How to Reach the Unreachable Voter

25:13I think our party is very interested in understanding people's relationships to chatbots and AI as a search engine. That is incredibly important and it's changing rapidly. But people using YouTube as a search engine is incredibly under-discussed. I think that YouTube is the number two search engine behind Google. Those data sets are obviously integrated under one umbrella. And it's a place that I think we definitely don't spend enough time thinking about. And we can actually do a lot more there than we can on chatbots. What do you when you say do more because you can you can manipulate you can manipulate and run ads and produce video content that appears when someone searches for a topic that you want to appear on.

25:54Right. Like we know for a fact that AEO is a is a hot topic right now. People really want to understand how they can influence a search result in a in a chat bot. But we, you know, YouTube search has been around for such a long time. It's a lot easier to manipulate what comes up when someone searches for something on YouTube in a way that I think the Democratic Party needs to be spending a lot more time producing video than they do, you know, manipulating chatbot results. It's not a choice. It's not a it's not a it's a false choice. But I think we got to spend more time. I am of a certain generation because I'm old where YouTube is not the same to me.

26:29Like I didn't grow up using YouTube, obviously. I grew up with the Internet. we're gonna have to discuss that here um and but like i think a lot of people who are in politics many of them are my age and older in our gerontocracy um don't fully understand just like how big youtube is that it's the biggest video platform in the world it's the biggest music platform in the world it's bigger than spotify on music it's better than apple podcast or spotify as a podcast platform that it is just this gigantic thing that dominates people's lives i don't think people really get that. But let's get to what you found about when you were analyzing this data, what are the major insights you got?

27:05Yeah. So I think the number one headline is that people are not searching for anything political. Of the 6 million searches that we acquired, less than 100 ,000 were political or even politically adjacent. The reality is, and I think the thing that keeps the team at Priorities USA up at night, but also motivates our work, is that people just aren't thinking about politics. And we have to really, if we don't understand that going into crafting a campaign, we're really going to miss the mark on how do we actually then reach someone. So, you know, I think in doing our analysis, we found a lot of really awesome patterns around when people do search for politics.

27:41It's eye-opening for our team around how soon out from the election are people starting to search for their polling location? When are they searching for information about their candidates? Like our team is quite literally right now, It's, you know, Friday afternoon. That is like literally what they're working on to craft our 2026 campaigns. But, you know, more importantly, it's opening our eyes, I think, to the thing that I'm the most excited about and nerding out about is this category of what we're calling politically adjacent categories that are a really awesome entry point for us to be having relevant conversations with people when they aren't thinking about politics.

28:20but they're one step away from thinking about politics. And let me just give you an analogy on this really quick because I think it's helpful at kind of landing why this is important. I like to, I spend a lot of time thinking about how can we as political advertisers compare ourselves to corporate advertisers? Because it's a billion dollar industry and there's a lot that we can learn from people that are quite literally doing similar work to us. But at the end of the day, you know, I said this to Peter, but Nike knows that you're training for a marathon and they're using that information to sell you shoes at that particular moment.

28:53Target knows that you are pregnant probably before you do. There was that story that came out on that a couple of years ago. My algorithm currently knows that I'm shopping for fall shoes and it is quite helpful to me. And I actually really appreciate the algorithm for knowing exactly what I want. The reality is that advertising writ large is like very contextually relevant and like very genuinely helpful in a lot of ways. and that political advertising is not that. Political advertising is just interruptive. We like show up in the most random moments and want to like interrupt your day. And we got to get closer to the corporate model.

29:28We got to create campaigns that are actually, you know, relevant to someone's day. And, you know, behaviorally, I think we can take a closer look at where people are actually interested and then create those connective points between what they're interested in and how we can shift the conversation to politics and have a million ideas of what that looks like that I'm happy to dive into. Yeah, so I want to, like you raised this very, and I was very struck by that quote from you. I got to get started. I got to get paid by Nike at some point. That's right. No free ads is a rule we have. Everyone who spends any time on the internet understands that your phone is tracking everything you do and then giving you, serving you information, ads about that very thing, as you point out, right?

30:16Like you have kids, it knows you have kids, back to school comes, it's back to school stuff, right? It's, they know you've done, you've done, you've searched Disneyland on the internet. Now you're going to get a bunch of Disney content and you're going to get advertised in a million different ways through, you know, on Instagram, through TikTok, on your, you know, in your Gmail, you're going to get Disneyland ads for, right? or from travel crimes to whatever else. If the corporate model is behavioral-based advertising, what is the political model been to date? What is that based on? It's the same conversation we just had.

30:49It's based on your geography and your voter file score. I think 90 plus percent of Democratic advertising investments to date have been based on where you live, not as a proxy for, you know, you being close to a data center or on a university campus, but just how likely am I if I were to throw a dart to reach a black voter or reach a college student like that? It is based on density and efficiency for the most part. That's like how people use geography to target. And then when it comes to voter file, it's just, you know, the ease of someone is building you a model. They're telling you which voter you should knock and which voter you shouldn't, which voter you should mail and which you shouldn't.

