Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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I think it correlates in certain situations where exposure is an advantage. If you're running in a crowded primary, having money earlier means you can start running ads and getting name recognition before your competition finds out if they even have donors. This is what happened in the 2014 PA Democratic gubernatorial primary; Tom Wolfe was independently wealthy and was able to get his name out there enough that his polling lead was large enough for him to start challenging the incumbent weeks before the primary was even over, despite being a political newcomer. This year, Stacy Garrity couldn't compete with Shapiro financially and didn't start running ads until very late in the campaign. The result was that for a while after Labor Day something like 30% of the electorate couldn't name the Republican candidate if you put a gun to their head.
With shit like President, I don't think it matters one iota in the general. With Senate it can matter, since an underdog can make an impact they wouldn't be able to make on a shoestring budget. But there are diminishing returns. Once a campaign is well enough funded that they've already done all their ad buys (it's a lot cheaper if you buy early) and they don't have to be too careful about what hotels they stay in, it's not going to do much. Spending a ton of money on late TV buys doesn't have the same impact on voters who have been seeing your ads for months. I almost think it's counterproductive, as there are certain candidates I'd never vote for based on ads alone. That guy from MS put together a good one, but most of them are just black and white shots if the opposition with dire voiceovers saying that they support tax cuts that ship jobs overseas. These are unwatchable but are at least predictable; more often than not, going outside the box makes them completely impossible, like the Stacy Garrity ad with AI Josh Shapiro talking about what a bad candidate he is.
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