after the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. They include Senators Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Corey Booker of New Jersey and billionaire activist Tom Steyer, along with a super PAC tied to former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.”
New York Times: “Several House candidates whose compelling biographies (and slickly produced renderings of them) helped put them on the national radar lost on Tuesday, including Randy Bryce in Wisconsin, Amy McGrath in Kentucky and M.J. Hegar in Texas. Ms. McGrath and Ms. Hegar made it close in traditionally conservative areas, though Democrats had higher hopes for full breakthroughs in recent weeks.”
“The conclusion is certainly not that viral videos are counterproductive; they remain a useful and efficient way to raise money and introduce a candidate to a wider audience. But at times, it seems, the audience was not always the intended constituency.”
The Hill: “A handful of Democratic hopefuls barreled into the general election with seemingly larger-than-life profiles that captured priceless media attention and raised the hopes of their supporters. But a number of them came up short on Election Day.”
“Major television networks and Facebook have taken the unusual step of rejecting an inflammatory ad by President Trump’s political team that effectively closes a fiercely fought midterm campaign with a message portraying immigrants as a violent threat,” the New York Times reports.
“The 30-second political spot, which mirrors the president’s apocalyptic warnings about a caravan of asylum seekers in Mexico, was widely denounced as racist and misleading after Mr. Trump shared a longer version of it last week.”
“NBC and Facebook, both of which had run the ad over the weekend, reversed course after a backlash on Monday and announced that the commercial would be removed, saying it fell short of their in-house advertising standards. CNN had refused to air the ad from the start, calling it ‘racist.’ Even Fox News, which has made warnings about the migrant caravan a staple of its prime time coverage of the midterms, felt compelled to distance itself from the ad.”
“The Republican Party has aired eight times as many ads focused on crime and public safety as it did during the last midterm election, according to a HuffPost analysis, a reflection of President Trump’s strategy of trying to fire up the GOP’s base with fear.”
“During the last midterm elections, in 2014, Republicans running for House and Senate seats aired ads about public safety more than 12,000 times… That number spiked to nearly 107,000 for the 2018 election, an increase of more than 800 percent.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
"There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them."
-- Chuck Todd, host of "Meet the Press"
"Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all."
-- Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
"Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
-- Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
"The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom -- nicely packaged, constantly updated... What political junkie could ask for more?"
-- Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.