31:31And digital practitioners have been told for a really long time, hey, can you target this list of voters that we think is important? There's technology that exists to be able to upload an offline list and match it to the internet. But that's just completely, you know, ignoring every online signal that you can add to make sure that that, you know, becomes relevant to the end user. So yeah, status quo is, I would say, geography and voter file are like the primary drivers of current targeting. And we're out here screaming, there's more to it than that. Is identity part of that as well, at least like in a broad-based way, especially if you back in the days when you're advertising on Facebook, where you would be targeting people of a certain demographic group or certain age group that you would be reaching.

32:16But it's not tied to any specific knowledge about what those people care about, correct? Yeah, I would say like age and demographic come into play a lot, probably more rarely than you would think. Right. Like I think when I was on the Obama campaign in 2012, we definitely had age and gender tracks. We had demographic tracks layered on top of kind of our broadcast track. But in a small congressional race, like I think that's a lot more rare than than you might expect. And I'm not out here saying that age demo geographic targeting isn't important. It's highly critical. I think we're just saying that the next step beyond that of really trying to understand how to reach someone based on things that we're not necessarily observing offline, but instead online, we should be pushing ourselves to think in that category because it's just going to make us better advertisers.

33:07Is cost prohibitive here? Or is that a problem? Is it obviously much more expensive to market to someone based on specific, targeted information about their online presence than just targeting a group who happen to live in a certain zip code? Not in a major way. I mean, I think Facebook, their CPMs get a lot lower when you kind of give them free will to pick out who you want them to reach. So when you're running a campaign on Facebook and you're saying as long as someone cares about fitness, go ahead and reach them. That gives them a lot more free will to target folks than if you were to upload a file and say, I only want to target these hundred thousand people.

33:46So that does impact the CPM, but in a in a helpful way. We have a lot of questions and we're doing a lot of research at Prairie is around just how you can kind of validate that that data that that you get on places like Facebook, YouTube. But no, I would say cost, if someone's bringing up costs as an excuse not to do a campaign like this, they're probably not fully grasping what we're talking about. Obviously, I think what I am describing here does require incremental costs from a production standpoint. I think the model we are describing certainly requires you to make many, many more ads than a TV one size fits all program.

34:20But I also think there's a ton more that we can be doing on the kind of AI automation side to make the production process faster, easier. That actually has nothing to do with, you know, AI slop. You can you can automate the back end without making the front end of it AI driven. But like, can we live in a world where using the voter file, we've identified a set of target voters in a swing state. And we now know that this swing voter has been searching. on, this is creepy to a lot of people, has been searching on the internet about cyclospora and food recalls. And then could you then, could a well-funded, well-run, digitally forward presidential campaign, then target that voter with an ad in 2028 that said, you know, in the Trump-Vance administration, presuming J.D.

35:08Vance is the nominee, in the Trump-Vance administration, they cut all the funding, which led to these blueberry recalls or lettuce recalls or whatever else. Is that something that can be done at scale? So Google doesn't allow you to use offline data to do targeting. They got rid of that, I think it was 2019. But everything else that you described, yes, would be doable. I think, though, the reason that I care a little bit less about the front end, like here's the voters I particularly care about, is think about how a model is built, right? You take a look at someone's vote history, and then you ask them a bunch of questions in a survey to infer how they're going to vote.

35:46And you apply that to a broader set of voters and you make predictions about how you think someone's going to vote based on them being male, going to church, reading books on the weekend, whatever it is. There's a bunch of really smart data people out there that are building really smart models. I think what we're saying, though, is in addition to asking someone a survey question to inform a model, what if you just observe what they do instead? Right. Like how can how can we get to a point where we are, you know, not relying on offline data to predict where someone is and instead just, you know, if someone's searching for whether their lettuce is contaminated, I don't really care how they voted in 2020.

36:24I think that ad is probably quite relevant to them. So and you don't even pay for an ad until someone clicks on it. So why don't why don't we just try and get rid of the kind of front end marker to begin with? Does that make sense? Okay, let's get into just sort of, all right, so we got a bunch of these voters who are less politically engaged. You've looked at, you know, of the 6 million searches you had, you know, the overwhelming percentage of them were nonpolitical. What are these theoretically nonpolitical people doing on the internet? Where are they? What are they interested in? Yeah. So one of the most interesting, remarkable findings that we saw is just how much people are, you know, searching for, you know, what we're calling kind of public benefit programs, people searching for how to download a FAFSA form, how to apply for Medicaid.

37:09What is Medicaid called in my state? Those are all I think it's a very like large percentage of the searches that we are seeing in that kind of politically adjacent field. And it's a really important signal to us that someone who is searching for a FAFSA form should probably fall into a particular bucket of communication that looks different than someone who's searching for whether their lettuce is contaminated. I think that was the most remarkable finding that I saw that I think we're eager to act on.

