How to Reach the Unreachable Voter

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whether we like it or not priorities has already started a 30 million dollar campaign to define the 2028 republicans like jd vance and marco rubio and i invited daniel on the podcast to unpack that research and talk about what they've learned we dove into their findings talked about how the media environment has changed the 2024 election and broke down some of the ads they're already running it was a great conversation and we'll get to it in a minute but before we do please consider becoming a paying subscriber to friends of the pod subscribers get access to the single best show produced at crooky media polar coaster with me dan pfeiffer i was forced to say that by producers but i really do like the show and i think you'll like it too this week on polar coaster we discussed angie nixon's upset win in florida new polling in the michigan senate race and a strange fake polling scandal in the la mayoral race and while i have you out there subscribing to truly great content check out my sub stack message box where i break down what is happening in politics you can find it all at crooked.com slash yes we dan or subscribe to friends of the pod at crooked.com slash friends all right here's my conversation with daniel butterfield daniel butterfield welcome to pod save america thanks for having me all right i'm so excited to talk to you thanks for doing this um priorities has been working on a whole bunch of things that are really interesting to me i want to talk to you about some of the things that are i want to talk to you about the study you've done on less politically engaged voters i want to talk to you about how you're thinking about ads and i really want to talk to you about why you are already spending money to try to win the 2028 election in the middle of the 2026 election we're going to do all of that i want to level set on a couple things first for people who've been around politics as long as i have they remember priorities usa as sort of the democratic super pack spending tens of millions of dollars to elect barack obama hillary clinton and i'm going to talk to you about what priorities usa is right now so maybe talk a little bit about who you are and what you guys are doing so our audience understands yeah so i joined the priorities usa team back in 2017 fresh off the hillary clinton campaign um priorities you know up until that point had been operating like to use like you said as a presidential super pack but in the aftermath of 2016 one of the most urgent kind of quickest realizations that folks had about why we lost was just how little we were able to do and i think that's one of the things that we've been thinking about is how little democrats had invested on digital compared to television and so the priorities team got some funding to kind of stay open beyond the presidential and really investigate why that that is um so that's when i joined the team i became our digital director alongside a bunch of other really smart people and we kind of made it our mission to really diagnose and understand why the democratic party is so severely under invest in digital but then also like to actually close the gap too right to raise a bunch of money to spend on digital and so flash forward to where we are today i like to say that we are anchored as a as a presidential organization but we really have gotten to a point where we're using the midterm elections and special elections to really prepare and get better and innovate and try new things so that by the time the next presidential election rolls around we're like that much more ready for it so that's how i would think about us today i know the presidential election seems like a million years away for a lot of people but as i like to point out that if we follow the previous schedule one exactly one year from now there will be democrats and republicans on stage in debates uh actually like this thing will be often we will be this thing will be often running the day after the midterms um so people should be prepared for that and so just also to level set here you know as you point out like in 2017 you're worried about the digital gap in working on it after the 2024 election there was this sort of widespread consensus that democrats had once again maneuvered digitally there was all the talk about all the podcasts that trump did and how they were you know using the internet to target these less engaged voters you know i think that there was a general sincerity among a lot of people in the party to try to close the gap even if they didn't know exactly how to do it or how the gap got there 18 months after that election where do you see things has the party made real improvements here how much work needs to be done yeah i mean we obviously have made improvements but we're not where we need to be right i think in the aftermath of 2016 it was quite easy to say wow democrats are really not spending anything on digital in the aftermath of 2024 democrats outspent republicans two to one on digital so it's no longer a numbers game it's actually like several layers below the surface which makes it a lot more difficult to diagnose and solve and that's why you know um it's no surprise that this the last couple years post 2024 have been a really tough set of fundraising years for democrats because the solutions to why we lost in 2024 are not the solutions to why we lost in 2024 the solutions to why we lost in 2024 really require us to to dive deep and solve some big bigger cultural um problems that we have ingrained in our party and so you know i think if i'm going to diagnose that problem in one sentence my read is that while democrats are spending a lot more money on digital than they were back in 2016 we're still running digital programs to mirror what goes on on television um and i think that's the that's the crux of the problem that i'm seeing today could you say a little bit more about what that means yeah i mean i think you know 20 years ago when a campaign was setting out to reach voters they had a handful of options of how they were going to do that they could buy you know broadcast cable television points they could knock doors build an organizing program send out mail pieces digital really wasn't on the table when you're setting out