A map of 5000+ midterm ads
admap.org
admap.org
I'm not sure what this person's agenda is, and why they're appearing for an advert in Ohio when their transition that they regret happened in GODDAMNED TEXAS and didn't transition AS A CHILD.
https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/10/06/woman-accusing-she...
It absolutely 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".
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000011228488/el...
Summary if you don't want to click: Vivek Ramaswamy ran an ad against his opponent, Amy Acton, which has Amy's mom telling people not to vote for her because she's a liar, and has "lied her whole life".
From wikipedia:
> Acton has said that after her parents divorced and while she lived with her mother, Donna Arthur, she experienced neglect, abuse, and periods of homelessness, including spending one winter living in a tent on the north side of Youngstown.[7][8][9] Her mother remarried Cledith Arthur, who had already been prosecuted for raping his daughter; according to Acton and her younger brother, Phil Stearns, Arthur sexually abused her.[10][11] Arthur was charged with raping her when she was 12, but charges against him stalled after he fled the state and moved to Pennsylvania, despite several warrants being issued for his arrest over the next three years;[12][13][14][15] Acton's mother was later convicted of felony theft by deception.[9]
> After Acton's mother lost custody of her
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.
In some states, sure. In many, you simply fill out a form and drop it in your mailbox. Takes approximately ten minutes, which you can do on the toilet if pressed for time. No driving, no waiting, no money spent.
If your state doesn't allow this, it's time to vote in new representation and fix that.
compared to the other way of creating political change, it's a vacation.
The chance of one vote being the difference between a tie and a win for a candidate has been approximately zero. And in the extremely rare times when there has been such a one vote difference, there have been re-counts that conclude with a margin that is larger than one vote [0][1].
Mathematically/statistically this makes intuitive sense. One might ask: what's the chance that a vote ends in a tie when there are 10, 100, 100,000... 10 million voters? As the voting pool increases, the chance decreases.
The most common objection is along the lines of, "if everyone decided not to vote because their vote didn't matter, then no one would vote!" Yep, that's correct... but that doesn't describe reality: clearly people vote a lot.
Voting because one enjoys it, gets satisfaction of some sort from it, feels that they are doing their "civic duty" and discharging a responsibility, etc... that's fine. But don't vote because you think you're gonna change the outcome.
[0]https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w8590/w8590... "THE EMPIRICAL FREQUENCY OF A PIVOTAL VOTE"
[1]https://archive.ph/ThMlo NYT: "Why Vote?"
This is like asking, "if pigs could fly, what happens?" -> all sorts of things... but pigs can't fly.
"if nobody votes..." is a hypothetical that has never been true because people DO vote. I don't know of a good reason to believe they'll stop voting. Obviously the futility of voting to change the election outcome isn't stopping them so far.
I don’t understand that. The fewer people vote, the more impact your vote has, so the more sense it makes to vote (up to a limit, of course. If too few people vote, revolution gray be around the corner)
Try to do an expected value analysis of your vote. Say the difference between your candidate winning or losing is worth 1000 USD. Multiply that by the odds that your vote will cause them to win. Take that very small number and see if you'd drive 2 minutes for that or just calculate if the lead used up on the pencil is worth that.
https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/
https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...
$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.
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.
As for the anonymity, no real reason behind it, just thought it would be a really nice personal project.
Also the republican ones where viciously disgusting in the way they were attacking. Tons of nearly childish name calling and mudslinging.