How to Reach the Unreachable Voter

Welcome to Potset America. I'm D&5. Today, I'm joined by Daniel Butterfield, the Executive Director of Priority, USA,

one of the largest and most important super packs

of Democratic politics. Priority, USA does a lot of essential digital work in the party, building infrastructure, investing and research in data, and running ads to reach the voters' campaigns often

struggle to reach. They're in the midst of a massive study about how less-engaged voters are getting their information on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and even AI chatbots. The platforms that will decide the 20, 28 election

whether we like it or not. Priorities has already started a $30 million campaign to define the 20, 28 Republicans by JD fans and Marco Rubio. And I invited Daniel on the podcast to unpack that research and talk about what they've learned.

We dove into their findings, talked about how the media environment has changed to the 20, 24 election, and broke down some of the ads that they're already running. It was a great conversation, and we'll get to it in a minute. But before we do, please consider becoming a pain subscriber

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rate, break down what is happening in politics. You can find it all at fricking.com/YesWeDan, or subscribe to friendsofthepod at fricking.com/friends. All right, here's my conversation with Daniel Butterfield. Daniel Butterfield, welcome to Potset of America.

Thanks for having me. All right, so excited to talk to you. Thanks for doing this. Priorities have been working on a whole bunch of things that are really interesting to me.

I want to talk to you about the study you've done on less politically engaged voters. I want to talk to you about how you're thinking about ads. And I really want to talk to you about why you are already spending money to try to win the 2028 election

in the middle of the 2026 election. And we're going to do all of that.

I'm going to level set up a couple things first.

For people who've been around politics as long as I have, they remember prior to USA as sort of the Democratic Super PAC spending tens of millions of dollars to elect Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton spending money for Joe Biden. That's not what priorities USA is now.

So maybe talk a little bit about who you are and what you guys are doing or our audience understands. Yeah, so I joined the priorities USA team back in 2017. Fresh off the Hillary Clinton campaign. Priorities, up until that point, had been operating up

to you, like you said, as a presidential super PAC. But in the aftermath of 2016, one of the most urgent kind of quickest realizations that folks had about why we lost was just how little Democrats had invested on digital compared to television. And so the priorities team got some funding to kind of stay

open beyond the presidential and really investigate why that is. So that's when I joined the team. I became our digital director alongside a bunch of other really smart people. And we kind of made it our mission to really diagnose and understand

why the Democratic Party is so severely under-invest in digital. But then also like to actually close the gap to raise a bunch of money to spend on digital. And so flash forward to where we are today. I like to say that we are anchored as a presidential

organization, but we really have gotten to a point where we're using the midterm elections and special elections to really prepare and get better and innovate and try new things. So that by the time the next presidential election rolls around, we're like that much more ready for it.

“So that's how everything about us today.”

I know the presidential election seemed like a million years away

for a lot of people, but I like to point out that if we follow the previous schedule, one is actually one year from now, there will be Democrats and Republicans on stage in debates, actually, this thing will be often running the day after the midterms.

So people should prepare for that. And so just also the level set here, as you point out, in 2017, you're already about the digital gap in working on it. After the 2024 election, there was the sort of widespread consensus that Democrats had once again been outmaneuvered digitally.

There was all the talk about all the podcasts that Trump did and how they were using the internet to target these less engaged voters. I think that there was a general sincerity among a lot of people in the party to try to close the gap.

You don't think they didn't know exactly how to do it or how they got there. 18 months after that election, where do you see things? Has the party made real improvements here? How much work needs to be done?

Yeah, I mean, we obviously have made improvements, but we're not where we need to be.

“I think in the aftermath of 2016, it was quite easy to say,”

wow, Democrats are really not spending anything

In the aftermath of 2024, Democrats outspent Republicans to to one on digital. So it's no longer a numbers game. It's actually like several layers below the surface, which makes it a lot more difficult to diagnose and solve.

“And that's why it's no surprise that the last couple of years”

post 2024 have been a really tough set of fundraising years for Democrats, because the solutions to why we lost in 2024 really require us to dive deep and solve some bigger cultural problems that we have in Granted in our party.

And so I think if I'm going to diagnose that problem in one sentence, my read is that, while Democrats are spending a lot more money on digital than they were back in 2016, we're still running digital programs

to mirror what goes on on television. And I think that's the crux of the problem that I'm seeing today. Can you say a little bit more about what that means? Yeah, I mean, I think 20 years ago,

when a campaign was setting out to reach voters, they had a handful of options of how they were going to do that. They could buy broadcast cable television points, they could knock doors, build an organizing program,

send out mail pieces, digital really wasn't on the table. When you're setting out to run a TV program, you're picking out DMAs that are efficient, based on where your state or congressional district is, you're building really fancy models

to determine which door I'm going to knock in which door I'm going to skip. You're building mail pieces that same thing, you're going to mail to one house and not to another.

“But I think that what we have really failed to realize”

is that digital opens up so many more possibilities to be able to reach voters in ways that bleed so much far beyond where you live, what your DMA is, and what your voter file score is, and we're really failing to lean into the creativity

that digital affords us when we do that. And I think put in a much simpler way. Nine out of the 10 top YouTube ads in 2024,

we're just 30 second ads that ran on TV first.

So we are quite literally, practically, taking 30 second ads that we run on TV, and then putting them on YouTube and expecting people to watch them. And that is quite literally lighting money on fire. - I've been struck by this and, you know, as you know,

we've been sort of both together in several ways to scream about this for a long time. - Yeah. - Anyone who washes YouTube would understand that a TV commercial run on YouTube makes no sense.

It would be like someone putting a print ad on your television when you were watching it, and you would just be supposed to read it. And there are obviously incredibly smart people working in digital spaces across the party,

you don't, in the Harris campaign, and some of these superpacks, and the Biden campaign in 2020, what accounts for the fact that there's sort of like jamming this

and neck rendistic square peg into a much more modern round hole? - I mean, I think I cannot adequately answer this question without addressing the consultant driven nature of decision game. - Go, go, I mean, my place was getting right into it, yes.

- Right, like it is just,

“if you want to look at profit margins for a second,”

what I am basically declaring that a campaign

should do costs a lot more than what it costs around a TV campaign. So that such that, and if I'm asking a campaign to cut 20 ads to put on the internet, instead of one ad to ship to everyone,

that is obviously going to eat into profit margins, and, you know, the folks that have been around for a really long time are going to resist that, but so it thinks that the pressure has to come from a different place.