to you know run a tv program you're picking out dmas that are efficient based on where your your state or congressional district is you're building really fancy models to determine which door i'm going to knock and which door i'm going to skip you're you know building mail pieces that you know same thing you're going to mail to one house and not to another um but i think that what we have really failed to to realize is that digital opens up so many more possibilities to be able to reach voters in ways that bleed so much far beyond where you live what your dma is and what your voter file score is um and we're really failing to to lean into the the creativity that digital affords us um when when we do that and i think put in a much simpler way um nine out of the 10 top youtube ads in 2024 were just 30 second ads that ran on tv first so we are quite literally practically taking 30 second ads that we run on tv and then putting them on youtube and expecting people to watch them and that is quite literally lighting money on fire i mean i've been struck by this and you know as you know we've been sort of both together and separately screaming about this for a long time yeah anyone who watches youtube would understand that a tv commercial run on youtube makes no sense it would be like someone putting a print ad on your television when you were watching it and you just be supposed to read it and they're obviously incredibly smart people working in digital spaces across the party you know in the harris campaign and some of these super packs um in the biden campaign in 2020 what accounts for the fact that there's we're sort of like jamming this anachronistic square peg into a much more modern round hole i mean i think i cannot adequately answer this question without addressing the consultant driven nature of decision go i mean let's get right into it yes right like it is just if you want to look at profit margins for a second what i'm what i'm basically declaring that a campaign should do costs a lot more than what it costs to run a tv campaign so that such that if i'm asking a campaign to cut 20 ads to put on the internet instead of 1 ad to ship to everyone that is obviously going to eat into profit margins and you know, the folks that have been around for a really long time are going to resist that. So I think that the pressure has to come from a different place. That's part of what Priority sees as its role in this ecosystem is pushing the hard questions and, you know, trying to get past profit margins as the core goal. It's, you know, ridiculous that we even have to have that conversation. But it's also part of why, like, when I joined the team in 2017 and, you know, was offered the job as digital director, part of my negotiation was I want to build an in-house team because I don't want to have to worry about, you know, working with a set of consultants that's ultimately going to be trying to, you know, pay the bills. I want to hire people that are purely focused on trying new things, innovating, and that has to be their number one focus. You know, I don't want to get on here and say, like, consultants are in it for the right reasons, right? So many Democratic consultants want to win these elections, but they also have to pay bills. And when you are forced to make decisions, between paying bills and, you know, winning elections, that's naturally going to create a tension that we just can't ignore. But anyway, all of that to say, you know, I think it is extremely easy to look at the reach numbers that YouTube affords, where any given week, 80, 90 percent of voters are reachable on YouTube, and to say, oh, that's just an extension of TV, just like TV is a one-size-fits-all reach broadcast. We literally use the word broadcast to describe TV. If you're treating YouTube like a broadcast channel, though, you're just missing the point, right? And I have a lot of good friends that, you know, work on the Google sales team, love them to death, but their sales pitch is YouTube is TV. I just fundamentally disagree with that, right? Like, if you are treating it like a broadcast channel, you are fully missing the point. The YouTube is TV thing, and I'm going to get to your study in a minute, but you've got me down a rabbit hole. And I knew that would happen in this conversation, because this is a, a particularly nerdy interest for me. I mean, YouTube is TV, and this is a thing I've done the round since 2024, meeting with various politicians, and I've tried to explain to them, and I use YouTube is TV for the purpose of understanding that for people to, like, actually, especially these politicians, understand that young voters watch YouTube on their TV, right? Yeah, literally as a device. So they come home, they turn it on, and what's different is they're not looking at TV Guide or the literal TV Guide that shows up in your Xfinity or cable. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, I think that's the thing, is that the algorithm is showing them things based on, you know, a lot of data mining and the things they subscribe to. But where the point you're making is where the analogy fails is that it is not consumed in the same way, and sort of, like, you can't just put a TV show on YouTube, which is why YouTube does not invest in scripted television. Like, there's like a lingua franca of it, and if the ads, if you're running TV ads on YouTube, even if it's being, being watched on a literal television, that's not what people are expecting, so they are more likely to dismiss it. Is that right? Yeah, just, I think it's an attention span problem, right? And it's, it's a function of, you know, if someone is sitting to, and you're correct that a majority of people when they're using YouTube are literally using, watching it on a smart TV, and that is different than YouTube TV, which is like a subscription service that people pay for. No, it's literally YouTube.com being streamed on a television device. But like, how many of those people are also holding their smartphone and playing games? Like, I fit into that category. Like, it is extremely tough to get me to pay attention to one screen, and I know I'm not alone in that situation. So, so you both have an attention span challenge, and then you also have a challenge/opportunity that people are using YouTube in very different