81–90 of 354 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
What alternative would you propose for candidates to get they're name out?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm probably going to mail my ballot on Monday. Are there any particular hot button issues in California to look out for?
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)
Am I reading this wrong or does it seem like the majority of these are for Harris/Democrats?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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), l…
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 c…
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…
Exactly. A lot of the ads are fundraising ads, like this one: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR059412260615...
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.
Mhmm, okay.
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.