Top Democratic group unveils a $30M digital ad blitz

A leading Democratic super PAC is planning to pump $30 million into digital ad campaigns in battleground states ahead of the midterms.
The new advertising push from Priorities USA is focused on seven states with Senate and gubernatorial campaigns that are crucial to the party this fall: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and New Hampshire.

Priorities’ spending plans for the 2022 cycle come on top of the $20 million that group organizers have announced to fight voter suppression efforts, half of which went to legal challenges and half to voter education. Guy Cecil, chair of Priorities USA, said that a portion of the new investment will also go toward helping voters navigate new election laws in several states and also toward keeping intact the political coalition that helped President Joe Biden get elected in 2020.

“Over the last three months, we have been running some programs that specifically look at how we improve Biden's favorability rating among those voters,” Cecil said in an interview. “A lot of these people just want to disengage with politics. They’re tired of it. It can’t be a typical ad where the primary focus is the candidate. It is about helping them understand how much difference their vote actually made and pointing out that it could get a lot worse.”

“We have to raise the stakes of the election, talk about what role they play in that election, and we have to give them the tools to vote,” Cecil added.
Priorities got its start as the main super PAC for former President Barack Obama in 2012 and for Hillary Clinton in 2016, when it watched Democrats get outspent 20-to-1 on digital advertising. It set out to close that gap, and has increasingly prioritized digital ad spending to mobilize and persuade potential voters. Priorities did not run television ads during the last midterms, in which it spent $50 million, and does not have plans to do so this time, either.