The Liberal Super PAC is shifting its focus entirely to digital

Priorities USA, one of the largest liberal super PACs, will not run any television ads during the 2024 election cycle.

Instead, the group announced Tuesday, Priorities USA is recasting itself as a digital political strategy operation, the culmination of a yearslong transition from its supporting role in presidential campaigns to a full-service communications, research and training giant for Democrats on and down in the mood. .

The move reflects a broad shift in media consumption over the past decade, away from traditional broadcast channels and toward a fragmented online world. It also shows the growing role big money groups play in shaping campaigns and American political life: Priorities USA says it will spend $75 million on digital “communications, research and infrastructure” in the coming year.

“We’ve learned that the Internet is moving too quickly for the traditional campaign apparatus to keep up in two-year cycles,” Danielle Butterfield, the group’s executive director, said in an interview. “We have committed to not only closing the gaps, but also building infrastructure. We do not just focus on investments with one candidate.”

She added, “I think we’re teaching people how to fish.”

Ms. Butterfield said more than half of that $75 million would be direct investments to support President Biden’s reelection efforts and the campaigns of other Democrats down the ballot. Those plans, she said, will also include “embedded experiments” that will provide feedback on how people respond to their efforts.

The organization said it was developing relationships with influencers and other “content creators” to spread campaign messages on platforms like TikTok. The group has also been working on “contextual targeting,” which it defined as presenting ads to voters based on what they were watching on their devices at any given time.

Priorities USA also has a nonprofit focused on litigation and voter protection.

Because of its size, the organization has essentially no colleagues or competitors in its new role, but Ms. Butterfield compared its new focus to that of the Center for Campaign Innovation, a conservative nonprofit — not a super PAC — that focuses on digital politics.

Eric Wilson, the founder of the Center for Campaign Innovation, said Priorities USA’s change in focus “clearly demonstrates that the way campaigns are going is around content creation and digital platforms.” While television advertising is still the best way to get a message across to most people, he says, “we’re seeing diminishing returns from television advertising – it’s becoming more expensive and less effective.”

“Media fragmentation is a major challenge for campaigns,” Mr. Wilson said, noting that the Center for Campaign Innovation does not work with campaigns. “You have platforms that ban political advertisements. How do we teach campaigns to create their own content? In a world focused on blocking political messages, what are some ways to distribute political ads?”

He added: “We spend a lot of time and investment figuring out how voters get information and why they make decisions.” (The Center for Campaign Innovation does not work with any campaigns.)

Priorities USA was founded in 2011 and supported Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign. It has relied on the support of major Democratic donors; in 2020, former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg gave more than $19.2 million, campaign finance records show.

The group has expanded in recent years, running digital training programs and an ad tracking service for strategists. It also extended beyond presidential campaigns to work on Senate and state election campaigns, including the recent race for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.