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40:26political issues, things that happen in the news. What did you learn about where those people are actually, where is that information coming from? How are they running into it in this crazy media ecosystem? For sure. So I think a stat that I like to throw out and remind myself of every day is that 54 % of voters writ large are just not paying attention to news at all. They're trying to avoid it mostly. And so if they're not paying attention to news, how are they experiencing politics? I think we like to ask ourselves that question to really shape kind of what are the campaigns that we're going to put together to reach them.

41:04And, you know, I think a lot of democratic investment over the last couple of years has has focused on how do we make the news sexier, easier to reach, easier to access. There's nothing wrong with that endeavor. But I think it's going to have its limits if there's just a, if there's a swath of people that just really don't want to pay attention to news at all. And so we want to reach those voters. We have to do it in a different way. We have to have different cultural entry points. I think you hear Democrats say a lot, like we need to be culture first. I'm frustrated that I don't actually feel like we have a next step to that question.

41:39I've never actually heard adequate, you know, ideas of what that looks like. And so I think part of the research that priorities has been doing over the last two years is sparking ideas of what does that actually look like in practice, knowing that beauty and fashion, true crime, parenting, those are three categories that are reaching a really large set of voters who are both swingy and, you know, switch from party to party, but also don't pay attention to the news. What would it look like for us to create a campaign where we develop true crime content and then use that content to like talk about Epstein or whatever it makes sense?

42:13Like, it's about really using, you know, using this data to uncover those other kind of non-news oriented entry points for us to then have conversations with people on their terms. Parenting is a category that I think is like highly interesting and super relevant to what we're talking about. What would it look like for us to create a track of always on communication that targets people based on the fact that they're parents that talks about issues that are, you know, highly relevant to parents? I think when we talk about, you know, the March to 2028 and the fact that we're getting going early, that doesn't mean that we need to be advertising all the time.

42:47We're trying to advertise in moments that are highly relevant. Back to school, great opportunity to, you know, talk to parents about how Trump's policies, advanced policies, Rubio's policies are personally impacting them. I think our goal here is to be relevant and not necessarily always on. When people are, whether they're interested in true crime or gaming or fitness or whatever else, where are those voters hanging out? We're not in a world where they're going to truecrime.com on the web to read about it. So is it? They are in social media apps and they have both followed and are being fed that sort of content.

43:25I want to try to get a little granular about where these people are hanging out. And I think why it's particularly relevant is we have been absent in these spaces, obviously. That's why you're doing the work you're doing. But if you look at like health and beauty, for instance, or wellness as a space, like we were absent, but at some course of time since, you know, 2016, 2012, that that category, which would have seemed demographically to be very much ours, you know, a very, you know, you know, young mom, younger women category became like the birthplace of Maha. So I'm just trying to understand like where these people are, like where they actually hang out when they say they're like they're into fitness or true crime or whatever else.

44:05Yeah. I mean, a lot of this research is very baked in YouTube. Like, let's just name that. I think there's priorities to spending a disproportionate amount of time and money really trying to understand YouTube behavior because we know how easy it is to just light money on fire on that platform. And there's a ton of upside and better understanding, you know, how people are using the platform. Let me give you an example of a program that we ran earlier this summer that I think will help answer the questions. So we, from our research, as we talked about, young men, super online, super swing, they're swing voters.

44:38They, you know, swung from Trump, away from Trump, away from Biden from 2020 to 2024. From our research, we knew that young men are interested in podcasts, finance, gaming, fitness. I think those were the categories. What our team did is we ran this campaign in Ohio earlier this summer where all of the ads were about John Husted. But each of the ads was highly relevant to those categories that I just laid out. So you had like a guy lifting weights talking about John Husted running, you know, next to game to fitness content. You had someone who was an actual gaming creator talk about same topic in the context of, you know, what a normal kind of gaming piece of content on YouTube might look like.

45:24Um, part of the theory here, it's, it was actually twofold. It was one, our ads should natively look like the content that someone is otherwise watching on YouTube. Um, ads actually, you know, in today's world, it's actually better for an ad to blend in than to stand out. You kind of want that nativity. There's, there's benefit there. And I think we had, we had some research from previous cycles that, that proved to us that that was, that was a good theory. Um, but then And also, I think more importantly, anyone on YouTube is kind of especially a young man is kind of like two clicks away from right leaning content at any given point, in part because of how much the right has invested in just like having an always on content machine and being present in all the places that we are not such that if you're watching fitness content and then you skip past the next two videos, you're probably going to be on a piece of content that's a little bit maha in nature.

46:16And so we had run a campaign a couple cycles ago where we just had this theory of what would it look like to just run ads on the most right leaning content that exists and see what kind of persuasion effect we can have. Assuming that just because someone's on Breitbart doesn't mean they probably chose to be there. They may have just ended up there because of the algorithms. And our theory proved out like we were able to keep, you know, retain these voters at a pretty high rate just by running positive pre-roll ads before someone, you know, was watching that Breitbart content. And so the team was kind of like, how do we do this in a slightly more expanded way, not necessarily explicitly right wing, but these kind of right leaning places that you might not, you know, expect on the front end.

