Peter Hamby goes inside Priorities USA’s latest research project: a deep dive into what voters are actually searching for across Google, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini – and how that data is shaping Priorities’ 2028 strategy with their Republican definition program: Prologue. 

Key takeaways:

  • Priorities USA recently analyzed 6 million search events by U.S. adults and found that only 1.7 percent of them could be classified as political or even politically adjacent – a reminder that politics takes up only a miniscule share of most Americans’ attention.
  • This research is fueling Prologue, Priorities’ $30 million paid and organic digital media program launched in June targeting Vance and Rubio ahead of 2028. In addition to search histories, the group mined negative YouTube comments and comedians’ mockery of both men to shape satirical animated ads aimed at 18- to 44-year-olds in the upper Midwest and Sunbelt.
  • The searches that do matter most aren’t about candidates – they’re personal and economic. Priorities found the highest-value search activity centered on cost-of-living concerns like gas prices and job searches, along with public benefits like Medicaid and student loans.
  • Priorities’ President, Danielle Butterfield, says Democrats have been slow to do what brand advertisers do every day: use behavioral data to reach people with relevant messaging in the moments that actually matter to them.
  • Priorities’ Polling Director, Campbell Chupik, points to recent polling misses as proof of the problem: the most politically engaged voters are also the most likely to answer pollsters, which skews the picture of the broader electorate. Priorities is augmenting their polling program with additional behavioral data sources, like search, to tell a well-rounded story. 
  • When Americans this summer searched for information on the contaminated lettuce outbreak, Priorities went up with ads tying the story directly to CDC cuts under Trump and Vance – a real-time example of the model in action.
  • The research is also reshaping how Priorities talks about the economy. Chatbot conversations showed people describing financial stress in blunt, personal terms – Butterfield’s team found that swapping out Beltway phrasing like “make ends meet” for how voters actually talk, calling things “expensive,” was a far more resonant way to talk to voters about cost of living.

Read more below:

Puck: YouTube ’28 & The Search for the Swing Voter

As the next presidential race looms, Democratic operatives have begun studying how to reach less politically engaged swing voters on the platforms that may determine the next election—TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and even ChatGPT. And they’re already strategizing about how to leverage their search activity to create ads blaming Vance and Rubio for everything from high gas prices to contaminated lettuce.

Priorities USA is hoping to leverage these search histories to craft relevant political ads that can be served back to voters quickly, even when they aren’t looking for political content. 

Priorities USA, one of the largest Democratic super PACs, has placed all its chips on the 2028 campaign, under the theory that someone on the blue team needs to be devoting resources to making ads that scuff up J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio while the party sorts through its own family-feud primary fight. But beneath that goal is a riddle that Priorities has been trying to solve since 2024: How do you reach voters in a media world where viewing habits are fragmented across social platforms and chatbots and streamers—especially those less-engaged voters who tend to sway presidential elections? “We are trying to figure out where people are spending their time if they’re not choosing to spend it on politics,” Priorities polling director Campbell Chupik told me.

Since the Obama years, when it was launched, Priorities USA has reinvented itself as a digital laboratory of sorts, studying how less-engaged voters spend their time across platforms, listening to them, and testing how best to reach those voters with relevant, real-time advertising. (Earlier this year I wrote about the company’s efforts to reimagine YouTube ads for Democrats.) Priorities’ latest research project, shared exclusively with Puck, investigated “search.” Not just on Google—that’s hardly the ball game anymore. Rather, what voters are searching for everywhere—on TikTok and Instagram, of course, but also on A.I. platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Perhaps most crucially, Priorities USA is hoping to leverage these search histories to craft relevant political ads that can be served back to voters quickly, even when they aren’t looking for political content. “Whenever you’re getting advertising from anyone in the corporate world who wants your attention or your money, the ads often feel pretty relevant to your day-to-day,” said Danielle Butterfield, the group’s executive director. “You’re training for a marathon, and Nike is using your behavioral data to sell you shoes. You are pregnant, Target knows before you do, and they decide to sell you diapers. Brand advertisers, for the most part, are very good at using your behavioral data to advertise to you in moments of contextual relevance. Our worldview is that political advertisers are not doing that at all.”

Priorities USA spent the summer digging into the search behavior of registered voters, combining a large June poll with an unusually valuable trove of opt-in search histories collected between August 2024 and March 2026 by an outside data firm that analyzes how consumers behave on their devices and favorite platforms. Priorities analyzed millions of searches across Google, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Gemini, and ChatGPT. The top finding won’t surprise card-carrying members of the Twitter Isn’t Real Life crowd: Among the 6 million observed search events by U.S. adults across those platforms, only 1.7 percent could be defined as political or even politically adjacent.

Intriguingly, however, the most valuable searches were in that bucket of politically adjacent concerns—not queries about Donald Trump or Zohran Mamdani, but more personal searches about the cost of living (gas prices, “jobs near me”) and public benefits (Medicaid, student loans), or searches that have been spiking in the recent inflationary years. “It’s a helpful reality check for those of us who are very tuned in to politics,” said Chupik. “We all know and have seen, of course, these recent polling misses [in Michigan and Wisconsin] and know that the most–politically interested voters are just far more likely to respond to polls.”