That's part of what priorities see as its role in this ecosystem is pushing the hard questions and, you know, trying to get past profit margins as the core goal, it's, you know, ridiculous that we even have to have that conversation,

but it's also part of why, like when I joined the team in 2017 and, you know, was off for the job as digital director, part of my negotiation was I want to build an enhanced team because I don't want to have to worry about, you know,

working with a set of consultants

that's ultimately going to be trying to, you know, pay the bills.

I want to hire people that are purely focused on trying new things, innovating, and that has to be their, their number one focus. You know, I don't want to get on here and, like, consultants are in it for the right reasons, right?

So many Democrats are consultants want to win these elections, but they also have to pay bills and when you are forced to make decisions between paying bills and, you know, winning elections, that's naturally going to create a attention

that we just can't ignore. But anyway, all of that to say, you know, I think it is extremely easy to look at the reach numbers that YouTube affords or any given week, 80, 90% of voters are reachable on YouTube.

And to say, oh, that's just an extension of TV. Just like TV is a, is a one-size-fits-all, reach broadcast, we literally use the word broadcast to describe TV. If you're treating YouTube like a broadcast channel,

though, you're just missing the point, right?

work on the Google sales team, love them to death,

but their sales pitch is YouTube is TV.

“I just fundamentally disagree with that, right?”

Like, if you are treating it like a broadcast channel, you are fully missing the point. - The YouTube is TV thing. And I'm going to get to your study in a minute, but you've got me down a rabbit hole.

And I knew that would happen this conversation because this is a, if you're a particularly nerdy interest for me, I mean, YouTube is TV. And this is the thing, I've done the round since 2024 meeting with various politicians.

And I've tried to explain to them. And I use YouTube is TV for the purpose of understanding that for people to, like, actually, such of these politicians, understand that young voters watch YouTube on their TV, right?

- Yeah. - So they come home, they turn it on. And what's different is they're not looking at TV guide or the literal TV guide that shows up in your exfinity or cable thing. Is that the algorithm is showing them things based on,

you know, a lot of data mining. And the things that subscribe to. But where the point you're making is where the analogy fails is that it is not consumed in the same way. And sort of, like, you can't just put a TV show on YouTube,

which is why YouTube does not invest in script and television. Like, there's like a lingua franca of it. And if the ads, if you're running TV ads on YouTube, even if it's being watched from the literal television, that's not what people are expecting.

So they are more likely to dismiss it. Is that right?

“- Yeah, I think it's an attention span problem, right?”

And it's a function of, you know, if someone is sitting in your correct that a majority of people when they're using YouTube are literally using watching it on a smart TV. And that is different than YouTube TV,

which is like a subscription service that people pay for. No, it's literally YouTube.com being streamed on a television device. But like, how many of those people are watching their smartphone and playing games?

Like, I think that category, it is extremely tough to get me to pay attention to one screen. And I know I'm not alone in that situation. So you both have an attention span challenge. And then you also have a challenge/opportunity

that people are using YouTube in very different ways. It's a battleground, right? It's people listening to podcasts. It is people playing games. It's people watching clips that their friends send them.

Like, it is people listening to music. It's just, it's so many different things that if we're going to try to squeeze it into it to one category, we're really, we're really feeling it.

“And this does open up a really good segue”

to a lot of the work that priorities is doing too. That's what we want to go. To really understand, I'm pretty tired of media consumption research, looking like, let's slap a question to the end of a poll and ask how many people are watching YouTube.

I need to know much, many, many more details than that to really understand how to craft the media strategies. So that is the work that priorities has been investing in since 2024, we're actually way before 2024.

And we were doing this in the middle of 2022. And that's the work that we're excited to chat about. Yeah, so you've been studying how people actually get information in this crazy insane world we live in. And not just how people like you and I can information,

because we kind of get information

to see where people have always got information.

Like, we're going to sources to get it. We're following poll users closely. But as we've talked about sort of endlessly on this podcast in elsewhere since 2024, is the swing voter is not necessarily

a well-informed, centrist white man from Wisconsin. It is someone who doesn't pay the attention to politics and is sort of surfing the news at best. And we were very, we were not very good at reaching the people or understanding those people.

So you've been looking at them. So before we get into what you actually found, can you get walk us through the process by which you try to understand the media habits of these less politically engaged individuals?

Yeah, absolutely. But just to underscore what you just said, in our post 2024 research, we actually found that beyond age, demographic geographic indicators that your consumption of YouTube was more predictive

of your vote choice and your vote swing from 20 to 24 than anything else. So people-- Meaning that you were more likely to vote for Trump than more YouTube you watched.

Yeah, exactly. So basically, the cross-to-out was a men who were watching more than three hours of YouTube had some of the highest swing of any other cross-to-out that we were looking at.

And it also applies to people who are listening to podcasts. It also applies to women. It's just pretty consistent that your internet consumption patterns are very predictive of how much you swung from a persuasion standpoint.

So our team took that information and said, OK, we got to be media consultants for the 21st century, because if no one else is going to do it, let's let us step up and play that role. And so we basically have this project

that our team has been working on, that really

takes a look at, we have an always-on survey operation.

Where it's actually really cool. We actually, in a normal kind of survey environment, we pay people to send us a screenshot of their screen time apps. I'm sure you guys have logged in to see how much time you spend on Twitter every single day.

of that and then validating it against what they sell for port to where they spend time. And then using that as an understanding of what new apps are popping that should be on our radar, how much is YouTube consumption changing over the summer,

how much are people changing their subscriptions between who and P.Cock, depending on what reality TV show

“is on, which is very common in the thing that I think”

our team was highly surprised to see how much people change up their subscriptions, which is very good information.

So basically, part one is an always-on survey operation.

It's just going to baseline of where people spend time. We then do kind of quarterly sometimes monthly deep dives on specific topics that our team wants to dig into. So last summer, we did a deep dive on audio consumption to really understand specifically how

our people consuming music, podcasts, et cetera, what platform, what are some patterns that we can take into account from a media planning perspective. And then we also acquire third-party data that often is very observational and behavioral in nature

so that we can actually observe what people are doing. And the search data that Peter Hammie wrote about over the weekend is that third category, where we paid to acquire people's search data and then we did a really long term kind of study

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“Do you speak just a little more detail about the search data?”