47:00So those five categories are the ones that the team kind of proposed as let's interrupt these, let's interrupt this user's journey with ads and see what happens. And the theory proved out, right? Like we were able to effectively, you know, stop from, you know, getting to that right leaning content. A lot of the times someone was like opening up a new tab on Google and searching for more information about John Husted, which, you know, it did the job of interrupting that person's flow. So anyway, all of that to say, I think we are disproportionately spending a lot of time thinking about how to find people on YouTube in particular, just because it is such a, It's a high density, very efficient place to reach people, but it's a very easy place to burn money.

47:45And it's important to note that we talk about TikTok all the time, but last I checked, you still cannot run political ads on TikTok, correct? You cannot run political ads on TikTok. That is true. And so it's just out there destroying the world and we can't intervene. There's certainly interventions that you can do that are not explicitly renting attention. My nerdy way to talk about advertising is you're renting someone's attention. We can earn attention on TikTok, but it's not something that we're going to be able to get in a short window. Let's talk a little bit about AI chatbots, because in your survey, I saw that just about half of voters are using an AI chatbot once a week.

48:26And, you know, obviously Google is still king. You pointed that out. But even Google is changing in the way a lot of people are getting their search results because they are coming in these AI summaries, which is interrupting the search ads that we've been spending gazillion dollars on for decades. And but so as we think as AI chatbots grow as a search engine for people, how should Democrats be thinking about influencing those results? Like we had a playbook. We had a both a we had a advertising playbook for Google search and we had an organic search SEO playbook for how to get our content near the top of the results.

49:08What the hell do you do when it's a handful of very different, very independent AI chatbots? Yeah. First of all, there's a lot of really smart people who are tackling this head on. I think the folks that run for something, caucus AI, are thinking really extensively about how do you, A, understand, and then B, manipulate a chatbot result. It's really, you know, AEO is just SEO 2.0, right? It's just understanding. Do you say what AEO is, just so people know? Yeah, it stands for Answer Engine Optimization. And it's basically how do you manipulate what is going to show up in a chatbot result? There's a lot of really smart people out there who are thinking about how do you understand what's showing up in a chatbot result?

49:50And then B, how do you actually change it? You change it by updating your website. You change it by pitching stories to the AP or posting shit on Reddit because that's a place that's often getting picked up by chatbots. All of this is going to change incredibly fast. And anyone who is kind of going out there with best practices today, the best practices are going to change two months from now, six months from now. And so I think it does require a lot of urgency and a shift in conversation across our party that if we always had to invest in digital infrastructure, now is the time to like double, triple, quadruple down on that effort.

50:29for us to like really understand how quickly the internet is changing. Like we have to be investing in innovation to make sure that we're able to stay on top of these trends. I think the work that Priorities is doing, though, in the kind of chatbot space beyond just, you know, understanding what a result is and understanding how you might manipulate that result is really understanding when and why are people turning to chatbots? What is the kind of driver of why someone's using it? And how does that, you know, change how we should be thinking about intervening and better understanding their media journey.

51:01And so I think, you know, the result, the research that we did over the summer, I think was highly, it was incredibly helpful at uncovering that people are not necessarily searching for information about a candidate, as much as they are searching for information about policies and issues in a much more granular way. You know, I think as, you know, AI, I don't know if you feel this personally, but I think as I'm scrolling TikTok and on YouTube and seeing content in my feed that feels a little like, is this real? Is this not? I am personally opening up ChatGBT, Claude and saying, hey, can you fact check this for me?

51:37There's, I think, a ton of, it almost feels like the Spider-Man meme where we're, because of the insurgence of AI, people are using AI to check if things are AI. It doesn't seem great for the world, but yes, that's where we are. Yeah.

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53:06This offer is exclusive to Pod Save America listeners. That's HelixSleep.com slash Crooked for 27 % off site-wide. HelixSleep.com slash Crooked. Keep it listeners, Louis Fertel here. I have something I've been dying to get off my chest. Dr. Robbie is the real villain of the pit. There, I said it. Okay, but that's not actually the big news. Here's the big news. Emmy-nominated television host Nina Parker is officially the new co-host of Keep It. That's the confession. The Dr. Robbie thing was just, you know, me needing to say it somewhat out loud. Okay, shots fired, and I hear you're Dr. Robbie, and I raise you.

53:37Sex in the City wasn't really a show about finding love. It was a humiliation ritual on bad friendships. The clothes were cute, though. Oh, yeah, the tutu in the opening credits? Yeah, it's really cute. Every week, Nina and I will bring you an inside look at all the pop culture drama, the hottest takes you can handle, and honestly, maybe some you can't. Plus, celebrity guests galore. We're going to guide you through a gorgeous wreckage of pop culture. We are unpacking the biggest stories in TV, film, entertainment news. We're going to go all the way to Gen Z, from YouTube taking over the horror genre to Olivia Rodrigo, redefining pop music.

