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Shining a light on political ads

WSU’s Travis Ridout and others are working to bring more transparency to the sophisticated, evolving advertising campaigns politicians are doing online

With a little more than a year to go until the 2024 general election, voters can expect to see a tsunami of political ads in the coming months.

AdImpact, a firm that tracks ad spending, recently projected political advertising will top $10.2 billion during the 2023-24 election cycle. That’s an increase of 13% compared to 2020, and nearly four times the amount spent in 2016.

Travis Ridout, the director of Washington State University’s School of Politics, Philosophy and Public [Affairs], said much of the spending will go toward digital ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

In recent years, campaigns have also begun allocating a larger and larger percentage of their budgets to online video streaming services.

This explosion in digital advertisements is raising concerns among democracy advocates. Because the online platforms are largely unregulated, it’s hard to track who’s paying for the ads, what they’re saying or how they’re trying to influence voters.

Ridout is part of a multiinstitute team of researchers who want to bring more transparency to the issue. They recently received a National Science Foundation grant to help expand their efforts to monitor online political advertising.

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The Lewiston Tribune
Pullman-Moscow Daily News

FTX chatted about $500K in ‘dark money’ support after Sen. Murray fundraiser

Last August, as she was seeking reelection to a sixth term against a well-funded Republican challenger, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray stopped by an intimate political fundraiser at a swanky Washington, D.C., town house. The host of the event benefiting Murray’s campaign was Gabe Bankman-Fried, the younger brother of disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

A few months later, Gabe Bankman-Fried, his brother, and other top executives at FTX discussed a $500,000 “dark” money transfer “to help Murray,” according to encrypted chat messages revealed by prosecutors this week at the federal fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried in Manhattan.

Campaign finance experts say there are a range of legal options for wealthy donors to discreetly employ dark money to influence politics and policy. Dark money donors can engage in fundraising conversations with a super PAC that’s supportive of a candidate, rather than a candidate’s direct campaign staff, said Anna Massoglia, editorial and investigations manager at OpenSecrets.

Donations can also be routed to dark money groups that spend on thinly veiled “issue” advertising campaigns, rather than ads that directly urge people to vote for a certain candidate. This money would not be reported as a donation for a candidate to the FEC.

A line campaigns must not cross is a promise of money in exchange for policy change, said Washington State University political science professor Travis Ridout.

Ridout, who reviewed the Signal chats filed in the Bankman-Fried trial at the request of The Seattle Times, said it was difficult to tell what exactly was going on with “Murray folks” and the $500,000.

“One concern that I think would be illegal is a quid pro quo,” Ridout said. “You give this money, presumably a 501(c)(4) gets this money in exchange for you doing something for me. I don’t know if anything like that happened or not.”

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The Seattle Times

 

The Supreme Court starts its new term with dismal approval ratings

Public opinion of the court is strongly polarized along partisan lines.

At the time of publication, an average of 38 percent of Americans approved of the job the Supreme Court is doing while 54 percent disapproved, for an average net approval rating of -16 percentage points.

Some of the major cases the court will take up in the next few months include challenges to the Chevron doctrine, a somewhat arcane precedent that would severely restrict the government’s regulatory powers if overturned, and a law restricting access to guns for individuals subject to domestic violence orders. There’s also a lawsuit challenging the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a case dealing with retaliations against whistleblowers. Another case that hasn’t officially been taken up, but that the court is almost certain to hear, is an appeal of a district court ruling restricting access to the common abortion drug mifepristone. The high court put that ruling on hold temporarily while it considers whether to hear the case.

“I think these are fairly normal cases, and they’re not going to shake public opinion up too much,” particularly among those who already have unfavorable opinions of the court, said Michael Salamone, a political scientist at Washington State University who studies public opinion and the Supreme Court. Unless there are a lot of surprising liberal decisions in the next term that cut against the court’s conservative image, Salamone argued, the needle isn’t likely to move much. Any of these cases could result in surprising coalitions or more backroom deal-making between swing justices. But as long as the court’s rulings remain as ideologically extreme as it’s been the past few years, expect the public’s polarized — and negative — views of the institution to remain.

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ABC News/538

Is Utah a model for disagreeing respectfully?

The nation is in a period of ‘extended conflict, partisan conflict, deep division,’ which one Washington university professor says has been more the norm over the course of our nation’s history.

There’s ample evidence of the nation’s deep divisions.

Nicholas Lovrich.
Lovrich

“This is the situation we find ourselves in: People screaming at one another. People are wondering, ‘How is it that we got to this place?’ We’ve been experiencing a pretty long period of being able to get along, in the moderate middle really calling the shots. When that sort of goes away, then you start worrying about things even as deep down as civil war,” said Washington State University Regents and Emeritus Professor Nicholas P. Lovrich.

Lovrich, a panelist on a University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics forum titled “To Respectfully Disagree: Civility in Government,” said the nation has gone through long periods of bad conduct in the past.

“We’ve had a duel. We’ve had a caning on the floor of the Senate. We’ve had periods of time when we were so divided in (our) politics that it led to a lot of violence in the streets,” Lovrich said on Wednesday.

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Desert News

 

How the Post Office could decide the presidency in 2024

The result of the next US presidential election could be decided by the efficiency of the humble postal service.

Since the coronavirus pandemic, voting by mail has become the norm for millions of Americans, and the practice is now central to each political party’s path to the White House. As legislative battles rage across the country over laws governing the practice, new research suggests that the performance of the postal service can have a small but noticeable impact on election turnout.

Michael Ritter.
Ritter

“Across the board, this study shows that having better postal administration makes it more likely there will be more positive voter turnout outcomes linked to all mail voting laws,” said researcher Michael Ritter, of Washington State University, who published the study in the Election Law Journal this summer.

“Postal service administration is important for shaping the ability of people to vote by mail,” Mr Ritter told The Independent. “For example, it can capture, you know, how easily or readily people are able to receive election mail at their homes, how quickly that mail is transported to distribution facilities and to election ballot counting sites,” he added.

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The Independent