Donald J. Trump’s super PAC called them the streaming persuadables.
It was shorthand for some of the most important voters of the 2024 election — the sliver of truly undecided voters who they believed skewed young and diverse, and disproportionately consumed content on streaming services like Max, Tubi and Roku.
Both broadcast and cable television allow campaigns to advertise almost exclusively by where voters live or what programs they are watching. But many of the ascendant streaming services and smart TVs allow advertisers to be far more precise — down to picking specific individuals to serve ads to.
How the leading Trump super PAC and his campaign targeted these streamers provided a critical yet unseen edge in Mr. Trump’s sweeping victory last month. It helped the Trump team make up for Kamala Harris’s mammoth financial advantage and narrow its dollars and focus on the roughly 14 percent of battleground-state voters it had identified as swayable.
The Harris side, awash in cash, mostly ran streaming television ads the old-fashioned way — targeting by geography.
“In the seven states, we were talking to 6.3 million people — they were talking to 44.7 million,” explained David Lee, a top pollster for the super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc. “There’s roughly 38 million people that they’re hitting who’ve already made up their mind. So I don’t care how much more money you have than us to spend, you’re wasting 85 percent of your money.”
Practically every presidential election brings about a technological leap or innovation in how campaigns target key voters.
The re-election campaign of George W. Bush pioneered using the partisan tilt of particular cable networks to find Republicans on, for instance, the Golf Channel. The Barack Obama campaigns went further, dividing cable programming into dozens of segments to air cost-effective ads when swing voters were likeliest to watch. The first Trump campaign leveraged Facebook to run tens of thousands of variations to elevate only the most effective ads.
The 2024 presidential race is the first when streaming services with ads were drawing big enough audiences to matter. By October 2024, Nielsen had estimated that streaming made up 40 percent of TV viewing. And while not every platform allows ads to be matched to individuals — one of the biggest streaming services, YouTube TV, does not — enough do to have made a meaningful difference, according to Trump campaign and super PAC officials.
“It saved us an enormous amount of money,” said Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s campaign managers. “You’re targeting by house.”
Both sides spent heavily on traditional broadcast ads, too, of course. But the Trump side layered its advertising strategy to serve fewer streaming ads to those it believed were seeing ads on other channels, and more to those who were not.
Mr. Trump’s return to the White House was driven by a host of big, systemic causes: inflation, immigration and a general unhappiness with the direction of the nation after four years of Democratic rule. But in a race where Ms. Harris spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks — a sum that threatened to bury Mr. Trump under an avalanche of advertising — even some people close to the Harris campaign have privately conceded that the Trump operation found a clever way to narrow the financial chasm.
“The Democrats didn’t have to be creative because they had so much money they could be stupid with it,” said Chris Grant, a consultant for the Trump super PAC. “We needed to make our money go farther.”
The undecided-voter list
Even before Mr. Trump had secured the Republican nomination, his operation had obsessed over finding ways to offset the expected Democratic money edge. The campaign deployed creative bookkeeping to offload payroll and rally costs. Door-knocking operations were coordinated with outside groups.
But at the very top of the list was finding ways to spend money on ads efficiently.
Tony Fabrizio, who began the year as the lead pollster for Make America Great Again Inc., commissioned a 20,000-person survey in early 2024 to study not just who was genuinely persuadable in the swing states but also how they got their news.
The findings were a revelation.
The swing vote in 2024 skewed younger, and more Black and Hispanic, than usual, the survey found. And crucially, a disproportionate share of those undecided or swayable voters could be found on streaming services. Roughly half of them used such services exclusively, and another third used streaming in addition to more traditional television.
The Trump super PAC team drew up a plan to target these so-called streaming persuadables relentlessly. It worked with political modelers to pair the polling data with consumer information and match it to the voter rolls in the seven swing states.
The end result was an actual list of 6.3 million individual voters. It amounted to the team’s best guess of the universe of undecided voters who would ultimately decide the 2024 election — and now it could target them on streaming television, in their mailboxes, by phone and at their doors.