54:07And then we're going to also talk about maybe you partying with Madonna a little bit. Oh, yeah, that one time at the Abbey. It was sweaty. But in a good way. New episodes drop every Wednesday on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts.

54:22we're in the village 2026 selection you guys are focused on among other things trying to define the 2028 potential nominees most notably jd vance and marco rubio talk to me about why start that process now yeah absolutely so i'm i'm very i've been working at a super pack for almost a decade now which is crazy um and i am very much of the opinion that the way that our party uses super PACs is outdated and not to the maximum that we can and certainly not to the maximum that Republicans do. And the way I would describe that is quite simple. I think as much as this role of a super PAC is to raise money that a campaign cannot raise, aka we are able to raise beyond the contribution limit that a campaign has, we also have time that a campaign doesn't have.

55:09And I think really leaning into that time element is a thing that I feel really important as the role that a super PAC can play in today's world. And so I think in the aftermath of 2024, when we're sitting around asking ourselves, why the hell did we just lose that election? And what can we do differently next time? Our team got to work on a couple of things, including, you know, at a high level, how can we do a better job of listening to the internet to be able to drive decision-making? We could talk about polling and all the reasons why polling is flawed, but, you know, Priorities is very much of the opinion that with the availability of AI, we can observe qualitative data at such a larger scale in today's world that we might as well lean into it.

55:55It's exactly how the Republicans are making their decisions, right? Like we like to look at the Kamala is for they, them ad, I think is a perfect example of how the Republicans said, that ad has likes to it. It's sticky. It's doing really well online. Let's put money behind it. Whereas on the Democratic side, we have to like let an ad go through an entire polling rigmarole in order to take it seriously. Anyway, all of that to say, priorities got to work after 2024 to build a tech stack and do research to really understand how can we be leaning into listening to the internet to understand what's going to resonate and what's going to break through.

56:28At the same time, you know, we recognize that the march to 2028 is going to be long and it's going to include a lot of Democrats fighting each other. I think if this summer was indicative of anything. It's that primaries are challenging and they can be really helpful, but ultimately they're tough. And we are about to go, we are about to face that on a level that is going to be different than what we just experienced over the summer. And I'm really worried that our party has not been, you know, we have not gone through an election without Trump on the ballot in quite some time. I think our muscle memory there is quite weak.

57:05We're going to be running against someone new no matter what happens. And the Democrats are going to be fighting each other. So the team at Priorities was like, what can we do to be the most value add heading into 28? Let's get going now. Let's actually start to think about what it looks like to define our eventual opposition so that by the time we have a nominee, they have a slightly less uphill climb to be able to go after and compare themselves to the Republican. So that's the work of Prologue. We're really excited about it. Our tech stack all feeds into kind of what we're doing. It's not going to look like a traditional advertising campaign.

57:38It's going to be always on, but that doesn't mean we're on all the time. And we have a million ideas that we're excited to dive into. So the I in after 2017, sorry, after 2016, in 2017, one of my strong views was that we should take a lot of the money that was flowing into Democratic politics in the wake of Trump and be always on. Right. And to like, not like you say, not always on like we're going to run ads for the rest of time. But in moments, high leverage moments, you would run advertising to shape that impression, shape that moment where people are paying attention in their minds, in our favor.

58:18And I was I like that idea because I believed correctly, I think that we were just so outgunned in the media space that we were competing with Trump, competing with Fox News, competing with Facebook at the time. this is very powerful entity that was a sort of a conduit for MAGA adjacent messaging. Like we needed to, you know, put some like messaging thrust behind the things that happened. I went around, I sold this to lots of people. And the thing that everyone came back to me to say was, and smart people, was there is no evidence that early ads work. And then you're basically recommending that we are lighting money on fire.

58:55I was never fully convinced of that, but I also wasn't capable of convincing the people who said that to do something different. What is your response to that? I mean, does that logically make sense? It doesn't make sense. Well, I mean, there's they will throw a bunch of political science research at you that people have very short memories or not paying attention at the time. And so it doesn't. The impressions are not worth the money, I guess. I mean, research also didn't show that smoking caused cancer until very recently. Fair enough. No, I just I think that I really appreciate the folks in the academic space for pushing us to be rigorous.

59:29But at the end of the day, like, I think it is really important to name that political advertisers and what we are trying to do when we are trying to win elections is fundamentally different than any other, you know, communication challenge, marketing challenge in the broader world, right? At the end of the day, not to bring Nike back into it, but like Nike spends millions of a year to think they're a really cool brand. They run ads around every sporting event to make you like them. But ultimately, they're trying to sell you shoes and they get to use shoe sales as a proxy for whether they're just do it ads are working or not.

