New TV Ad: No Kings

It's a banger, help us share it!

This Saturday, June 14th, there are going to be massive, fun, and peaceful No Kings protests everywhere across the country. If you’re annoyed or horrified that Trump is throwing himself a dictator-style military parade, this is the thing to do. You can find one near you or create your own right in your neighborhood at indivisible.org. We wrote and tested a quick TV ad to help get the word out, and to also drive the story about Trump that people paying less attention might not be hearing very clearly:

We need your help sharing it! If you’re reading this, YOU almost definitely know about the protests and what Trump is doing, but a lot of your friends, family and neighbors probably don’t. Here it is on different platforms for your sharing delight: bluesky - facebook - instagram - twitter. (we’re mostly off twitter these days, hope you will join us elsewhere too!)

And if you’re curious, we’re sharing a little behind the scenes data for this ad, too. We ran an opinion lift randomized control trial (RCT) test using a commercial ad testing platform called Swayable to give us some insight into how this ad lands with voters. Since part of our testing philosophy is that results are more valuable relatively, we tested it vs an alt with slightly different wording, an ad from an ally and an opposition ad. The total n was 6691 of national registered voters. This one was the clear strongest performer of the three allied ads.

One of the reasons we like using Swayable is that it lets us see results across segments easily; this view shows the results across overall, white noncollege, races and political views:

The blue and purple arrows are statistically significant results. Sometimes we highlight results with green, yellow or red boxes but we skipped it for this once since it would basically just be all green boxes! This treatment had positive effects broadly across most of the segments on generic ballot, Trump disapproval, likelihood of taking direct action, and even vote likelihood questions. It had nicely positive effects on moving more liberal voters to take action, one of the primary objectives of the ad. (we’re still working on you moderates, we’ll get you out there yet!)

We also are trying something new: what we are calling a “worldview tracking” question. This is the exact wording, and the results are in the “Richest 1% Benefit” column in the chart above:

We weren’t sure if this was a thing we’d even be able to move with ads, but this one did, at least with some groups. It was particularly strong with the white noncollege voters. Swayable also has “baseline + impact” mode so you can see the differences in baseline views across segments more clearly. Here it is, also including the output of the emotion tracking feature in the platform. We started calling this the “feels-o-meter” when they rolled it out a few cycles ago, and also we have not stopped calling it that:

So we’re not moving this worldview question with very liberal voters, but for a clear reason: basically all of them (88%) already agree! But the Latino and Black segments don’t have particularly high baselines (64% and 71% respectively) and while there was a little directional movement with Latinos, Black voters didn’t budge. None of this will be surprising for those of you who are already listening to Charting the Way Foward, but clearly, we have a lot of work to do on making this case to rightfully and entirely understandably skeptical Black and brown voters. Our most recent episode is here:

Thanks for following along, and we have more research coming soon, so make sure to share this with your most positive, glowing comments!