By the summer, MAGA Inc. was on the airwaves in four states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona — and focusing on these streamers in all four, according to officials involved in the effort, which was overseen at the time by Taylor Budowich, the super PAC’s chief executive.
The super PAC’s internal polls showed that Mr. Trump was up by seven percentage points among these streaming persuadables in those four states — compared with only a one-point lead in the other three battleground states. Even more revealing was the fact that Mr. Trump was ahead by six points among that group in Nevada.
In that state, the Trump super PAC was exclusively running streaming ads. It was seen as an early sign of the effectiveness of the targeting, officials said.
The research done by the super PAC soon informed the campaign, too, in part because of the nation’s increasingly porous campaign-finance rules. Mr. Fabrizio, previously the super PAC’s chief pollster, migrated to the campaign not long after the study was commissioned. And Mr. Budowich had followed him there by August. In other words, the research paid for by the super PAC and the people who oversaw the work wound up at the campaign.
The campaign had been conducting its own, similar research, led by Tim Saler, its data guru, and they merged their findings.
“We were data on steroids,” Mr. LaCivita said.
Still, there were clear risks to the Trump approach. Chief among them was whether the data that undergirded all that targeting was actually reliable. If the Trump team was serving ads to all the wrong voters, the results could be disastrous.
“The bottom line was we either win because our modeling was right, or we would lose because it was wrong,” Mr. LaCivita said.
‘Over and over and over again’
The Biden turned Harris campaign had conducted similar studies to ferret out who was persuadable, what programming they watched and even whom they trusted most.
It was one of the reasons that the businessman Mark Cuban was dispatched so publicly — he was trusted by these swayable voters — and that celebrities like Magic Johnson and Julia Roberts made appearances on the campaign trail for the vice president. One intriguing Harris finding was that Dolly Parton was the most trusted surrogate among swing voters, according to people familiar with the research, though Ms. Parton never took sides in the presidential race.
But when it came to running television ads, the Harris campaign had so much money that it did not treat streaming television much differently from cable or broadcast. The main pro-Harris super PAC, Future Forward, did run some individually targeted ads on streaming services, which are known as connected TV or CTV in the industry. But the group said that in its testing as many as 60 percent of voters were mismatched on those platforms.
Still, officials with the Trump super PAC were incredulous when they heard in September that the Harris campaign was targeting ads on streaming services only by where voters lived.
“I did not believe it because it makes no sense,” Mr. Grant said.
That month, the Harris side was outspending the Trump side on television ads by roughly 60 percent, according to data from the tracking service AdImpact. But the Trump super PAC team felt it remained competitive because of how often the most important 14 percent of voters were seeing its ads.
“We hit them over and over and over again,” Mr. Lee, the super PAC pollster, said. All told, he said, the super PAC spent roughly $80 million on streaming advertisements, which are subject to far less public disclosure than traditional television ads, or even ads on the biggest social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram.
Streaming ads have one other advantage that stretches the dollar further: Unlike traditional TV ads, streaming spots do not require super PACs to pay a premium to reserve them.
While the research had shown that about 83 percent of the potential persuadable voters could be reached by at least some kind of streaming service, that left a critical 17 percent who could not. The Trump super PAC team tried to adjust its mix of ads on an almost person-to-person basis.
“If you are already getting broadcast, we’re not feeding you as much streaming,” Mr. Lee said. “If you are unreachable by streaming and cable, we’re going at you through mail and text.”
In the final stage of the race, the super PAC’s targeting even incorporated whether voters had cast early ballots. Officials sifted through voting records in the states that updated them daily and removed those people who had cast ballots from their list of voters to see ads. It was all part of a bid to make the final remaining dollars go as far as possible.
Steve Passwaiter, a political advertising consultant who was not involved in the 2024 race, said none of this was possible just eight years ago, when streaming ads were a vanishingly small share of political advertising.
“We can take this tool we used to use like a shotgun — and spray and pray,” Mr. Passwaiter said of television ads. “Now, you’ve got this very precise tool.”
“It’s a new game now,” he added.
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