Like what you were looking for? How many people it was? And then we came into what you found? Yeah, absolutely. So anyone that's ever like talked to me in my life knows that I

like particularly obsessed with search behavior as like a proxy for understanding kind of where voters are at. I think it's like the single most interesting thing that you can do to observe where someone's head is at. It is literally like knocking on someone's door and then being able to say

to you, hey, I'm really interested in immigration. You can then have a conversation with them about immigration. They're like quite literally telling you what they're interested in. And so for a long time I've just been really interested in how can we, you know, do more to understand people's search behavior?

How can we use it? How can we learn from it, et cetera?

“So we work for the third-party data provider to acquire and pay for a set of”

people who basically opted in to share their behavioral data with this data provider.

So basically like you could go to your YouTube account right now and say download my history. You could do the same thing on Twitter. I actually highly recommend it. It's like very entertaining. You've like download your history, upload it to

Claude, tell it to give you some analysis. It is like better than therapy in a lot of ways. But, or at least maybe Claude will tell you to go to therapy after reading it because. Yeah, potentially. Oh, I'll call it complimentary to therapy.

Yeah. But anyway, so we did that with a provider that was able to send us search behavior across, you know, the major kind of traditional search engines, Google being the most predominant one, but also, you know, Gemini, chat, GBT, and then some of the major social media engines, YouTube,

Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc.

And so our team, it was about six million searches.

We did it across two different time periods. The first was like the last couple of months of 2024. And then the second time period was like a chunk of 2025. We wanted to be able to kind of look at it into chunks. Our team spent a couple of weeks like really, really analyzing the data.

It was like a huge, you know, undertaking to take a look at the trends. We definitely would not have been able to do this project if our team wasn't, you know, fully enabling AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting in the work. We are a very, let's lean into AI organization at priorities. And we walked away with, you know, unsurprisingly, a huge number of insights that our team is currently

using to both run programs that we're running here in in 26, but also looking ahead to 28. So, yeah, happy to share more about kind of what we learned. Before we get to the actual findings, but the search, the context of search in this day and age is very interesting because for most of the last 20 years, search meant one thing and one thing only.

But the people at, the people of being would would not. Yes, there's a small handful of being people out there who use it. And, you know, we had nutscape. It's we had some things earlier. And there was actually a highly, highly effective fundraising platform on this.

Because then child campaigns that they were trying to get. Wow, well, there we go. I am learning something brand new today. But it meant via Google or Bing, searching the web. That's something very, very different now as particularly as the social media, and I'm going

to get to AI later on this conversation. But as the social media platforms become more places where people sort of live, particularly TikTok and Instagram, like, how are you thinking about, like, how does that accommodate, like, I assume people are searching for the same thing that you'll use to search. Google for a few years ago, are now searching on Instagram or TikTok or elsewhere,

or are there differences in those search? Like, what did you find? Yeah, I think Google is still king. Like, let's just be really clear. Google is still a huge market share, predominant market share.

And Google makes a majority of their money off of search, not YouTube. Like, let's just name that. They were going to do everything they can to not lose that spot in the market. But even though, as people are spending more and more time online, I like to think about it and this comes into play a lot when you're putting together a media plan.

As people spend more time online, they're just doing more. Like, you are both using Instagram and TikTok and search every day instead of picking between them.

“And so I think what we are starting to see is that the behaviors between these different search engines”

are different, which is really helpful learning, right? Like, people are going to Google to really fact check and get basic information, but then they're going to chat to BT to really put together robust plans and really go back and forth whereas Instagram, TikTok, it can become a little bit more entertaining in nature. So I like to think about it less of a binary choice that people are making between these different

platforms. Obviously, there are trends in that direction. But it's more about how our people are using these different platforms for different reasons.

Google is still top of the list.

“I think our party is very interested in understanding people's relationships to chatbots and AI as a search”

engine. That is incredibly important and it's changing rapidly, but people using YouTube as a search engine is incredibly under-discussed. I think that YouTube is the number two search engine behind Google. Those data sets are obviously integrated under one umbrella and it's a place that I think we definitely don't spend enough time thinking about and we can actually do a lot more there than we can on chatbots. What do you, can you say do more? Because you can

you can manipulate, you can manipulate and run ads and produce video content that appears when someone searches for a topic that you want to appear on. We know for a fact that AEO is a hot topic right now. People really want to understand how they can influence a search result in a chatbot. But YouTube search has been around for such a long time. It's a lot easier to manipulate what comes up when someone searches for something on YouTube in a way that I think the democratic party needs

to be spending a lot more time producing video than they do manipulating chatbots results.

“It's not a choice. It's not a false choice, but I think we've got to spend more time with it.”

I am of a certain generation because I'm old where YouTube is not the same to me like I didn't grow up using YouTube obviously. I don't really grow up with the internet but we're going to have to discuss that here. I think a lot of people who are in politics, many of them are my age and older in our gerantocracy, don't fully understand just how big YouTube is that it's the biggest video platform in the world, the biggest music platform in the world, it's bigger than

Spotify on music, it's better than Apple podcasts or Spotify as a podcast platform that it is just this gigantic thing that dominates people's lives and I think people really get there. But let's get to what you found when you were analyzing this data, what are the major insights you got? Yeah, so I think the number one headline is that people are not searching for anything political. Of the 6 million searches that we acquired less than 100,000 were political or even politically

adjacent. The reality is and I think the thing that keeps the team at priorities USA up at night

but also motivates our work is that people are just thinking about politics and we have to really if we don't understand that going into crafting a campaign we're really going to miss the mark on on how do we actually then reach someone. So I think in doing our analysis we found a lot of really awesome patterns around when people do search for politics. It's eye opening for our team around lead. How soon out from the election are people starting to search for their polling location?