ways. It's, it's a battleground, right? It's people listening to podcasts. It is people playing games. It's people watching clips that their friends send them. Like, it is people listening to music. It's just, it's so many different things that if we're going to try to squeeze it into one video, it's going to be a challenge. Yeah, that's exactly where we want to go. Yeah. To really understand, like, you know, I'm, I'm pretty tired of media consumption research looking like, let's slap a question to the end of a poll and ask how many people are watching YouTube. I need to know much, many, many more details than, than that to really understand how to, how to craft a media strategy. So that is the work that Priorities has been investing in since 2024, actually way before 2020. We were doing this in the middle of, of 2022. And, and that's, you know, the work that we're excited to chat about. Yeah. So you've, like I said, you've been studying how people actually get information in this crazy, insane world we live in and not just how people like you and I get information because we kind of get information the same way people have always got information. Like we're going to sources to get it. We're following politics closely, but you know, as we've talked about sort of endlessly on this podcast and elsewhere since 2024 is the swing voter is not necessarily a well-informed centrist white man from Wisconsin. It is someone who doesn't pay that much attention to politics and is sort of kind of, you know, surfing the news at best. And we're, we're very, we did, we're not very good at reaching those people or understanding those people. So you've been looking at them. So before we get into like what you actually found, can you walk us through the process by which you try to understand the media habits of these less politically engaged individuals? Yeah, absolutely. But just to underscore what you just said in our post 2024 research, we actually found that beyond age, demographic, geographic indicators, that your consumption of YouTube was more predictive of your vote choice and your vote swing from 20 to 24 than anything else. So people, meaning that you were more likely to vote for Trump, the more YouTube you watch. Yeah, exactly. So basically the, the crosstab was that men, men who are watching more than three hours of YouTube had some of the highest swing of any other crosstab that we were looking at. And that, it also applies to people who are listening to podcasts. It also applies to women. It's, it's just, it's pretty consistent that your internet consumption patterns are very predictive of how much you swung from a persuasion standpoint. So our, our team, you know, took that information and said, okay, like we gotta be media consultants for the 21st century. Cause if no one else is going to do it, like, let's let us step up and play that role. And so we basically have this project that our team has been working on that really takes a look at, we have an always on survey operation where we it's actually really cool. We, in a, in a normal kind of survey environment, we pay people to send us a screenshot of their screen time apps. I'm sure you guys have like logged in to see like how much time you spend on Twitter every single day. But we're actually paying people to send us a screenshot of that and then validating it against what they self report to, to where they spend time. And then using that as an understanding of what are, what new apps are popping that should be on our radar. How much are, is YouTube consumption changing over the summer? How, how much are people, you know, changing over the summer? Is YouTube consumption changing over the summer? How much are people changing their subscriptions between Hulu and Peacock, depending on, you know, what, what reality TV show is on, which is very common. And the thing that I think our team was highly surprised to see how much people change up their subscriptions, which is very good information. So basically part one is a, is an always on survey operation to just get a baseline of like, where are people spending time? We then do kind of quarterly, sometimes monthly deep dives on specific topics that our team wants to dig into. So last summer, we did a deep dive on audio consumption to really understand specifically how are people consuming music, podcasts, et cetera, what platform what are some patterns that, that we can, you know, take into account from a media planning perspective. And then we also acquire, you know, third-party data that often is very kind of observational and behavioral in nature so that we can actually observe what people are doing. And, and the search data that Peter Hamby wrote about, um, over the weekend is, is that third category where we have, we, um, paid to, um, acquire people's search data. And then we did a really long-term kind of study to kind of better understand what patterns we could, we could pick up there. Positive America is brought to you by Hiya. Back to school season is here again, and we want to give your kids their best shot to be prepared for the new academic year ahead. That includes. their health and wellness. That's exactly why Hiya exists to give parents a real solution in a market flooded with kids' vitamins that prioritize candy-like appeal over actual nutrition. 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guarantee so you can try your first box risk-free go to wild alaskan.com slash cricket for 35 off your first order of premium wild caught seafood that's wild alaskan.com slash cricket for 35 off your first order thanks to wild alaskan company for sponsoring this episode you speak just a little more detail about the search data like what what you were looking for um how many people it was what you know and then we can get to what you found yeah so anyone that's ever like talked to me in my life knows that i am like particularly obsessed with search behavior as like a proxy for understanding kind of where voters are at i think it's like the single most interesting thing that you can do to observe where someone's head is at um it is literally like knocking on someone's door and then being able to say to you hey i'm really interested in immigration you can then have a conversation with them about immigration they're like quite literally telling you what they're