I knew American politics were wild, but holy hell man, some of these videos are just exploitative - e.g., https://youtu.be/mbNiWWKqt0s

I'm not sure what this person's agenda is - they are obviously still presenting as a woman, so why are they denouncing the healthcare system? Why haven't they detransitioned if it was wrong?

It reeks of despair when the SLF PAC is paying for videos that are basically "Democrats are putting chemicals in the water that makes the frogs gay".

"Jesus a radical feminist?" - MAGA Inc.

Voting is a chore. You have to set aside a block of time, drive to a polling station, stand in line, and vote. Gas is expensive. Time is expensive. Groups of people who are agitated gathering in the same place is risky. The return on that investment of time, at a personal level, is practically nonexistent. From an individual cost-benefit perspective, voting does not make much rational sense.

So you have to appeal to something beyond rationality. Emotion. You need someone to be so swayed by what you say that they forget to think critically and simply go out and vote.

Committees have approved these ads. They understand that the system is not driven purely by rationality. And they have engineered these messages to influence people into making irrational choices voluntarily.

• shafyy

  today at 1:38 PM

  Voting makes absolute rational sense, what are you talking about. It's just that it makes sense in aggregate, but for that to make sense everybody must do their part.

That's nice. It would be awesome to have a museum website like this for each primary and mid-term election in the past. Make history and political study much more interesting.

• Eden09

  today at 1:44 PM

  Thank you! That was my initial plan: an archive of past elections. I was especially interested in more local and obscure campaigns for judges, sheriffs, etc. I'll probably add more years and more elections down the line.

Flock Hunt Ad — I wonder if they made that with Opus 5.5?

$90,000 to $105k on Google - Ad revenue is a nice touch.

Interesting: 9.7 million YouTube views are worth approx $12,125 to $29,100 USD in standard long-form ad revenue; you can make some spare cash whilst you run for office as well, pay the bills.

Really great project! Could you share a bit more on how you gathered the data?

Out of curiosity, what drove the decision to stay anonymous? A project like this feels like a massive street-cred builder in the data viz community.

• Eden09

  today at 1:38 PM

  Thank you very much! Google publishes a bundle of its political ad records (https://adstransparency.google.com/), but without video links. So I had a script browse each advertiser's public page in Google's Ads Transparency Center and pick up the YouTube video behind each ad.

  As for the anonymity, no real reason behind it, just thought it would be a really nice personal project, especially for a European fascinated with American political culture.

This is a really cool idea (and looks nice)! Are the ranges percentages of the total? I am finding it slightly annoying that changing the tab sends me to a new page with another hit to my browser hist

• Eden09

  today at 12:56 PM

  Thanks a lot! The ranges are the number of videos per race, not percentages.

As someone who has managed to stay away from these ads, boy is it disappointing sometimes how much they play to the most simple of human needs and emotions like "I will make things more affordable" and "the other guy is a sell out and corrupt politician". This coming from even the politicians that I support. I guess it's what's effective when needing to gain mass-appeal for an election.

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Thought this was just going to be Ohio /s