Lesser-Known Candidates In Challenging Environments

For months, the only certainty about the 2024 election was that it was going to be close, from the top of the ballot on down. House Majority PAC tapped us as their digital partner for some of the most competitive races in the nation. Only one of those races had a Democratic incumbent — for the rest, we would have to attack our opponents while introducing lesser-known candidates.

Advanced Targeting To Deliver Essential Messages

To break through to oversaturated voters in battleground districts, we pushed our digital strategies to new levels. Compared to the previous cycle, we expanded investments in OTT and YouTube to address the electorate’s fragmented media consumption habits. We also used programmatic ad buys to split districts by ZIP code and manage frequencies within each one.

We ran separate tracks for specific demographic groups, where needed. In CA-45, we served nuanced messaging specifically to Vietnamese voters and targeted ZIP codes where the community overindexed, instead of treating AAPI voters as a monolith. In some districts, we trafficked more than 30 pieces of unique creative, requiring extremely close coordination and communication with the client, their other consultants, and other independent expenditure organizations working in the same district.

We produced positive, negative, and contrast ads to cut down support for Republicans and boost name recognition and favorability for Democrats including Derek Tran and Kristen McDonald Rivet. When new guidance came to us through the red box, we jumped into action, turning even the most convoluted attacks into memorable 15- and 30-second ads.

Our positive ads were essential, as many of our candidates were running in expensive media markets where their campaigns couldn’t carry those messages themselves. Our ads effectively countered Republican attacks about crime and immigration, even in an election where these attacks were especially salient.

Hard-Fought Wins Where Digital Made The Difference

We won five of our nine battleground races, holding OH-09, keeping MI-08’s open seat blue, and flipping CA-45, CA-13, and NY-19. These were hard-fought wins: Three of our target districts were among the four closest races in the nation, decided by tenths of a percentage point. In these razor- thin races, our digital persuasion and mobilization efforts got Democrats over the finish line.

We’re proud of the difference we made. In OH-09, our candidate narrowly won, even as Sherrod Brown came up short and Kamala Harris lost the district by nearly 7 points. And in CA-13, we helped the Democrat eke out a victory by 187 votes.

By narrowing Republicans’ House majority, we laid the groundwork for reclaiming the House in 2026 — and helped contain the damage Donald Trump can inflict in his second term.