1:00:04We don't have that. We do not have proxies that we get to use to understand whether someone's mind is being changed, right? Like that's why surveys are, you know, we invest so much in surveys because it's the closest we can get to be able to being able to ask someone, were you persuaded by this? Did we did we sell you the shoe? And, you know, that I've spent a huge chunk of my career trying to get to a point where we can like zero in and understand how to properly measure a persuasion effect. And it is it is quite challenging. And it is probably the hardest thing that I've had to, you know, to a billion dollars over the last decade in always on infrastructure and communication.

1:00:51And I think it is quite obvious that it has paid off. Right. You look at, you know, the example I like to give is Trump after the shooting, you know, within an hour, he had people on the Internet talking about the ballroom and how the shooting necessitated the need to to build a ballroom. We don't have that amplification, you know, program on our site. There's a lot of folks that are working really hard to build it, but it just shows the long-term payoff of what always-on infrastructure looks like. Meanwhile, you know, Democrats sit around and our amplification is like crossing your fingers in tow, hoping for a retweet from Barack Obama.

1:01:25Like, if you want to look at that and say that our situation is better, I just don't buy that. I think that's, at the end of the day, like, art and science have to come into play, and we have to be able to use our judgment and be able to say that, you know, always on communication, it has to matter, right? Like we can see it playing out in front of our eyes. But I think a critical reason that we are doing things differently. And I empathize with the criticism of always on in that sometimes you can look at the way it plays out in a budget and just think, well, there's no way in hell we can afford that.

1:02:00You can't afford to like be at the impression levels now that we would want to be at in the fall of 2028. But that's why the priorities approach of really using behavioral targeting as an entry point to have these conversations is, I'm so excited about this program because it's the first time that I've really looked at a program through the lens of how do we reach people, not necessarily during a time when they're registering to vote or when news is breaking, kind of those natural political moments, but instead during the moments of, hey, I'm Googling whether my lettuce is safe. Like that's the perfect time to have a political conversation.

1:02:35It doesn't mean we're going to be on all the time. In fact, we're not on right now, but like the next time something, you know, politically relevant happens, you'll see us go up. All right. I want to look at some of your ads because they are, they look nothing like a typical Democratic ad. I want to start with one about J.D. Vance. Let's play it. Hi, I'm J.D. Vance. As vice president, I cast a tie-breaking vote to cut your health care, And I've been helping our great leader create tremendous wealth, which has been trickling down to you. Rome wasn't built in a day, of course, but ultimately you're going to feel the benefits and your Medicaid.

1:03:15Don't worry. That's just immaterial minutiae. Anyway, get back to work. You're almost late for your second job. And President Trump and I have to get back to redecorating. Okay. I believe that was Donald Trump taking a leak on JD Vance's head to make a point about trickle-down economics. I love it. Yeah. So go ahead. Yeah. Talk to me. Just talk to me about the concept of the ad, who you, who you showed the ad to and what the reaction to it was. Yeah. So, you know, my friends at home think being an executive director is like out there talking to, to, you know, rich people. It's actually just getting a slack from your CMO that says, Hey, how do you feel about an ad with some piss in it?

1:03:51That's quite literally the reality of this job. But, you know, I think this ad is about recognizing that if you can't actually get someone to watch your ad, it doesn't matter how well it tested, right? The number one thing that we need to be aware of is the skip button and the second screen that exists and the fact that people are just naturally going to tune out of what we were saying. So if we want to be able to actually get our message across about gas prices, we need to deliver it in a format that's going to capture people's attention. This is just one ad, right? I think it's really, you know, the media responds really well to, hey, look at this one ad and cover it and get some media attention on it.

1:04:29The reality is like Prologue is going to be thousands of ads over the next two years. We're going to throw shit at the wall, see what sticks and then move on with our lives. This ad is one example of something that we tried. It actually did get a ton of attention. People watched it all the way through. I think we were really excited about the metrics that we saw. People want humor. They want politics to be a little bit less serious. And so that was our attempt to kind of play around with those insights. So, you know, the typical way we have been measuring the efficacy of ads and messaging over the last decade here is persuasion effects, right?

1:05:05How much does that based on a we're testing the ad in front of tens of thousands of people and to what how many points did this take off of Trump's approval? or how much did it move vote choice in our favor? And these are all in a polarized environment, very small numbers that were like, an ad could be three times as effective as another ad and it's because it's moving approval three points, not one point. What is your metric of success here? Is it completion rate? Are you testing persuasion effects? How are you thinking about it? All of the above. I think we are of the opinion that there's no singular metric that's ever gonna tell you your ad is working.

1:05:40You have to take a really wide lens and like take it all in. you know we didn't do creative testing in 2016 I think in the aftermath I was really excited when the idea of creative testing kind of came into the ecosystem because I was like okay like we can finally like understand before we put money behind an ad how's it going to do and I don't know if you you guys remember like 2016 the biggest thing was like so many of our ads were causing backlash they were actually like moving people in the wrong direction and that was like such an eye-opening thing and so I was always of the opinion that you know you can take a look at a creative test result and weed out the ads that are going to do harm and actually move people in the wrong direction.