interested in and so for a long time i've just been really interested in how can we you know do something that's really interesting for them and then you can do um more to understand people's search behavior how can we use it how can we learn from it etc so we work with a third-party data provider to um acquire and pay for a set of people who basically opted in to share their behavioral data um with with this data provider so basically like you could go to your youtube account right now and say download my history you could do the same thing on twitter i actually highly recommend it it's like very entertaining you like download your history upload it to claude tell it to give you some analysis it is like better than therapy in a lot of ways um but or at least maybe claude will tell you to go to therapy after reading it yes yeah potentially i'll call it complimentary to therapy um but anyway so we did that um with a provider that was able to send us search behavior across you know the major kind of traditional search engines google being the most predominant one but also you know gemini chat gbt and then some of the major social media engines youtube instagram tick tock facebook etc um and so our team it was about six million searches and then we were able to send them to a lot of people who were able to send us search behavior across you know the major kind of traditional search engines google being the most predominant one but also you know gemini chat gbt and then some of the major social media engines youtube instagram tick tock facebook etc um and so our team it was about six million searches it was about six million searches um we did it across two different time um we did it across two different time um we did it across two different time periods the first was like the last periods the first was like the last periods the first was like the last couple months of 2024 and then the couple months of 2024 and then the couple months of 2024 and then the second time period was like a chunk of second time period was like a chunk of second time period was like a chunk of 2025 we wanted to be able to kind of 2025 we wanted to be able to kind of 2025 we wanted to be able to kind of look at it in two chunks um our team look at it in two chunks um our team look at it in two chunks um our team spent a couple of weeks like really spent a couple of weeks like really spent a couple of weeks like really really analyzing the data it was like a really analyzing the data it was like a really analyzing the data it was like a huge you know undertaking to to take a huge you know undertaking to to take a huge you know undertaking to to take a look at at the trends um we definitely look at at the trends um we definitely look at at the trends um we definitely would not have been able to do this would not have been able to do this would not have been able to do this project if our team wasn't you know project if our team wasn't you know project if our team wasn't you know fully enabling ai to do a lot of the fully enabling ai to do a lot of the fully enabling ai to do a lot of the heavy lifting in the work we are a very heavy lifting in the work we are a very heavy lifting in the work we are a very let's lean into ai organization at let's lean into ai organization at let's lean into ai organization at priorities um and we walked away with priorities um and we walked away with you know unsurprisingly a huge number of you know unsurprisingly a huge number of you know unsurprisingly a huge number of insights that our team is currently insights that our team is currently insights that our team is currently using to both run programs that we're using to both run programs that we're using to both run programs that we're running here in 26 but also looking running here in 26 but also looking running here in 26 but also looking ahead to to 2028 um so yeah happy to ahead to to 2028 um so yeah happy to ahead to to 2028 um so yeah happy to share more about kind of what we share more about kind of what we share more about kind of what we learned before we get to the actual learned before we get to the actual learned before we get to the actual findings but the search findings but the search findings but the search the context of search in this day and age the context of search in this day and age the context of search in this day and age is very interesting because for is very interesting because for is very interesting because for most of the last most of the last most of the last 20 years search meant one thing and one 20 years search meant one thing and one 20 years search meant one thing and one thing only thing only thing only it meant the people that the people at it meant the people that the people at it meant the people that the people at bing would would not yes there's a bing would would not yes there's a bing would would not yes there's a small handful of bing people out there small handful of bing people out there small handful of bing people out there who use it uh and you know we had who use it uh and you know we had who use it uh and you know we had netscape it's we had some things earlier netscape it's we had some things earlier netscape it's we had some things earlier and there was actually a highly highly and there was actually a highly highly and there was actually a highly highly effective fundraising platform on the effective fundraising platform on the effective fundraising platform on the presidential campaigns that i worked on presidential campaigns that i worked on presidential campaigns that i worked on yes wow well there you go i am learning yes wow well there you go i am learning yes wow well there you go i am learning something brand new today um but it meant something brand new today um but it meant something brand new today um but it meant it meant via google or bing it meant via google or bing it meant via google or bing searching the web that's something very searching the web that's something very very different now as particularly as the social media and i'm gonna get to ai later on this conversation but um as the social media platforms become more places where people sort of live particularly tiktok and instagram like how are you thinking about like how does that how many like are i assume people are searching for the same thing that people used to search