When are they searching for information about their candidates? All our team is quite literally right now. It's a Friday afternoon. That is literally what they're working on to craft our 26 campaigns. But more importantly, it's opening our eyes, I think, to the thing that I'm the most excited about and learning out about is this category of what we're calling politically adjacent categories that are a really awesome entry point for us to be having

relevant conversations with people when they aren't thinking about politics but they're one step away from thinking about politics. And let me just give you an analogy on this really quick because

“I think it's helpful at kind of landing why this is important. I like to, I spend a lot of time thinking”

about how can we as political advertisers compare ourselves to corporate advertisers because it's a billion dollar industry and there's a lot that we can learn from people that are quite literally doing similar work to us. But at the end of the day, you know, I said this to Peter but Nike knows that you're training for a marathon and they're using that information to sell you shoes at that particular moment. Target knows that you are pregnant probably before you do. There was

that story that came out on that a couple years ago. My algorithm currently knows that I'm shopping for fall shoes and it is quite helpful to me and I actually really appreciate the algorithm for

knowing exactly what I want. The reality is that advertising writ large is very contextually relevant

and very genuinely helpful in a lot of ways and that political advertising is not that. Political advertising is just interruptive. We like show up in the most random moments and want to like interrupt your day and we got to get closer to the corporate model. We got to create campaigns that are actually relevant to someone's day and you know behaviorally I think we can take a closer look at where people are actually interested and then create those connective points between what they're

interested in and how we can shift the conversation to politics and have a million ideas of what that looks like that I'm happy to dive into. Yeah so I want to like you raised this very and I was very struck by that quote from you and I got to get started and I got to get paid by Nike at some point. But it's very no free answer. It's a rule we have. Everyone who spends any time on the internet understands that your phone is tracking everything you do and then giving you serving you information

Back to school comes. It's back to school stuff right it's they know you've done you've searched Disneyland on the internet now you're going to get a bunch of Disney content. You're going to get

advertised in a million if or ways through you know on Instagram through TikTok on your

you know in your Gmail you're going to get Disneyland ads for writer from travel comes from whatever else. If the corporate model is behavioral based advertising what is the political model been to date? What is that based on? It's the same conversation we just had it's based on your geography and your voter file score. I think 90 plus percent of democratic advertising investments to date have been based on where you live not as a proxy for you know you being close to a data center

or on a user university campus but just how likely am I if I were to throw a dart to reach a black voter or reach a college student like that it is based on density and efficiency for the most part that's like how people use geography to to target and then when it comes to a voter file it's just

“you know the ease of someone is building you a model they're telling you which voter you should”

knock and which voter you shouldn't which voter you should mail and which you shouldn't and

digital practitioners have been told for a really long time hey can you target this list of voters that we think is important there's technology that exists to be able to upload an offline list and match it to the internet but that's just completely you know ignoring every online signal that you can add to to make sure that that you know becomes becomes relevant to the to the end user so yeah status quo is I would say geography and voter file are like the primary drivers of current

targeting and we're out here screaming there's more to it than that is identity part of that as well at least like in a broad base way like especially if you back in the days when you're advertising on Facebook where you would be you know targeting people of a certain demographic group or certain age group that you would be reaching but it's not tied to any specific knowledge about what those people care about correct yeah I would say like age and and demographic come into play a lot

“probably more rarely than you would think right like I think when I was on the Obama campaign in”

in 2012 we definitely had age and gender tracks we had demographic tracks layered on top of kind of a broadcast track but in a small congressional race like I think that's a lot more rare than then you might expect and I'm not out here saying that age demo geographic targeting isn't important it's

it's highly critical I think we're just saying that the next step beyond that of really trying to

understand how to reach someone based on things that were not necessarily observing offline but instead online we should be pushing ourselves to to think in that category because it's just going to make it's going to make us better advertisers is cost prohibitive here does that a problem is it much more obviously much more expensive to market to someone based on you know specific targeted not you know information about their online presence that just targeting a group who

happen to live in a certain zip code not an amazing way I mean you know like I think Facebook their CPM's got a lot lower when you kind of give them free will to pick out who you want them to reach so when you're running a campaign on Facebook and you're saying as long as someone cares about fitness go ahead and reach them that gives them a lot more free will to to target folks than if you were to upload a file and say I only want to target these 100,000 people so that

does impact the CPM but in a in a helpful way we have a lot of questions and we're doing a lot of research at priorities around just how do you kind of kind of validate that data that that you get on places like Facebook YouTube but you know I would say cost if someone's bringing up costs as an excuse not to do a campaign like this they're they're probably not fully grasping what what we're talking

“about obviously I think what I am describing here does require incremental cost from a production”

standpoint I think the model we are describing certainly requires you to make many many more ads than a TV once I spit salt program but I also think there's a ton more that we can be doing on the kind of AI automation side to make the production process faster easier that actually does nothing to do with you know AI slot you can you can automate the back end without making the the front end of it AI driven but like can we live in a world where the use in the voter file

we've identified a set of target voters in a swing state and we now know that this swing voter has been searching on this is creepy to a lot of people has been searching on the internet about cycle spora and food recalls and they could you then kid I can't present well funded well run digitally forward for presidential campaign then target that voter within ad in 2028 that said you know in the Trump Vance Administrative Administrative Administrative Administrative Administrative

and the Trump Vance Administration they cut all the funding which led to these bluebird recalls

so Google doesn't allow you to use offline data to do targeting they got rid of that

“I think it was 2019 but everything else that you described yes would would be doable”

I think so the the reason that I care a little bit less about the front end like here's the voters I particularly care about is think about how a model is built right you take a look at someone's vote history and then you ask them a bunch of questions in a survey to infer you know how they're gonna you know how they're gonna vote and you apply that to a broader set of voters and you make predictions about how you think someone's gonna vote based on them

being male going to church reading books on the weekend whatever it is like there's a bunch of really smart data people out there that are building really smart models I think what we're saying though

is in addition to asking someone a survey question to inform a model what if you just observe

what they do instead right like how can how can we get to a point where we're you know not relying on offline data to predict where someone is and instead just you know if someone's searching for whether their letters is contaminated I don't really care how they voted in 2020

“I think that ad is probably quite relevant to them so and you don't even pay for an ad until”

someone clicks on it so why don't why don't we just try and get rid of the kind of front end marker to begin with does that make sense okay let's get into just sort of all right so we got a bunch of these voters who are less politically engaged you've looked at you know of the six millions such as you had you know the rolling percentage of them were non-political what are these theoretically non-political people doing on the internet where are they what are they interested in

yeah so one of the most interesting remarkable findings that that we saw is just how much people are you know searching for you know what we're calling kind of public benefit programs people searching for how to download a fast-perform how to apply for Medicaid what is Medicaid called in my state those are all I think it's a very like large percentage of the searches that we are seeing and that kind of politically adjacent field and it's a really important signal to us

that someone who is searching for a fast-perform should probably fall into a particular bucket of communication that looks different than someone who's searching for whether their letter

“is contaminated I think that was the most remarkable finding that that I saw that I think we're”

