The 2022 midterms, minus Georgia’s Senate race, are finally over. We survived. Well, mostly.
A few political reputations took a hit this year, along with more than a few political careers. Adios, Sean Patrick Maloney. He’s off to live in a very special place in political infamy — the one reserved for leaders who eject a hometown incumbent from a neighboring district, snub the locals, then siphon millions in committee money away from winnable seats in desperation to save their skins when it backfires. All on the way to losing their own races, the other former incumbent and the whole House. Congrats.
Some winners? Besides the candidates, people like Tom Bonier and Simon Rosenberg. They noted the enthusiasm of Democratic voters to actually vote when given the chance since the Dobbs decision, questioning the Red Wave narrative that dominated media coverage before Election Day. Partisan outfits aside, most pollsters caught at least the outlines of a race that was nationally close, but locally varied. Not so much the pundits, most of whom herded from one TV studio to another to predict Democratic doom. Perhaps try a little skepticism and humility next time? Probably too much to ask.
We won’t have complete national turnout data for another couple of months, at least, but we can already answer some of the questions I posed about the midterms back in those gauzy, innocent days of September.
The kids did turn out to vote, if not in overwhelming numbers, as did women upset by Dobbs. And while Republicans held onto many suburbanites in places like Ohio, Florida and New York, enough voted Democratic in other places to help flip the Michigan legislature, keep the U.S. House close and send the most dangerous of the election deniers home.
Nonetheless, midterm mysteries still abound. Here are a few things I’m looking forward to learning more about:
The Case of the Disappearing Republican Digital Budget
In 2016, Republican congressional candidates outspent their Democratic opponents four to one on digital ads in the last couple of months of the general election. This year, despite a late dump of money into YouTube, Republicans as a whole spent a fraction of what their Democratic counterparts did on digital, at least on the big public platforms like Google and Meta properties, and ceded Snapchat entirely to the Dems. Maybe they prefer voter-file targeting and spent big on programmatic in secret? If so, I haven’t heard about it. What gives?
The Curse of the Zombie Media Plan
At least from what I can pick up, plenty of Republican money went into good old un-targeted broadcast TV advertising instead. Considering the absolute dearth of other options available, that’s a great plan. Just kidding! It’s a great plan when many of your candidates had trouble raising grassroots money and you have support them via a PAC that doesn’t get the candidate discount from TV stations.
And it was a competitive year for TV, particularly when you consider how many battleground House districts were part of major media markets. In DC, I saw ads on local channels for a congressional race all the way out in far western Maryland, fighting for attention with other ads aimed at Loudon County, Va. As a wise steward of my IE group’s budget I, too, would like to waste more than 90 percent of my advertising dollars reaching people who can’t vote for my candidate. This year, it turns out, was a great year for a TV ad salesperson to build a new back deck.
The Secret of DSCC Field
But PACs and party committees spend money on TV. That’s what they do, right? Not the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, at least not this year. Leading up to the midterms, they spent more money on field organizing than they did on advertising, something basically never heard of.
Did they have that luxury because John Fetterman, Mark Kelly and the others had raised so damn much money? Perhaps, but it smells to me like a coherent and thought-out strategy. Note that the DSCC has already announced a $7 million investment in Georgia field in the December Warnock-Walker runoff, suggesting that at least one party organization has figured out how to kill its zombie media plans. How many will follow? And how many will find a way to fund those organizers year-round, not just for last-minute GOTV?
The Terror of Errant OTT
Considering the problems with traditional television, many political advertisers put solid money into OTT this year, trying to stream their way into the hearts of cord-cutting voters with targeted, broadcast-quality ads. But I’ve heard, anecdotally, about some cases where ads showed up on friends’ Hulu, Roku or Dish for candidates in the wrong district or the wrong state.
Now, every targeting mechanism can fail somewhere along the line— even if I have the right device ID for a given voter’s phone, their kids could be watching videos when my pre-roll ad comes up. Considering that programmatic OTT ads were at least projected to cost several times more than pre-roll video early in the cycle, though, I’d love to know if these were isolated blips or examples of a wider problem in need of fixing.
We’ll have plenty more data to chew on in the months to come, and perhaps we’ll be able to make better sense of a fragmented media market and an evolving electorate.
Colin Delany is founder and editor of the award-winning website Epolitics.com, author of the 2022 edition of “How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections,” a twenty-five-year veteran of online politics and a perpetual skeptic. See something interesting? Send him a pitch at cpd@epolitics.com.
