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The Trump team had a huge financial disadvantage. It made up for it with a strategic innovation that allowed it to narrow the focus of its ad dollars.
Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent who covered the 2024 presidential campaign.
Dec. 5, 2024, 10:29 a.m. ET
Donald J. Trump’s super PAC called them the streaming persuadables.
It was shorthand for some of the most important voters of the 2024 election — the sliver of truly undecided voters who they believed skewed young and diverse, and disproportionately consumed content on streaming services like Max, Tubi and Roku.
Both broadcast and cable television allow campaigns to advertise almost exclusively by where voters live or what programs they are watching. But many of the ascendant streaming services and smart TVs allow advertisers to be far more precise — down to picking specific individuals to serve ads to.
How the leading Trump super PAC and his campaign targeted these streamers provided a critical yet unseen edge in Mr. Trump’s sweeping victory last month. It helped the Trump team make up for Kamala Harris’s mammoth financial advantage and narrow its dollars and focus on the roughly 14 percent of battleground-state voters it had identified as swayable.
The Harris side, awash in cash, mostly ran streaming television ads the old-fashioned way — targeting by geography.
“In the seven states, we were talking to 6.3 million people — they were talking to 44.7 million,” explained David Lee, a top pollster for the super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc. “There’s roughly 38 million people that they’re hitting who’ve already made up their mind. So I don’t care how much more money you have than us to spend, you’re wasting 85 percent of your money.”
Practically every presidential election brings about a technological leap or innovation in how campaigns target key voters.