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details restrictions and important safety information syldenifill is the generic version of vayagra vayagra is a registered trademark of viatris specialty llc hymns is not affiliated with or endorsed by viatris the grand mystery right is like i know where you get your information and you know where someone like me gets my information how but but all these people who pay no attention to politics like who don't actively pay attention to politics are forming political opinions

right that like or even if they're very broad they have a general sense of how they feel about political figures political issues things that happen in the news we know what or what is you learn about where those people are actually like where is that information coming from how are they running into it in this crazy media ecosystem for sure so you know i think a stat that i like to throw out and remind myself of every day is that 54% of voters writ large are just not paying

attention to news at all they're they're trying to avoid it mostly and so if they're not paying attention to news how are they experiencing politics i think we like to ask ourselves that question to really shape kind of what are the campaigns that that we're going to put together um to reach them and you know i think a lot of democratic investment um over the last couple years has has focused on how do we make the news sexier easier to reach easier to access um there's something wrong

swap of people that just really don't want a page into news at all and so we want to reach those

“voters we have to do it in a different way we have to have different cultural entry points i think”

you hear democrats say a lot like we need to be culture first i'm frustrated that i don't actually

feel like we have a next step to that question i've never actually heard adequate you know ideas

of what that looks like and so i think part of the research that part has has been doing over the last two years is sparking ideas of what does that actually look like in practice knowing that beauty and fashion true crime parenting um those are three categories that are reaching a really large set of voters who are both swinging and you know switch from herty to party but also don't pay attention to the news what would it look like for us to create a campaign where we

develop true crime content and then use that content to like talk about obscene or whatever it makes sense like it's about really using you know uh using the state to uncover those other kind of non news oriented entry points for us to then have conversations with people on their

“terms parenting is it is a category that i think is like highly interesting and and super”

relevant to what we're talking about what would it look like for us to create a track um of always

on communication that targets people based on the fact that their parents that talks about issues that are you know highly relevant to parents i think when we talk about you know the marked to 2028 and the fact that we're getting going early that doesn't mean that we need to be advertising all the time we're trying to advertise in moments that are highly relevant um back to school great opportunity to you know talk to parents about about how Trump's policy is

advanced policies reveals policies are are personally impacting them i think our goal here is is to be relevant and not necessarily always on when people are whether they are like they're interested in a true crime or gaming or fitness or whatever else like where are those voters hanging out right it's like we're not in a world where they're going to true crime.com on the web to read about so is it they are in social media apps and they have both followed

and are being fed that sort of content you know like just i want to try to like get a little granular about where these people are hanging out and i think with why it's particularly relevant is

“we know as we have been absent in these spaces obviously that's why you're doing the work you're doing”

but if you look at like health and beauty for instance or wellness as a space like we were absent but it's some course of time since uh you know 2016 2012 that that category which would have seemed demographically to be very much ours you know a very you know you know you know young mom younger women category became like the birthplace of mahas i'm just trying to understand like where these people are like where they actually hang out and they say they're like they're in

a fitness or true crime or whatever else yeah i mean a lot of this research is very baked in YouTube like let's just name that i think there's priorities is spending a disproportionate amount of time and money really trying to understand YouTube behavior because we know how easy it is to just like money on fire on that platform and there's a ton of upside and better understanding you know how people are using the platform let me give you an example of a program that we ran earlier

the summer that i think will help answer the questions so we from our research as we talked about young men super online super swing up they're swing voters they you know swung from from Trump away from Trump away from Biden in from 2020 to 2024 from our research we knew that young men are interested in podcasts finance gaming fitness i think those were the categories what our team did as we ran this campaign in Ohio earlier there's summer where all of the ads were about john

Houston but each of the ads was highly relevant to those categories that i just laid out so you had like a guy lifting weights talking about john Houston running you know next to game to fitness content you had someone who was an actual gaming creator talk about same topic in the context of you know what a normal kind of gaming piece of content on youtube might look like um part of the theory here it's it was actually twofold it was one our ads should natively look like the the content

that someone is otherwise watching on youtube um ads actually you know in today's world it's actually better for an ad to blend in than to stand out you kind of want that nativity there's there's benefit there and i think we had it's we had some research from previous cycles that that proved to us that that was that was a good theory but then also i think more importantly any one on youtube is kind especially a young man is kind of like two clicks away from right leaning content

and any given point in part because of how much the right has invested in just like having an

always on content machine and and being present in all the places that we are not such that if you're

watching fitness content and then you skip past the next two videos you're probably going to be on a piece of content that's a little bit maha in nature and so we had run a campaign a couple

right leaning content that exists and see what kind of persuasion effect we can have assuming that

just because someone's on bright bark doesn't mean they probably chose to be there they may have just ended up there because of the algorithms and our theory proved out like we were able to keep you know retain these voters at a pretty high rate just by running positive pre-roll ads before someone you know was watching that right bark content and so the team was kind of like how do we do this in a slightly more expanded way not necessarily explicitly right wing but these kind of right

leaning places that you might not you know expect on on on on the front end so those those five categories are the ones that the team kind of proposed as let's interrupt these let's interrupt this this users journey with ads and see what happens and the theory proved out right like we were able to effectively you know stop from one set from you know getting to that right leaning content a lot of the times someone was like opening up a new tab on Google and searching for more information

about John Houston which you know it did the job of interrupting that person's flow so anyway

“all of that to say I think we are disproportionately spending a lot of time thinking about how to”

find people on YouTube in particular just because it is such a it's a high it's a high density very efficient place to reach people but it's a very easy place to to burn money and it's important note that we talk about takes back all the time but at last I checked you still cannot run political ads on TikTok right you cannot run political ads on TikTok that is true and so it's just out there just starting to roll that we can't intervene there's certainly

interventions that you can you can do that are not you know explicitly renting attention what is though I like my like nerdy way to talk about advertising is your you're renting someone's attention we can earn attention on TikTok but it's not something that we're going to be able to you know get in a short window let's talk a little bit about AI chat bots because in your survey I saw that just about half of voters are using an AI chat bot once a week and you know obviously Google

is still king you pointed that out but even Google is changing in the way a lot of people are getting their search results because they are coming in these AI summaries which is interrupting the search ads that we've been spending gazillion dollars on for decades and but so as we think as AI chat bots grow as a search engine for people how should Democrats be thinking about influencing those results like we had a playbook we had a both a we had a advertising playbook for Google search

and we had an organic search SEO playbook for how to get our content near the top of the results what the hell do you do when it's a you know the handful of very different very independent

