Hacker News Reader

Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

The solution is to not allow targeting for political ads. Costs will go up as you'll be competing for same eyes, and you'll have to spend more to reach everyone you want - plus has added benefit of allowing to see what messaging and narratives opposition is perpetuating.

View on HN

How is this even remotely practical? You're only allowed to have political ads on nationally shown TV programs? Choosing to show an ad in Wisconsin and not California is "targeting".

I think only allowing the advert to be targeted at the level that the campaign is being run in is reasonable.

i.e. if you are campaigning for Governor of NY, you can target New York state, but you can't target Manhattan, or Long Island, or men over 50, or people who liked the NRA.

that would kill list building and fundraising which are large digital expenditures. non-presidentials barely spend on digital persuasion but they will spend on fundraising if it raises

Killing those things might not be a negative...

Doing so would destroy the ability of non-establishment candidates representing salient issues, e.g. police violence in particular communities, from effectively running grassroots campaigns.

Only if money remained the engine of political campaigns. But if others can't raise money either, then I think that helps the grass-roots candidates.

People who already have money could just spend it directly in that world, couldn't they?

They already do in this one. I will admit it would give the rich more of an edge.

So about the only allowed form of advertising is mail addressed to "Occupant" sent to every postal address that is in the jurisdiction the office represents?

Nearly everything else will generally only reach a subset of the voters, and that subset will have known demographic differences from the overall voter demographics for the jurisdiction.

Run an ad at in the 8-8:30 PM Sunday slot on every FOX TV station in a state, for example, and you'll get quite a different demographic than if you ran an ad on those same stations on Sunday afternoon. The first ad would be during "The Simpsons" and the second would probably be during an NFL football game.

It might be a solution although I think regulating this specific form of political ads would have unintended negative consequences.

I think things like hard cap campaign contribution limits (as in overall campaign fundraising cap rather than by donor type) could do more good to even the playing field. And it should reduce the web of "IOUs" that elected officials come into office with.

super pacs and citizen united are the problem.

The choice of what issues to run on is in itself targetting regardless of where it is run. I am not sure what good that would even do given it is already well known that political stances at rallies vary by venue.

This will only help existing parties stay in power, and new parties will be doomed to fail.

Look into Andrew Yang's policy proposals - Ranked Choice Voting and Democracy Dollars in particular.

And for those platforms it’s a plus as well (more political ad income) given the poor quality of the average eyeball.

Interesting question arises - does advertising to Republicans or Democrats cost more or less than the other? Either way the mechanism would be good to level the playing field further.

That's a good question, the only thing I could find (and take it with a grain of salt) was that Trump spent $5 per vote compared to Clinton's $10 per vote if you assume all the money they raised was spent. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-spending/at-...

It is interesting to think of campaign efficiency (or propaganda efficiency lol) as CPV (cost per vote) to make it parallel to advertising metrics like CPC and CPI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com