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POLITICO: House Dems tout digital efforts
The House Democrats’ independent campaign arm has spent $3.25 million on digital advertising during the 2014 midterms, a 450-percent increase from last cycle, targeting the most persuadable voters with an online onslaught.
That campaign, spelled out in an internal memo from the DCCC’s IE, will escalate Monday when it “takes over” the homepages of major news outlets in markets with close contests: New Hampshire, Southern California and South Florida.
Democrats are also spending thousands of dollars to beat out their Republican rivals on Google search ads, showing up an average of 90 percent of the time in the first position when searching for the GOP candidate’s name.
While the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has gained notoriety this year for sending out a torrent of sky-is-falling fundraising emails, its independent expenditures have been making its digital pleas to tens of thousands of potential voters in 28 of the nation’s tightest House races. Republicans are favored to pick up seats this year, but Democrats hope to mitigate their losses and put the House back in play in subsequent elections.
The Democratic’ digital strategy hits between 22,000 and 80,000 of the most persuadable voters in each of the targeted districts, using a mix of demographic data and other modeling techniques that Dems say mirror what President Barack Obama’s campaign did two years ago to great effect in several key swing states.
“We answered the question of whether the Obama 2012 digital ad buy targeting can be replicated at the smaller scale of a congressional campaign,” the Democrats’ IE said in the memo, which also claimed to have “likely executed the largest digital spend targeted to specific congressional races from either party in history.”
According to the memo, the House Democrats ran over 1,000 pieces of creative digital ads and notched at least 15 video impressions per week for each targeted voter.
Digital spending represented 23 percent of the DCCC’s IE media buy for Pete Aguilar in his run for an open House seat in California’s San Bernardino County. Also in California, the IE dedicated 19 percent of its media buy to digital for Rep. Julia Brownley and 11 percent to Rep. Scott Peters. In Florida, it put 10 percent of its spending into an entirely Spanish-language digital campaign for Rep. Joe Garcia.
By booking its digital inventory early, the IE said it was able to pay as much as 30 percent lower rates for reservations to online sites at key moments during the campaign, including takeovers scheduled for Monday on the home sites for WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H., the Ventura County Star in California, U-T San Diego and the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale Univision affiliate.
Democrats also targeted their GOP rivals on Google by showing up 99 percent of the time in the first slot when searching for Republican candidate Lee Zeldin (New York-01), 96 percent of the time for Carl DeMaio (California-52) and 95 percent of the time for Rep. Michael Grimm (New York-11), they said.
House Republicans have been far from sitting still on the digital front. They’ve had their own stream of online ads and have grown their email lists for a fundraising operation that is modeled to a large degree on their Democratic counterparts.
Here’s the full list of House races the DCCC IE targeted with its digital campaign: Arkansas-02, Arizona-01, Arizona-02, California-07, California-26, California-31, California-52, Colorado-06, Connecticut-05, Florida-02, Florida-26, Georgia-12, Iowa-01, Iowa-03, Illinois-10, Illinois-12, Illinois-13, Illinois-17, Minnesota-08, Nebraska-02, New Hampshire-01, New Hampshire-02, New Jersey-03, New York-01, New York-11, New York-18, New York-24 and Virginia-10.