AI chat bots yeah first of all there's a lot of really smart people who are tackling this

“head on I think the folks that run for something constantly are thinking really extensively about”

how do you understand and then be manipulate a chat bot result it's really you know AEO is just SEO too by no right it's just understanding with AEO is just people know yeah it stands for answer engine optimization and it's basically what how do you manipulate what is going to show up in a chat bot result there's a lot of really smart people out there who are thinking about how do you you know understand what's showing up in a chat bot result and then be how do you actually you know change it

you change it by updating your website you change it by pitching stories to the AP or posting shit on Reddit because that's a place that's often getting picked up by chat bots all of this is going to change incredibly fast and anyone who is kind of going out there with best practices today the best practices are going to change two months from now six months from now and so I think it does require a lot of urgency and a shift in conversation across our party that

if we always had to invest in digital infrastructure now is the time to like double triple

quadruple down on on that effort for us to like really understand how quickly the internet is changing like we have to be investing in innovation to to make sure that we're able to stay on top of

“these trends I think the work that that priorities is doing though in the kind of chat bot space beyond”

just you know understanding what a result is an understanding how you might manipulate that result is really understanding when and why are people turning to chat bots what is the kind of driver of why someone's using it and how does that you know change how we should be thinking about intervening and better understanding their their media journey and so I think you know the result the research that we did over the summer I think was was highly it was incredibly helpful

at uncovering that people are not necessarily searching for information about a candidate as much as they are searching for information about policies and issues in a much more granular way you know I think as you know AI I don't know if you feel this personally but I think

like is this real is this not like I am personally opening up chat GBT clawed and saying hey can you

“fact check this for me there's that I think a ton of it almost feels like the spider-man meme where”

because of the insurgents of AI people are using AI to check if things are AI so it's it doesn't seem like great for the world but yes that's where we are yeah positive america is brought to you by helix I love my helix mattress I have a dawn lux I took I actually took the quiz because I am a stomach sleeper I'm trying to become a science sleeper and kind of rotating but I love the bed it's really comfortable it helps make sure

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cricket for 27% off site wide this offer is exclusive to positive america listeners that's helix sleep dot com slash cricket for 27% off site wide helix sleep dot com slash cricket we're in the list 26 selection you guys are focused on among other things trying to define the 20s 28 dominant potential nominees most notably shady vance america rubio talked to me about why start that process now yeah absolutely so I'm I'm very I've been working

at a super packed for almost a decade now which is crazy and I'm very much of the opinion that the way that our party uses super packs is outdated and not to the maximum that we can and certainly not to the maximum that republicans do and the way I would just describe that as quite simple I think as much as this role of a super pack is to raise money that a campaign cannot raise aka we are able to raise beyond the contribution limit that a campaign has we also have time that a campaign

“doesn't have and I think really leaning into that time element is a thing that I feel really”

important as the role that a super pack can can play in today's world and so as think in the aftermath of 2024 when we're sitting around asking ourselves why the hell did we just lose that election and what can we do differently next time our team got to work on a couple of things including you know and at a high level how can we do a better job of listening to the internet to I be able to drive decision-making we can talk about polling and all the reasons my polling

is is flawed but you know priorities is very much of the opinion that with the you know availability of AI we can we can observe qualitative data at such a larger scale in today's world that we might as well lean into it it's exactly how the Republicans are making their decisions right like we like to look at the common is for they them ad I think is a perfect example of how the Republicans said that ad has likes to it it's sticky it's doing really well online let's put money

behind it whereas on the Democratic side we have to like let an aggo through an entire polling program we're all in order to take it seriously anyway all of that to say priorities got to work after 2024 to build a tech stack and do research really understand how can we be leaning into listening to the internet to understand what's going to resonate and what's going to break through at the same time you know we recognize that the market to 2020 is going to be long

and it's going to include a lot of Democrats fighting each other I think if this summer wasn't

indicative of anything it's that primaries are challenging and they can be really helpful but ultimately

they're tough and we're about to go we're about to face that on a level that is going to be different than what we just experienced over the summer and I'm really worried that our party has not been you know we have not gone through an election without Trump on the ballot in quite some time I think our muscle memory there is quite weak we're going to be running against someone new no matter what happens and the Democrats are going to be fighting each other so the team at priorities was like

what can we do to be the most value adding into 28 let's get going now let's actually start to think about what it looks like to define our eventual opposition so that by the time we have a nominee they have a slightly less uphill climb to be able to you know go after and you know compare

tech stack all feeds into kind of what we're doing it's not going to look like a traditional

average in campaign it's going to be always on but that doesn't mean we're on all the time and we have a

million ideas that were excited to dive into so the I am in after 2017 after sorry after sorry after 2016 in 2017 one of my strong views was that we should take a lot of the money that was lower flowing into Democratic politics than we could have Trump and be always on right and to like not let's you say not always on like we're going to run ads for the rest of time but in moments high leverage moments you would run advertising to shape that

impression you shape that moment where people are paying attention in their minds in our favor

“and I was I like that idea because I believed correctly I think that we were just so outgunned”

in the media space that we were competing with Trump being with Fox News being with Facebook at the time this is very powerful entity that was a sort of conduit for MAGA the Jason messaging like we needed to you know put some messaging thrust behind the things that happened I went around I saw this lots of people and the thing that everyone came back to me to say was in smart people was there is no evidence that early ads work and then you're basically recommending that we are

lighting money on fire I was never fully convinced of that but I also was in capable of

convincing the people who said that to do something different what is your response to that? I mean does that logically make sense? It doesn't make sense well I mean there's they will throw a bunch of political science research issue that people have very short memories or not paying attention at the time and so it doesn't the impressions are not worth the money I guess. I mean research also didn't show that smoking caused cancer until they were recently

there enough. No I just I think that I really appreciate the folks in the academic space for

