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.”

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.”

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.”

“In the most racially charged national political ad in 30 years, President Donald Trump and the Republican Party accuse Democrats of plotting to help people they depict as Central American invaders overrun the nation with cop killers,” CNN reports.

Wall Street Journal: “In the midterm elections of his first term, 28% of all House and Senate ads — fully 50% of all GOP ads — were anti-Obama. This year, less than 7% of the ads carry an anti-Trump message. Trump-opposition commercials make up just 15% of Democratic ads.”