A recent example: Millions of Americans this summer searched for information about contaminated lettuce and the “explosive diarrhea” outbreak that followed. “We went up with ads responding specifically to people who were searching for more information about the outbreak, and we tied it specifically to the cuts that were made to the C.D.C. under Trump and J.D. Vance, really holding Vance’s feet to the fire there, as part of our broader 2028 program,” Butterfield told me.

Priorities USA’s June poll also asked registered voters about their search habits, the platforms they use, and the videos they watch. Some 46 percent said they actively seek out political news online—that group was older, better educated, and more likely to be highly invested in politics. But a majority (54 percent) said they do not actively seek out political news. Many (42 percent), representing a group that skewed younger, said they do so passively. And 12 percent were categorized as “news avoiders,” a group that over-indexed with parent-aged women.

Officials at Priorities USA told me that they aren’t as interested in active news seekers, who are already obsessed with politics and swamped with messaging from both parties at every turn. Instead, Priorities wants to understand swing voters and less-engaged voters, who traditionally pay little attention to politics until November rolls around every four years. Those voters, of course, tipped the election to Trump in 2024. “A big story here is that moments when election news actually breaks through, those are pretty rare,” Chupik said. “People search for where to vote every four years. There are also rare events, like the Charlie Kirk event last year, when you see a search spike, but that’s very unusual. Most of the time, searches are about economic needs that are constant and personal.”

Where do less-engaged voters spend their time? Obviously not where the political junkies hang out. “Smaller, more partisan platforms like Bluesky and Truth Social, less than 10 percent of voters use those platforms,” Chupik told me. While political elites obsess over podcasts and X, normie voters generally don’t hang out there either. The platforms most heavily used by persuadable voters—the ones who aren’t political-news junkies—include YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, along with video streaming and terrestrial AM/FM/Spanish-language radio, which remains an underrated audience powerhouse.

Then there are TikTok and Snapchat. Priorities USA found that both video platforms offer campaigns, Republican and Democrat, that are target-rich environments for reaching younger, drop-off voters who don’t skew too partisan in either direction. (The Snapchat finding warmed my heart: When I worked at Snap, I ranted to campaign operatives for years about the platform’s massive, persuadable audience base in purple and red states. The smart ones listened—I see you, Rob Flaherty.)

As for content categories, Priorities USA has found that comedy and business/finance content lean more Republican. Democrats are more likely to watch political news and video content about the arts—books, dance, design. But most American viewers, those without a strong partisan tilt, watch content about food, sports, self-help, pranks, memes, D.I.Y. and gardening, science and history, and health and fitness. Those are the cultural spaces where Priorities tries to play ball, by combining its data sets with the ability to narrowcast to niche voting groups on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snap, rather than by relying on voter files and TV markets that don’t provide much about a person’s specific behaviors or real-world concerns. The trick, though, is coming up with the kind of creative that can capitalize on its precious data—specifically, political ads that don’t repel people who just want to binge their Dude Perfect videos or Architectural Digest house tours in peace.

________________________________

Past Is Prologue

When I last wrote about Priorities USA, in April, the group had just run a test flight of YouTube ads in Ohio, targeting apolitical young men who play video games: brief interstitial spots attacking Republican Sen. Jon Husted and linking him to rising energy bills. Last winter, during the holidays, Priorities also targeted G.O.P. Rep. Scott Perry in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District with newsboost-style YouTube and Instagram ads, along with a creator program, blaming Perry for rising food prices just as voters in Harrisburg and York were buying their Thanksgiving turkeys.

In June, Priorities USA began its 2028 campaign against potential G.O.P. presidential candidates with a $30 million paid media program called Prologue. To shape satirical animated ads aimed at 18- to 44-year-old voters in the upper Midwest and Sunbelt, Priorities mined negative YouTube comments about Vance and Rubio, as well as comedians’ mockery of both men. (The Priorities analysis found that Vance was the object of far more jokes and derision than Rubio, who was viewed positively in most YouTube comments.)

Butterfield pointed out the value of using search signals across the internet to listen to voters, rather than relying solely on traditional polling questions or platforms dominated by political junkies. “It’s a subtle shift between asking voters what they care about to really listening to the internet—to infer what voters care about,” Butterfield told me. It might seem obvious, but there are meaningful differences between how normal Americans and political insiders talk. That’s where the increasingly popular A.I. chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini come in. On politically adjacent topics, people used Google to navigate government resources, check prices, and seek status updates—questions like “Is the government still shut down?” or “gas prices near me.”

But on ChatGPT and Gemini, the data shows that Americans are asking more comprehensive questions and revealing more of their personal stories than they would in a search on Google or TikTok. They discussed their economic situations, job qualifications, and professional backgrounds, financial planning, eligibility for benefits, and, of course, a lot of raw personal distress. A confession from one of their chatbot histories—“i feel like i am drowning in my credit card debt”—is a reminder of how sterile phrases like “affordability” and “the cost of living” can sound beside the emotional pressure of daily life.

Butterfield pointed to a recent draft of an ad script in their office that included the phrase “We need to make ends meet.” The group changed the wording based on their trove of search histories. “Most people don’t use that language,” Butterfield said. “We were able to use this data to be able to say, ‘Actually, the number one way that people describe their current lives is they say it’s expensive.’ That’s just a better word. Getting Democrats to sound accessible when we’re talking about the economy, that’s where we’re struggling. We need better entry points to talk about economic issues in terms that are much more salient with voters.”