“pushing us to be rigorous but at the end of the day like I think it is really important to”

name that political advertisers and what we are trying to do when we are trying to win elections is fundamentally different than any other you know communication challenge marketing challenge in the broader world right? I think of the day not to bring Nike back into it but like Nike spends millions of dollars a year to think there are really cool brands they run ads up around every sporting event to make you like them but ultimately they're trying to sell

you shoes and they get to use shoes sales as a proxy for whether they're just do it ads or working or not. We don't have that we do not have proxies that we get to use to understand whether someone is mind is being changed right like that's why surveys are you know we invest so much in surveys because it's the it's the closest we can get to be able to being able to ask someone where you persuaded by this did we did we sell you the shoe and you know that I've spent a huge

chunk of my career trying to get to a point or we can like zero in and understand how to you know properly measure a persuasion effect and it is it is quite challenging and it is probably the hardest thing that I've had to you know face in my career but the reality is you know their Republicans

are investing close to a billion dollars over the last decade in always on infrastructure and

communication and I think it is quite obvious that it has paid off right you look at you know the example I like to give is Trump after the the shooting you know within an hour he had people on the internet talking about the ballroom and how the shooting necessitated that the need to to build a ballroom we don't have that amplification you know program on our site there's a lot of folks that are working really hard to build it but it just shows the long-term payoff of what always on infrastructure

looks like meanwhile you know Democrats sit around and our amplification is like crossing your fingers

“and toe hoping for a retweet from Barack Obama like if you want to look at that and say that our”

situation is is worse is better I just don't buy that I think that's at the end of the day like art and science have to have to come into play and and we have to be able to use our judgment and be able to say that you know always on communication it it has to matter right like we can see it playing out in front of our eyes but I think a critical reason that we are doing things differently and I empathize with the criticism of always on and that sometimes you can look at the

way it plays out in a budget and just think well there's no way in how we can afford that you can't afford to like be at the impression levels now that we would want to be at in the fall of 2021 but that's why the priorities approach of really using behavioral targeting as a entry point to have these conversations is is I'm so excited about this program because the first time that I've really looked at a program through the lens of how do we reach people not necessarily during a time when

the registering to vote or when news is breaking kind of those natural political moments but instead

to have a political conversation it doesn't mean we're going to be on all the time in fact we're we're not on right now but like the next time something you know politically relevant happens you'll see us go up all right I want to look at some of your ads because they are they look nothing like a typical Democratic ad I would start with one about JD Vance let's play it hi I'm JD Vance as vice president I cast a type breaking vote to cut your health care and I've

been helping our great leader create tremendous well which has been trickling down to you wrong

wasn't built in a day of course but ultimately you're going to feel the benefits and you're medicating

I worry that's just in the period my new show anyway get back to work from a quick year second job

“and president Trump and I have to get back to redecorated okay I believe that was Donald Trump”

taking a leak on JD Vance's head to make a point about trickling economics I love it yeah so yeah talk to me just talk to me about the concept of the ad who you show the ad to and what the reaction to it was yeah so you know my friends at home think being an executive director is like out there talking to you know rich people it's actually just getting a slack from your CMO this is hey how do you feel about an ad with some piss in it that's quite literally the reality of of the

job but you know I think this ad is about recognizing that if you can't actually get someone to watch your ad it doesn't matter how well it tested right the number one thing that we need to be aware of is the skip button and the second screen and that exists and the fact that people are just naturally going to tune out of what we were saying so if we want to be able to actually get our message across about gas prices we need to deliver it in a format that's going to capture

people's attention this is just one ad right I think it's it's really you know the media responds really well to hey look at this one ad and cover it and get get some make media attention on it

the reality is like prologue is going to be thousands of ads over the next two years

we're going to throw us shit at the wall see what sticks and then move on with our lives this ad is is one example of something that we tried it actually did get a ton of attention people watched it all the way through I think we were really excited about the metrics that we saw people want humor they want things they want the poll they want politics to be a little less little bit less serious and so that was our attempt to kind of play around with that those insights

so you know the typical way we have been measuring the efficacy of ads and messaging and over the last you know decade here is persuasion effects right how much does it based on a we're testing the ad um in front of tens of thousands people and to what how many points did this take off of Trump's approval or how much did it move vote choice in our favor and these are all and polarized environment very small numbers that you know we're like an ad can be three times

as effective as another ad and it's because it's moving approval three times that one three points that one point yeah what is your metric metric success here is it completion rate is are you testing persuasion effects how are you thinking about it all of the above I think we are of the

“opinion that there's no singular metric that's ever going to tell you your ad is working you have to”

take a really wide lens and like take it all in you know we didn't do creative testing in 2016 I think in the aftermath I was really excited when the idea of creative testing kind of came into the ecosystem because I was like okay like we can finally like understand before we put money behind the ad how's it going to do and I don't know if you you guys remember like 2016 the biggest thing was like so many of our ads were causing backlash they were actually like moving

people in the wrong direction and that was like such an eye opening thing and so I was always

of the opinion that you know you can take a look at a creative test result and weed out the ad they're going to do harm and actually move people in their own direction and then if you have five ads at the end of the day that move people in their right direction put them all online and see how they do right like let's let's compare offline and online metrics against each other to really understand you know how how they're going to both be complimentary and maybe disagree

with each other not to to shout out the the team at on the new some campaign but they did this

“really while during during the Prop 50 campaign I think their whole theory was we're going to test”

our ads we are going to see what works in a kind of lab environment we're going to see what horse race looks like but instead of you know picking the top bad that has the highest horse race effect we're just going to put everything out there that doesn't do harm and then see you know on YouTube which audience is which at which ad move I just give them a lot of props for kind of taking that that theory it's in in strong alignment with kind of the priority theory of the case and

obviously had a really awesome impact in that race but yeah I think part of our our theory and and this is one of the other tools that we're actually in development on right now is what is it look like to a mass a much larger set of signals to understand how something might resonate online beyond just you know how something tests in it in a creative test and how something pulls how is it issue being talked about on a podcast how is it being talked about in a comment section

that we can be listening to and part of what priorities is doing is amassing all of those into

“a centralized view so that we can take everything in and and make strategic judgments accordingly”

alright let's look at a ad about Marco Rubio um and now let's discuss okay take America can't get any more expensive did we can't afford another pointless war well the call isn't yours to me it's is with a little Marco invasion action play set boats that are too big promises he can't keep what's it talking to you start the war we pay for social security not anymore medicare i buy the time it sends wheelboys off to war

the little Marco invasion action play set i love it i love little Marco uh similar vibe to the little have a self-parkied self-parkied and i guess other term vibe to them if which i do like um who was the target audience for this ad and how did it do yeah so generally

speaking priorities is always kind of trying to go after the young voters and voters of color

as are primary audience um looking ahead to 2028 our team has identified just over 10 just under 10 million voters across the background states that kind of fit into that category um so that is

