How to Reach the Unreachable Voter

Pod Save America

In this episode of Pod Save America, Dan Pfeiffer sits down with Danielle Butterfield, Executive Director of Priorities USA, to discuss the evolving digital landscape in Democratic

Key takeaways

• Democrats are outspending Republicans on digital but still failing due to outdated strategies that mirror TV advertising formats.
• The majority of top YouTube ads in 2024 were repurposed 30-second TV commercials—ineffective and wasteful for online audiences.

Main topics

• Digital strategy evolution post-2024 election
• Engaging less politically engaged voters via TikTok, YouTube, and AI platforms

Notable quotes

"We're still running digital programs to mirror what goes on on television."

Conclusion

To win future elections, Democrats must move beyond traditional TV-style digital ads and embrace the creative potential of

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Experience sound like never before with Novatec Wireless Earbuds. Enjoy crystal clear audio, active noise cancellation, and up to 30 hours of battery life on a single charge. Designed for work, travel, and entertainment, Novatec delivers premium performance at an affordable price. Order today and enjoy free shipping for a limited time. Staying hydrated has never been easier. Meet the GlowX Smart Bottle. your intelligent hydration companion. With smart reminders, premium stainless steel construction, and double wall insulation, your drinks stay cold for 24 hours and hot for 12 hours. Perfect for work, travel, fitness, and everyday life. Order now and enjoy an exclusive 25 % discount for a limited time. Glow-X Smart Bottle. Stay hydrated, stay smarter. Speaker 8 (1:14) Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Today, I'm joined by Danielle Butterfield, the Executive Director of Priorities USA, one of the largest and most important super PACs in democratic politics. Priorities USA does a lot of essential digital work in the party, building infrastructure, investing in research and data, and running ads to reach the voters campaigns often struggle to reach. They're in the midst of a massive study about how less engaged voters are getting their information on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and even AI chatbots, the platforms that will decide the 2028 election, whether we like it or not. Priorities has already started a $30 million campaign to define the 2028 Republicans like J.D. 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 since 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 Crooked 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. Danielle Butterfield, welcome to Pod Save America. Speaker 1 (2:43) Thanks for having me. Speaker 8 (2:44) All right. I'm so excited to talk to you. Thanks for doing this. Priorities has been working on a whole bunch of things that are really interesting to me. 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 of things first. Speaker 8 (3:11) For people who've been around politics as long as I have, they remember Priorities USA as sort of the Democratic super PAC spending tens of millions of dollars to elect Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton spending money for Joe Biden. That's not what Priorities USA is now. So maybe talk a little bit about who you are and what you guys are doing so our audience understands. Speaker 1 (3:30) Yeah. So I joined the Priorities USA team back in 2017, fresh off the Hillary Clinton campaign. Speaker 1 (3:38) Priorities, you know, up until that point had been operating, like you said, as a presidential super PAC. 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 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 is. 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 to write 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 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. Speaker 8 (4:43) 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 Speaker 8 (5:06) 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 been outmaneuvered digitally. There was all the talk about all the podcasts that Trump did and how they were 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? Speaker 1 (5:45) 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, it's no surprise that the last couple of years post 2024 have been a really tough set of fundraising years for Democrats because the solutions to why we lost in 2024 really require us to dive deep and solve some big, bigger cultural. 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. And I think that's the that's the crux of the problem that I'm seeing today. Speaker 8 (6:46) Could you say a little bit more about what that means? Speaker 1 (6:48) 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 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. But I think that what we have really failed 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. And we're really failing to lean into the creativity that digital affords us when we do that. And I think put put in a much simpler way, 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. Speaker 8 (8:09) 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 would just be supposed to read it. And they're obviously incredibly smart people working in digital spaces across the party in the Harris campaign and some of these super PACs in the Biden campaign in 2020. What accounts for the fact that we're sort of like jamming this anachronistic square peg into a much more modern round hole? Speaker 1 (8:54) I mean, I think I cannot adequately answer this question without addressing the consultant-driven nature of decision-making. Let's get right into it. Speaker 8 (9:03) Yes. Right? Speaker 1 (9:04) Like, it is just, if you want to look at profit margins for a second, what I'm... What I am 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 one 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 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 to get past profit margins as the as the core goal. It's 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 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 % 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. Speaker 8 (11:11) The YouTube is TV thing. 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 issue of 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 actually, especially these politicians, understand that young voters watch YouTube. on their TV, right? 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 thing is that the algorithm is showing them things based on, you know, a lot of data mining and the things to 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 the... 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 watched on a literal television, that's not what people are expecting. So they are more likely to dismiss it. Is that right? Speaker 1 (12:25) Yeah, just I think it's an attention span problem, right? And it's a function of, you know, if someone is sitting 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 slash 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 category, we're really feeling. And this does open up a really good, you know, segue to a lot of the work that Prairie is doing. Yeah, Speaker 8 (13:28) that's exactly Speaker 1 (13:28) where we want to Speaker 8 (13:29) go. To Speaker 1 (13:29) really understand, like, you know, 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 that to really understand. understand 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 2022. And that's the work that we're excited to chat about. Speaker 8 (13:55) Yeah. So 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 policies 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 get, walk us through the process by which you. try to understand the media habits of these less politically engaged individuals. Speaker 1 (14:43) 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 Speaker 8 (15:01) that you were more likely to vote for Trump the more YouTube you watched? Speaker 1 (15:04) Exactly. So basically the cross tab was that men- men who are watching more than three hours of YouTube had some of the highest swing of any other, you know, 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 just it's pretty consistent that your Internet consumption patterns are very predictive of how much you swung from a persuasion standpoint. So our team, you know, took that information and said, OK, like. we got to be media consultants for the 21st century because 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 it's actually really cool. We actually. 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 where they spend time. And then using that as an understanding of what new apps are popping that should be on our radar. How much is YouTube consumption changing over the summer? How much are people... you know, changing their subscriptions between Hulu and Peacock, depending on, you know, 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, you know, good information. So basically part one 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. Speaker 1 (16:52) What are some patterns that we can take into account from a media planning perspective? And then we also acquire 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 the search data that Peter Hamby wrote about over the weekend is that third category where we paid to 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 pick up there. Speaker 7 (17:29) Posse of America is brought to you by Haya. 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 Haya exists, to give parents a real solution in a market flooded with kids' vitamins that prioritize candy-like appeal over actual nutrition. Some children's vitamins on the market today contain up to seven grams of sugar per serving and are stuffed with artificial additives and petroleum-based dyes. 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