um google for a few years ago are now searching on instagram or tiktok or elsewhere or are there differences in those search like what did you find yeah i think like google is still king like let's let's just be really clear google is still huge market share predominant market share and google makes the majority of their money off of search not youtube like let's just name that um they were going to do everything they can to to not lose that that spot in the market um but you know as people are spending more and more time online i like to think about it and this comes into play a lot when you're putting together a media plan as people spend more time online they're just doing more right like you are both using instagram and tiktok and search every day instead of picking between them and so i think what we are starting to see is that the behaviors between these different search engines are different um which is really helpful learning right like people are going to to google to to really fact check and and get basic information but then they're going to chat gbt to really like put together robust plans and really go back and forth um whereas you know instagram tick tock it can become a little bit more entertaining in nature um so i i like to think about it less of a binary choice that people are making between these different platforms obviously there there are trends in in that direction but um it's more about how are people using these different platforms for different different reasons um the thing i will say that i think is a really important piece of the learning here is like i said google is still top of the list i think our party is very interested in understanding people's you know relationships to 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 um 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 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 on chatbots what do you when you say do more because you can you can manipulate you can manipulate and run ads and and produce video content that appears when someone searches for a topic that you want to appear on right 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 for such a long time it's a lot easier to manipulate what comes up um when someone searches for something on youtube um in a way that i think the democratic party needs to be spending a lot more time producing video um than they do you know manipulating chatbot results it's not it's not a choice it's not it's a false choice but i think we got to spend more time with i am of a certain generation because i'm old where youtube is not the same to me like i didn't grow up using youtube obviously i don't really grow 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 it is just this gigantic thing that dominates people's lives i don't think people really get that but let's let's get to let's get to what you found about well when you were analyzing this data what are sort of what are the major insights you got yeah so i think the the number one headline is that people are not searching for anything political of the six million searches that that we acquired less than a hundred thousand were political or even politically adjacent the reality is and i think the thing that you know keeps the team at priorities usa up at night but also motivates our work is that people just aren't thinking about politics um and we have to really if we don't understand that going into crafting a campaign we're really going to miss miss the mark on on how do we actually then reach someone um so you know i think in doing our analysis we found a lot of really awesome patterns around when people do search for politics it's it's eye-opening for our team around how 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 all 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 um but you know more importantly it's it's opening our eyes i think to the the thing that i'm i'm the most you know excited about and nerding out about is this category of what we're calling politically adjacent categories that are um a really awesome entry point for us to be having relevant um conversations with people when they aren't thinking about politics but 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 spent a lot of time thinking about politics and i think it's kind of interesting because i think 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. Target 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 interrupt your day. And we got to get closer to the corporate model. We 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. And I got to get started. I got to get paid by Nike at some point. That's right. No, no, 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? Like you have a kid, 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. You're going to get advertised in a million different ways. You're going to get ads 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 a writer from travel firms, 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. It's based on your geography and your voter file score. I think 90 plus percent of democratic advertising investments 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. And 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, you can add to, to make sure that that, you know, becomes, becomes relevant to the, 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, like, especially if you back in the days when you're advertising on Facebook, where you would be, you know, targeting people of a certain demographic group or certain age group that you would be reaching, but it's not tied to any specific knowledge about what those people care about. Correct. Yeah. I would say like age and, and demographic come into play, um, 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, um, and gender tracks. We had demographic tracks, um, layered on top of kind of our broadcast track, but in a small congressional race, like, I think that's a lot more rare, um, than, than you might expect. And I'm not out here saying that age demo geographic targeting isn't important. It's, it's highly critical. Um, I think we're just saying that the next step beyond that of, of really trying to understand how to reach someone based on things that we're not necessarily observing offline, but instead online, um, we should be pushing