“you know the primary audience for this i think for this particular creative brief we were also quite”

interested in in um having an effect with young man in particular just because those those those that's a tough audience for us um you know you i heard you say the you mentioned the youtube comments earlier that you read them and that they're actually sort of influencing some of the creative decision-chermaking um which is a far cry from which if there's probably causing data nerds within the party to lose their mind that we would look at youtube comments but one

that you said to Peter Hanley was that um the the youtube comments about jaddy van somarca rubio

were different in one very notable respect could you say what that was yeah for sure so um let me explain quickly why we care so much about comment section i've heard he's because it does cause a lot of stress but i do think it's it's super valid so um we did a research project last somewhere where we interviewed a bunch of young men on on how they watch youtube and by far in a way the biggest takeaway from that research project was just how reliable these young men are

on comment sections they watch a video they jump to the comment section they really want to understand what their peers think they really want to understand if there's agreement or disagreement it is like pure validation that is like happening in front of our eyes and it is like you know people like to say the internet is not real life comment sections are not real life i'm not here to say that people who are commenting on videos are representative of voters but it is an environment where

conversations are happening and we need to take it seriously and learn from it um so that is why we care so much about observing what is going on in these comments sections and what we saw when we were crafting you know for our initials that are pulling on unvance and rubio in particular you know our team was going about you know picking out the messages that you would you know pull out when you're pulling together a poll but we also spent a lot of time kind of scouring the

internet to understand what are the narratives that are kind of naturally occurring around these guys what are the late night hosts saying about these guys what are comment sections what are podcasts saying about them so that we could you know have a little bit of an internet for slends to the narratives that are appearing in our polling and we found that um while comment sections about JD events were we're often you know quite negative definitely poking fun at him people are not afraid

to poke fun at JD events more groupios comments were a lot more positive there's just not a lot of criticism happening organically about him online and it's actually why in in rolling out this program I think our team walked away feeling a lot more anxious about kind of what we have in front of us to define marker rubio just because a he's super undefined b people are not willing to you know go super negative on him online and see like in rolling out this program to the press the only person

anyone wants to talk about right now is JD events um people don't want to talk about marker rubio and that's a problem the JD events thing is interesting because hey like I think a lot of political messaging when you're trying to define a person if you kind of want to memeify him and you either be memeified in a cool way or in a bad way. Trump maybe the Trump may actually be the one person who resist memeing because he kind of isn't meme of himself who's

her developed his own meme in the 80s and it's just like live with a sense but you know it is

“what I mean it's like this is even before we even talked about memes like that's what happened to”

John Kerry with the the wind surfing and the you know the I you know I was for reverse against like they he was memeified he lost Al Gore even before that we we know who a man who was a lot chosen by Bill Clinton to be on the ticket because he was thought to be the most ethical and moral person in the Senate then by the end was turned into a giant liar who claimed the he invented the internet and was so boring he got memeified right and so like vans seems like like

like I was think about when we like you can I'm sure if we do message testing and we asked the

but that's not like that it's not a culturey relevant message or culturey relevant message is that

the J.D. Vance is a goober I actually looked at the cranibre effect before we got on just I wanted to remember um our our cranibre federally describes like what we think the meme of these guys should be um for J.D. Vance it's the flannel shirt doesn't fit him anymore um right he he grew up seemingly middle class um he's now in the Trump administration and like unfortunately the flannel shirt that he wants wanted to wear no longer zips up it's he's grown out of it because

he's spent the last couple years catering to the Trump administration so what you thought you knew about him before it's not so true anymore so everything you're gonna see us put out over the next

“couple years like for now like I think the meme could evolve and part of our our research is going”

to be to try to understand you know poke holes in in that theory um but that's kind of the story that we're trying to tell about vans and it also allows us to you know tell that story through a climate change lens or an abortion lens or an economic lens it doesn't require us to you know pit issues against each other I think every time as a party we're pinning issues against each other we're losing the the meme I think that our team has picked out for for Rubio is he's a chicken hot

he's all talk but when it actually comes to it like he's never served in the military he's actually

nowhere to be found right now just by everything that's going on and around so um those like like I said like our team and putting together this creative brief and really distilling the research it was less about um what are the top issues and more what's the one sentence that you want someone to

“describe them as when they walk away um and I think that's really our theory on on narrative and”

and messaging uh my priorities. I before I let you go um like as we are sitting here today there's somewhere between a dozen and 400 people who were planning to run for president very soon in those campaign headquarters there are already people you and I have been these people in him as in the past who are charting out in memos and slide decks what the campaign should look like what the strategy would be what the campaign structure would be what advice do you have for these

campaigns to you know learn from what you guys have done into a void making some of the mistakes we've made in recent campaigns where I think some of our structure and strategies have been anacronistic advice. Yeah I mean I would be your miss not to say that like digital has to be at the table like if you are not bringing to digital be the table yes right there's all the debate a digital is a team versus a tactic yes like I hope we're past that but I have to

“say it right um I mean the other thing is just like you know I think that if I I get asked all the”

time well how are you guys actually acting on this research it's really smart it's really insightful but like what what how should it change my strategy and and I think my singular answer to that question

is more is more and more video um you are never going to regret making more video for today

the way today's internet operates um I think Kyle's art put this study out a couple weeks last week around just how much Cory Booker is just turning out video and constantly putting things out and it's like earning him a ton of of awesome you know goodwill on the internet um you are never going to regret doing more but I think that requires a fundamental shift in um we need to stop editing ourselves on the front end we need to stop putting things things through 20 rounds of

legal compliance research review and and just start putting things on the internet and seeing what sticks the internet is a place where we have a lot to learn we need to stop thinking of it out it as just a distribution channel and instead think about it as a place where we can do a lot of good in listening and observing um how people are responding to our content Daniel what I feel thank you so much for joining us thank you for nerding out with me on my favourite topic in the world

um this has been so much fun we will be watching what you guys are doing through the rest of this election and the next thank you so much thank you talk soon pausing america is a quick media production our show is produced by Austin Fisher Saul Rubin McKenna Roberts in Ferris Safari with Reacherland, Elijah Cohen and Adrian Hill our team includes Matt DeGroat then have code Jordan Cantor Charlotte Landis David tolls

meacelmond Ryan Young and Naomi single our staff is probably unionized with the writers killed of america east.