How to Reach the Unreachable Voter

**Dan Pfeiffer** (0:20)
Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Today I'm joined by Danielle Butterfield, the Executive Director of Priorities USA, one of the largest and most important super PACs in Democratic politics.
Priorities USA does a lot of essential digital work in the party, building infrastructure, investing in research and data, and running ads to reach the voters campaigns often struggle to reach. They're in the midst of a massive study about how less engaged voters are getting their information on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and even AI chatbots. The platforms that will decide the 2028 election whether we like it or not. Priorities has already started a $30 million campaign to define the 2028 Republicans like JD Vance and Marco Rubio.
I invited Danielle on the podcast to unpack that research and talk about what they've learned. We dove into their findings, talked about how the media environment has changed to the 2024 election and broke down some of the ads that are already running. It was a great conversation and we'll get to it in a minute. But before we do, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Friends of the Pod. Subscribers get access to the single best show produced at Crooked Media, Polar Coaster with me, Dan Pfeiffer. I was forced to say that by producers, but I really do like the show and I think you'll like it too. This week on Polar Coaster, we discussed Angie Nixon's upset win in Florida, new polling in the Michigan Senate race, and a strange fake polling scandal in the LA Mayoral race. And while I have you out there subscribing to truly great content, check out my sub-stack message box where I break down what is happening in politics. You can find it all at crooked.com/yeswedan or subscribe to Friends of the Pod at crooked.com/friends. All right, here's my conversation with Danielle Butterfield. Danielle Butterfield, welcome to Pod Save America.

**Danielle Butterfield** (1:49)
Thanks for having me.

**Dan Pfeiffer** (1:51)
All right, so excited to talk to you. Thanks for doing this. Priorities has been working on a whole bunch of things that are really interesting to me. I want to talk to you about the study you've done on less politically engaged voters. I want to talk to you about how you're thinking about ads. And I really want to talk to you about why you are already spending money to try to win the 2028 election in the middle of the 2026 election. We're going to do all of that. I'm going to level set on a couple of things first.
For people who've been around politics as long as I have, they remember Priorities USA as sort of the Democratic Super PAC spending tens of millions of dollars to elect Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton spending money for Joe Biden. That's not what Priorities USA is now. So maybe talk a little bit about who you are and what you guys are doing so our audience understands.

**Danielle Butterfield** (2:36)
Yeah. So I joined the Priorities USA team back in 2017, fresh off the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Priorities, up until that point, had been operating, like you said, as a presidential super PAC. But in the aftermath of 2016, one of the most urgent, quickest realizations that folks had about why we lost was just how little Democrats had invested on digital compared to television. So the Priorities team got some funding to stay open beyond the presidential and really investigate why that is. So that's when I joined the team. I became our digital director alongside a bunch of other really smart people and we made it our mission to really diagnose and understand why the Democratic Party is so severely under invest in digital, but then also to actually close the gap too, to raise a bunch of money to spend on digital.
Flash forward to where we are today. I like to say that we are anchored as a presidential organization, but we really have gotten to a point where we're using the midterm elections and special elections to really prepare and get better and innovate and try new things, so that by the time the next presidential election rolls around, we're like that much more ready for it. So that's how we would think about us today.

**Dan Pfeiffer** (3:50)
I know the presidential election seemed like a million years away for a lot of people, but as I like to point out that if we follow the previous schedule, exactly one year from now, there will be Democrats and Republicans on stage in debates. Actually this thing will be often running the day after the midterms. So people should be prepared for that.
So just also to level set here, as you point out, in 2017, you're worried about the digital gap in working on it. After the 2024 election, there was this widespread consensus that Democrats had once again been outmaneuvered digitally. There's all the talk about all the podcasts that Trump did and how they were using the Internet to target these less engaged voters. I think that there was a general sincerity among a lot of people in the party to try to close the gap, even if they didn't know exactly how to do it or how the gap got there. 18 months after that election, where do you see things? Has the party made real improvements here? How much work needs to be done?