ourselves to, to think in that category, um, because it's just going to make, it's going to make us better advertisers. Is cost prohibitive here, or is that a problem? Is it much more, obviously much more expensive to market to someone based on, you know, specific targeted, not, you know, 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, you know, like I, I think Facebook, their CPO, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they get a lot lower when you kind of give them free will to, 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, to target folks. Um, than if you were to upload a file and say, I only want to target these hundred thousand people. So that does impact the CPM, but in a, in a helpful way. Um, we have a lot of questions and we're doing a lot of research at priorities around, um, just how do you kind of, kind of validate that, that data that, that you get on Facebook. Like Facebook, YouTube, but, um, no, I would say cost. If someone's bringing up costs as an excuse not to do a campaign like this, they're, they're probably not fully grasping what, what we're talking about. Obviously, I think what I am describing here does require, um, 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. Um, but 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. Um, I think though, the, 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, um, you know, how they're going to, you know, how they're going to vote. and designed to make getting care feel easy. Simple online access to personalized, affordable care for ED and more. Visit hymns.com slash crooked. That's H-I-M-S dot com slash crooked. hymns.com slash crooked. Not available in all 50 states. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions, and important safety information. Sildenafil is the generic version of Viagra. Viagra is a registered trademark of Vietris Specialty LLC. Hymns is not affiliated with or endorsed by Vietris. Keep it listeners. Louis Fortel 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. Oh, yeah, the choo-choo in the opening credits? Yeah, it was really cute. Every week, Nina and I will be- 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 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, 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. Phone, wallet, house keys, check. But this meeting's across town. There's not enough time to walk there. Well, what is a ride going to cost me? That ride might be more expensive than a week's worth of coffees. Oh, wait. Let me check Lyft, too, real quick before I book. That's less than I thought. I guess those savings can go towards getting that pastry with it. So whether you need to get to uptown or way downtown, taking a few seconds to check Lyft when you book your next ride could save you money. Save the money. Check Lyft. The grand mystery, right, is like, I know where you get your information or you know where someone like me gets my information. How, but all these people who pay no attention to politics, like, who don't actively pay attention to politics are forming political opinions, right? Or that like, or even if they're very broad, they have a general sense of how they feel about political figures, political issues. Things that happen in the news. You know, what are you, what did you learn about where those people are actually, like, where is that information coming from? How are they running into it in this crazy media ecosystem? For sure. So, you know, 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, 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, that we're going to put together, um, to reach them. And, you know, I think a lot of democratic investment, um, over the last couple of years has, has focused on how do we make the news sexier, easier to reach, easier to access. Um, there's nothing wrong with that endeavor. Um, but I think it's, 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. I've never actually heard adequate, you know, ideas of, 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, um, those are three categories that are reaching a really large set of voters who are both swingy and, 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? Like it's about really using, you know, um, 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, it is a category that I think is like highly interesting. And, and super relevant to what we're talking about. What would it look like for us to create a track, um, of always on communication that targets people based on the fact that their 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. We're trying to advertise in moments that are highly relevant. Um, back to school, great opportunity to, you know, talk to parents about, about how Trump's policies work. I think that's, I think that's a really important part of the conversation that we're having. I think our goal here is, is to be relevant and not necessarily always on. When people are, whether they are like, they're interested in true crime or gaming or fitness or whatever else, like where are those voters hanging out? Right. It's like, we're not in a world where they're going to true crime.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, you know, like just, I want to try to get a little bit of a sense of what's going on. it's just out there destroying the world and we can't intervene. There's certain. Certainly interventions that you can you can do that are not, you know, explicitly renting attention was that I liked my like nerdy way to talk about advertising is you're 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, you know, 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. And, 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 an 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. What 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 at Run for Something, Cox 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. Can 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, you know, understand what's showing up in a chatbot? And then B, how do you actually, you know, 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 parties. And I think it does require a lot of urgency and a shift in conversation across our parties. Now is the time to like double, triple, quadruple down on that effort for 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 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 AEO. I think the work that that priorities is doing, though, in the kind of chatbot space beyond just, you know, understanding how you might manipulate that result is really understanding when and why are people turning to AEO. 