Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer launched a taxpayer-funded ad campaign about voting featuring himself earlier this month.
The ads discuss the county’s voter dashboard, beballotready.vote, and assert that his office will clean up voter rolls. The ads were placed on broadcast TV, radio, and YouTube — including during conservative podcasts — Facebook, X, Instagram, and Reddit.
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A group known as the Change for Arizona 2024 PAC (CFAPAC) filed a complaint to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I) Thursday, alleging that she had misused her campaign funds.
“Specifically, Complainant alleges that Senator Sinema, through her Committees, illegally diverted funds that were donated to her for campaigning for federal office by making expenditures for her personal use and benefit,” according to the complaint.
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As the heated Arizona gubernatorial campaign between Trump-endorsed Kari Lake and Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs continues, Lake is pulling ahead with spending related to her campaign. Through a funding maneuver, Republicans figured out how to adjust their TV ad buys in order to get better purchasing power, allowing them to obtain more than double the spots Democrats had purchased. At the same time, independent expenditures (IEs) in the race greatly favor Lake over Hobbs by over four to one.
The Republican Governors Association (RGA) has spent over $4 million on ads attacking Hobbs. That strategy is shifting, as the RGA has decided to coordinate with the Yuma Republican Party in order to get more out of their money. Since candidates and their local political parties get better airtime rates than outside groups, the RGA will fund the Yuma GOP $6.5 million to buy a total of $7.1 million in ads through election day on Nov. 8. State law allows political parties to coordinate with candidates, not out-of-state independent expenditure (IE) organizations. The first ad attacked Hobbs on border security and the second ad on taxes and spending.
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New financial data from AdImpact details that the Georgia U.S. Senate race between Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker is set to become one of the most expensive in the country.
According to the media tracking company, Warnock has already reserved millions in TV ads leading up to the November midterm elections.
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Various outside groups and campaigns have spent millions to project their supported candidate in the Ohio 15th Congressional District special election, but many signs point to rather low voter turnout in the approaching August 3 primary.
According to the Ohio Secretary of State’s office, approximately 3,900 people had voted early or returned absentee ballots through Friday with only one week left to cast an early ballot.
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How much money did Democrats squander on hopeless campaigns based on the foolish expectation that Joe Biden would lead a “blue wave” landslide sweeping Republicans out of office at every level? While we must wait for final vote counts to know who won the presidency — this takes time, considering that some Biden voters have been dead for more than 30 years — we can begin to tabulate the cash total Democrats threw away on other campaigns that were inarguably doomed from the outset.
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by Rob Garver In 1895, Mark Hanna, a U.S. senator from Ohio, explained how politics worked in his times: “There are two things that are important in politics,” he said. “The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.” Nearly 125 years later, things haven’t changed much. In every two-year federal election cycle in the U.S., candidates and their supporters spend billions of dollars to raise their public profiles, get their messages out, and discredit their opponents. By the best available estimates, the 2016 presidential elections cost $2.4 billion when spending by candidates and various interest groups are combined. And, by all accounts, it would have been much more except for Donald Trump’s unique campaign strategy, which relied in large part on “earned” (read: free) media coverage rather than paid advertisements. That’s an astounding amount of money — larger than the economies of dozens of countries around the world in that same year, including Lesotho, Bhutan and Belize. If you add in spending by candidates for other federal offices — members of the House of Representatives and the Senate — the total figure skyrockets to about $6.5 billion. Surge in campaign spending Historically, this is…
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