Why a leading super PAC is going all in on digital this election

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, when Donald Trump shocked millions in America and around the world by defeating Hillary Clinton to become the president of the United States, leading Democratic operatives went back to the drawing board to assess what went wrong. They zeroed in on their media plan.

Trump’s campaign pointed to a heavy digital strategy centered around Facebook as key to their victory. Priorities USA, the largest Democratic super PAC, which had been operating with a more traditional advertising strategy, recognized that and decided to make major changes and invest more into all digital channels.

Eight years later, Priorities is running a 100%-digital campaign in a presidential year for the first time ever. (It tested the strategy in the 2022 midterms, investing millions into Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s winning campaigns, among others.) It’s activating on everything from connected TV (CTV) to audio, digital out-of-home, social and search. That the super PAC is putting this much investment in the power of digital suggests a sea change for the future of political campaigns.

“It’s our job to reach voters where they are and where they’re spending time,” Danielle Butterfield, executive director at Priorities USA, tells The Current. Butterfield moved to Priorities USA in 2017 after serving as deputy director of digital advertising for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. “And the numbers really paint a clear picture that digital platforms are where that is.”

Kamala Harris’ campaign has been putting muscle behind digital since she stepped in as the presidential nominee. Harris’ camp outspent Trump 20 to 1 on Facebook and Instagram during the week of their debate in September, to the tune of $12.2 million versus $611,228 on Meta’s platforms, according to The New York Times. The difference was even more stark in the two swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania — $2.8 million versus $57,255.

Back in August, Harris’ campaign reserved what they called the largest digital ad buy ever in American politics, with $200 million of the $370 million going to digital platforms.

Getting more context

Within its digital-only strategy, Priorities is making behavioral and contextual targeting the building blocks of its path to success. As more campaigns evolve from the historical use of voter-file targeting, Butterfield believes campaigns are leaving votes on the table by not using more-advanced methods.

There are thousands of options to serve a potential voter based off what their interests are, from music to gaming to cooking. These options dive deeper than the traditional name, age, race and ZIP code within a voter-file profile. Even for ZIP code targeting, those that have a high percentage of Black or Latino voters can be oversaturated with ads, according to Butterfield. She is quick to say that only targeting those areas could lead them to miss out on potential voters in under-indexed areas. Finding those under-indexed voters is the bread and butter of Priorities USA’s strategy.

“We are really laser focused on how to get off of voter-file targeting and off of strictly geographic targeting and on to behavioral [and] contextual targeting, which we believe is the future in the present of targeting,” Butterfield says.

Working digital on both sides

The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), which works to elect Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives as one of the top Republican super PACs, sees digital as a chief priority in its path to victory as well.

The CLF expects to spend between 25% to 30% of its media on digital and streaming ads, although Director of Digital Greg Butcher qualifies that that number can look smaller than what their commitment is due to factors like the cost of TV ads from market to market.

The CLF has reserved $179 million in ads since May.

Butcher sees the rising tide of importance that digital holds and believes that video content on a connected TV will be the dominant media experience for American voters in the next 2 to 4 years.

“We have looked at digital in the last couple cycles as a critical component of delivering reach to voters who aren’t reachable with broadcast television, meaning it is not an afterthought when we plan media spends and produce creative,” Butcher tells The Current.

Reaching any and all voters has become more sophisticated in the modern age, as mountains of data are turned into targeting methods.

“The road to victory runs through digital,” Brianna Vercellino, director of media planning at i360, tells The Current. i360 has a database of 220 million voters with 1,800 unique data points that campaigns can use to target at the individual and household levels.

The weight of democracy

Within political advertising, the stakes for experimentation are higher, as they could lead parties and candidates to rousing success or crushing failure. Political still leans heavily into traditional TV as the biggest place to dump ad dollars, with the channel projected to make up 57% of total political spend in 2024, according to Emarketer.

“Campaigns don’t have the year-round resources and infrastructure to constantly be thinking about the next cycle when we’re putting out fires every single day,” Butterfield says. “That’s just not how campaigns are built, you know, in comparison to the corporate world. There is a little bit of constantly playing catch-up to where the digital space is always moving.”

Priorities USA has spent the past eight years reforming its media strategy to get to this point — placing immense trust in the power of digital. The stakes for ad strategies are arguably highest in political.

“The only way for us to get an academic, rigorous understanding of if our campaigns are working is to hold out a group of voters from our campaigns and have a control group,” Butterfield says. “But you don’t want to have a control group when the state of democracy is in your hands.”