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? And 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, you know, scrolling TikTok and on YouTube and seeing content in my feed that feels a little like, is this real? Is this not? Like, I am personally opening up ChatGPT, Claude, and saying, hey, can you fact check this for me? There'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 yeah. Yes, that's where we are. Yeah. Pod Save America is brought to you by Helix. I love my Helix mattress. I have a Dawn Lux. 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It's so nice knowing that, like, at the end of the day, you know, right before bed, you get into super comfortable Helix mattress, throw in a streaming sheet, and you're good to go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm watching Furious. There you go. It's awesome. It's a great crime drama. You know, this is not an ad for that, but you should check that out, too. Hey, everybody, get a Helix mattress, get comfortable. Watch Furious on Disney+, you know? But I just think it's a great mattress, and you should get one. Helixsleep.com/cricket for 27% off site-wide. This offer is exclusive to Pod Save America listeners. That's Helixsleep.com/cricket for 27% off site-wide. Helixsleep.com/cricket. I'm going to take this one. 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. It'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 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. As you say, not always on, like we're going to run ads for the rest of time, but in 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. And I liked 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 a very powerful entity that was a sort of a conduit for MAGA adjacent messaging. We needed to put some 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 you're basically recommending that we are lighting money on fire. I was never fully convinced of that, but I also was incapable 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 are 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. Fair enough. No, I just, I think that, I really appreciate the folks in the academic space for pushing us to be rigorous. But 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 dollars a year to think they're a really cool brand. They run ads that, 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. We don't have that. We do not have proxies that we get to use to understand whether someone is mind is being changed, right? Like that's why surveys are, you know, we invest so much in surveys because it's the, 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, face in my career. Um, but the reality is, you know, the Republicans are investing close to a billion dollars, um, over the last decade in infrastructure and communication. And I think it is quite obvious that it has paid off, right? You know, the example I like to give is Trump, um, after the, the shooting, you know, within an hour, he had people on the internet talking about the ballroom and how the shooting necessitated that the need to, to build a ballroom. Um, 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. Um, meanwhile, you know, Democrats sit around and our amplification is like crossing your fingers and toe, hoping for a from Barack Obama. Like, if you want to look at that and say that our situation is, is worse, is better. I just don't buy that. Um, I think that's at the end of the day, like art and science have to have to come into play and, and we have to be able to use our judgment and be able to say that, you know, always on communication. Um, it, it, it has to matter, right? Like we can see it playing out in front of our eyes. Um, but I think a critical reason that we are doing things differently. And, and I, I empathize with the criticism of, um, you know, a lot of people and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and just think, well, there's no way in how we can afford that. You can't afford to like be at the impression levels now that we would want to be at in the fall of, of 2028. But that's why the priorities approach of really using behavioral targeting as a entry point to have these conversations is, 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 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. It doesn't mean we're going to be on all the time. In fact, we're, 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 JD Vance. Let's play it. Hi, I'm JD Vance. As vice president, I cast the 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. Don't worry. That's just immaterial minutia. Anyway, get back to work. You're almost late for your second job. And president Trump and I have to get back to redecorating. Um, 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? That's quite literally the reality but you know, I think, um, this ad is about, um, 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. Um, and the fact that people are just naturally going to tune out of, 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, it's really, you know, the, the media responds really well. And I think it's, it's really, you know, it's, it's really, well to, Hey, look at this one ad and cover it and get, get some media attention on it. The 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. Um, this ad is, 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. Um, people want humor. They want things, they want the Paul, they want politics to be a little less, a little bit less serious. And so that was our attempt to kind of play around with that, those insights. So, you know, the typical way we have been measuring the efficacy of ads and messaging and over the last decade here is persuasion effects, right? How much does that based on a, we're testing the ad, um, 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, you know, we're like an ad can be three times, as effective as another ad. And it's because it's moving approval three times that one, three points at one point. Yeah. What is your metric metric of