1:06:15And then if you have five ads at the end of the day that move people in the right direction, put them all online and see how they do, right? Like let's compare offline and online metrics against each other to really understand, you know, how they're going to both be complimentary and maybe disagree with each other. Not to shout out the team on the Newsom campaign, but they did this really well during the Prop 50 campaign. And I think their whole theory was we're going to test our ads. We are going to see what works in a kind of lab environment. We're going to see what horse race looks like. But instead of, you know, picking the top ad that has the highest horse race effect, we're going to just going to put everything out there that doesn't do harm and then see, you know, on YouTube, which audience does which ad move.

1:06:56I just give them a lot of props for kind of taking that theory. It's in strong alignment with kind of the priorities theory of the case. And it obviously had a really awesome impact in that race. But yeah, I think part of our theory, and this is one of the other tools that we're actually in development on right now, is what does it look like to amass a much larger set of signals to understand how something might resonate online? Beyond just how something tests in a creative test and how something polls, how is an issue being talked about on a podcast? How is it being talked about in a comment section, in a search trend, at the doors?

1:07:32There's a million different data sets that we have available to us that we can be listening to. And part of what Priorities is doing is amassing all of those into a centralized view so that we can take everything in and make strategic judgments accordingly. All right, let's look at an ad about Marco Rubio, and then let's discuss. Okay. Think America can't get any more expensive? That we can't afford another pointless war? Well, the call isn't yours to make. It is with the little Marco invasion action play set. Boots that are too big. Promises he can't keep. This is not going to be a pro-op conflict.

1:08:06He starts the wars. We pay for it. Social security? Not anymore. Medicare? Bye-bye. The toy that sends real boys off to war. The Little Marco Invasion Action Play Set. I love it. I love Little Marco. Similar vibe. They all have a South Parkian, I guess is their term, vibe to them, which I do like. Who was the target audience for this ad and how did it do? Yeah, so generally speaking, priorities is always kind of trying to go after the young voters and voters of color as our primary audience. Looking ahead to 2028, our team has identified just under 10 million voters across the battleground states that kind of fit into that category.

1:08:46So that is the primary audience for this. I think for this particular creative brief, we were also quite interested in having an effect with young men in particular, just because that's a tough audience for us. um you know you i heard you say to you mentioned the youtube comments earlier that you read them and that they're actually sort of influencing some of the creative decisions you're making um which is a far cry from uh which is probably causing uh data nerds within the party to lose their mind that we would um look at youtube comments but one thing you said to peter handy was that the YouTube comments about J.D.

1:09:27Vance and Marco Rubio were different in one very notable respect. Could you say what that was? Yeah, for sure. So let me explain quickly why we care so much about comment sections at parties because it does cause a lot of stress, but I do think it's super valid. So we did a research project last summer where we interviewed a bunch of young men on how they watch YouTube. And by far and away, the biggest takeaway from that research project was just how reliable these young men are on comment sections. They watch a video, they jump to the comment section, they really want to understand what their peers think, they really want to understand if there's agreement or disagreement.

1:09:59It is like peer validation that is like happening in front of our eyes. And it is like, you know, people like to say the internet is not real life, comment sections are not real life. I'm not here to say that people who are commenting on videos are representative of voters, but it is an environment where conversations are happening and we need to take it seriously and learn from it. So that is why we care so much about observing what is going on in these comment sections. And what we saw when we were crafting, you know, our initial set of polling on Vance and Rubio in particular, you know, our team was going about, you know, picking out the messages that you would, you know, pull out when you're pulling together a poll.

1:10:35But we also spent a lot of time kind of scouring the Internet to understand what are the narratives that are kind of naturally occurring around these guys? What are the late night hosts saying about these guys? what are comment sections, what are podcasts saying about them so that we could have a little bit of an internet first lens to the narratives that are appearing in our polling. And we found that while comment sections about JD Vance were often quite negative, definitely poking fun at him. People are not afraid to poke fun at JD Vance. Marco Rubio's comments were a lot more positive. There's just not a lot of criticism happening organically about him online.

1:11:08And it's actually why in enrolling out this program, I think our team walked away feeling a lot more anxious about kind of what we have in front of us to define Marco Rubio, just because A, he's super undefined. B, people are not willing to, you know, go super negative on him online. And C, like in rolling out this program to the press, the only person anyone wants to talk about right now is J.D. Vance. People don't want to talk about Marco Rubio. And that's a problem. The J.D. Vance thing is interesting because like, I think a lot about political messaging when you're trying to define a person is you kind of want to meme-ify them.