success here? Is it completion rate? Is, are you, 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 going to tell you your ad is working. You have to take a really wide lens and like take it all in. Um, you know, we didn't do creative testing in 2016. I think in the aftermath, um, 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 eyeopening thing. Um, 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. And 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, let's compare offline and online metrics against, against each other, um, to really understand, you know, how, how they're going to both be complimentary and maybe disagree with each other. Not to, to, to shout out the, the team at, um, on the Newsome campaign. Um, but they did this really well during, during the prop 50 campaign. I think when their whole theory was, we're going to test our ads. We are going to see what works in a kind of lab environment. And 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, which ad move. I just give them a lot of props for kind of taking that, that theory it's in, in strong alignment with kind of the priorities theory of the case. And it obviously had a, a really awesome impact in, in that race. Um, but yeah, I think part of our, our theory, and this is, um, 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, um, beyond just, you know, how something tests in a, in a creative test, and how something polls, um, how is an issue being talked about on a podcast? How is it being talked about in a comment section, in a search at the doors. There'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 Playset. Boots that are too big. Promises he can't keep. This is not going to be a full-on conflict. He 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 Playset. I love it. I love Little Marco. Similar vibe. They all have a South Parkian, I guess. Another 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. So 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. You know, I heard you say that 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, which is a far cry from, which is probably causing data nerds within the party to lose their mind that we would look at YouTube comments. But one thing you said to Peter Hamby was that the YouTube comments about. J.D. Vance 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 Priorities 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. It 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. But 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, you know, 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 J.D. Vance were often, you know, quite negative, definitely poking fun at him. People are not afraid to poke fun at J.D. Vance. Marco Rubio's comments were a lot more positive. There's just not a lot of criticism happening organically about him online. And it's actually why in rolling 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 not going to be there. B, he's not going to be there. C, he's not going to be there. D, he's not going to be there. E, he's not going to be there. E, 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. And 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, you know, this is even before we even talked about memes. That's what happened to John Kerry with the windsurfing and the, you know, I was for it before, he was against it. He was meme-ified. He lost. Al Gore, even before that, a man who was chosen by Bill Clinton to be on the ticket because he was thought to be the most eloquent, he was chosen by Bill Clinton to be on the ticket and he was the most ethical and moral person in the Senate. Then by the end was turned into a giant liar who claimed that he invented the internet and was so boring. He got meme-ified, right? And so like Vance seems, 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 do focus groups, like you would want to say they're bad on affordability, but that's not like a, it's not a culturally relevant message. A culturally relevant message is 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 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. He's grown out of it because he's spent the last couple of years catering to the Trump administration. So 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 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. The 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, he's a chicken hawk. 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 priorities. Before I let you go, like as we are sitting here today, there's somewhere between a dozen and 400 people who are planning to run for president very soon. In 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, you know, 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, you know, we've made some mistakes that 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 like digital has to be at the table. Like if you are not bringing a digital person- Should digital be the table? Yes. 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? 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, how should it change my strategy? And I think my singular answer to that question is more is more and more video. You are never going to regret making more video for today, the way today's internet operates. I think Kyle Tharp put this study out a couple of weeks or last week around just how much Cory Booker is just churning out video and constantly putting things out. And it's like earning him a ton of, 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, 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 of 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 doing. And I think that's a really important point. And I think that's how people are responding to our content. Daniel 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 in the next. Thank you so much. Thank you. Talk soon. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Faris Safari with Rhi Chirlan, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Singel. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Keep It listeners, Lewis Fertel here. Dr. There, I said it. Here's the big news. The Dr. Sex in the City wasn't really a show about finding love, it was a humiliation ritual on bad friendships. Yeah, it's really cute. 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