1:11:44And you can either be meme-ified in a cool way or in a bad way. Trump may actually be the one person to resist memeing because he kind of is a meme of himself. He sort of developed his own meme in the 80s and has just lived with it since. But it is what... This is even before we even talked about memes. That's what happened to John Kerry with the windsurfing and the... I was for it before I was against it. He was meme-ified. He lost. Al Gore, even before that, you know who a man who was um a lot chosen by bill clinton to be on the ticket because he was thought to be the most ethical and moral person in the senate um then by by the end was turned into a giant liar who claimed that he invented the internet and was so boring he got memefied right and so like vance seems like like i always think about when we like you can i'm sure if we do message testing and we ask the million voters we did focus groups like like you would want to say they're bad on affordability.

1:12:37But that's not like a it's not a culturally relevant message or culturally relevant messages that J.D. Vance is a goober. I actually looked at the creative brief right before we got on just I wanted to remember. Our creative brief literally describes like what we think the meme of these guys should be. For J.D. Vance, it's the flannel shirt doesn't fit him anymore. Right. He he grew up seemingly middle class. He's now in the Trump administration. And like, unfortunately, the flannel shirt that he once wanted to wear no longer zips up. It's he's grown out of it because he's spent the last couple of years catering to the Trump administration.

1:13:09So what you thought you knew about him before, it's not so true anymore. So everything you're going to see us put out over the next couple of years, like for now, like I think the meme could evolve. And part of our research is going to be to try to understand, you know, poke holes in that theory. But that's kind of the story that we're trying to tell about Vance. And it also allows us to, you know, tell that story through a climate change lens or an abortion lens or an economic lens. It doesn't require us to, you know, pit issues against each other. I think every time as a party we're pitting issues against each other, we're losing.

1:13:38The meme I think that our team has picked out for Rubio is he's a chicken hawk. He's all talk, but when it actually comes to it, like he's never served in the military. He's actually nowhere to be found right now, despite everything that's going on in Iran. So those, like I said, like our team and putting together this creative brief and really distilling the research, it was less about what are the top issues and more what's the one sentence that you want someone to describe them as when they walk away. And I think that's really our theory on narrative and messaging our priorities. Before I let you go, like as we are sitting here today, there is somewhere between a dozen and 400 people who are planning to run for president very soon.

1:14:18In those campaign headquarters, there are already people, you and I have been these people in campaigns in the past, who are charting out in memos and slide decks, what the campaign should look like, what the strategy would be, what the campaign structure would be. What advice do you have for these campaigns to learn from what you guys have done and to avoid making some of the mistakes we've made in recent campaigns where I think some of our structure and strategies have been anachronistic at best? Yeah. I mean, I would be remiss not to say that digital has to be at the table. Like if you are not bringing a digital person - Shouldn't digital be the table?

1:14:55Yes. Right. There's all the debate of digital as a team versus a tactic. Yes. like I hope we are past that but I have to say it right um I mean the other thing is just like you know I think that if I I get asked all the time well how are you guys actually acting on this research it's really smart it's really insightful but like what what how should it change my strategy and I think my singular answer to that question is more is more and more video um you are never going to regret making more video for today the way today's internet operates I think Kyle Thart put this study out a couple weeks or last week around just how much Cory Booker is just churning out video and constantly putting things out.

1:15:35And it's like earning him a ton of awesome, you know, goodwill on the Internet. You are never going to regret doing more. But I think that requires a fundamental shift in we need to stop editing ourselves on the front end. We need to stop putting things through 20 rounds of legal compliance research review and just start putting things on the Internet and seeing what sticks. The Internet is a place where we have a lot to learn. We need to stop thinking about it as just a distribution channel and instead think about it as a place where we can do a lot of good in listening and observing how people are responding to our content.

1:16:13Danielle Butterfield, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for nerding out with me on my favorite topic in the world. This has been so much fun. We will be watching what you guys are doing through the rest of this election and the next. Thank you so much. Thank you. Talk soon. Pause in America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Faris Safari with Ree Jerlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

1:16:46Keep it listeners, Louis Fertel here. I have something I've been dying to get off my chest. Dr. Robbie is the real villain of the pit. There, I said it. Okay, but that's not actually the big news. Here's the big news. Emmy-nominated television host Nina Parker is officially the new co-host of Keep It. That's the confession. The Dr. Robbie thing was just, you know, me needing to say it somewhat out loud. Okay, shots fired, and I hear you're Dr. Robbie, and I raise you. Sex in the City wasn't really a show about finding love. It was a humiliation ritual on bad friendships. The clothes were cute, though.

1:17:14Oh, yeah, the tutu in the opening credits? Yeah, it's really cute. Every week, Nina and I will bring you an inside look at all the pop culture drama, the hottest takes you can handle. And honestly, maybe some you can't. Plus, celebrity guests galore. We're going to guide you through a gorgeous wreckage of pop culture. We are unpacking the biggest stories in TV, film, entertainment, news. We're going to go all the way to Gen Z from YouTube taking over the horror genre to Olivia Rodrigo redefining pop music. And then we're going to also talk about maybe you partying with Madonna a little bit. Oh, yeah.

1:17:41That one time at the Abbey. It was sweaty. But in a good way. New episodes drop every Wednesday on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts.