Elections and Media

The Association of State Democratic Committees, the group responsible for overseeing Democratic Party state efforts, is strongly encouraging all its state campaigns to use a single digital ad tech platform from a company called TargetSmart. The move aims to help Democrats streamline their ad buys and save money, but some critics say the one-vendor mandate is anticompetitive and limits innovation. TargetSmart has been one of the leading voter data sources for Democratic political parties and progressive organizations since it launched in 2006.

The Democratic Party’s megadonors are being inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump were the main characters on the internet and across Washington day after day. Then the world’s richest man started to fade away. On Truth Social, where Trump is known for sharing his unfiltered thoughts, the president used to mention Musk every few days but now has not posted about him in more than a month. Trump’s fundraising operation has largely ceased sending emails that name-check the Tesla CEO. The billionaire’s name, once a staple of White House briefings, now hardly gets mentioned at all.

Elon Musk has enthusiastically posted, reposted and endorsed incorrect or inflammatory claims on X that Social Security is fraudulent, that the Democrats are importing immigrants to win elections and that the federal judges who are ruling against the Trump administration should be impeached. There are plenty of precedents for what Mr. Musk is doing with X. But he has taken the process to a level unimaginable even a short time ago. The site says he has 220 million followers, an assertion impossible to verify.

Information sharing on cybersecurity and election threats may become a whole lot harder after the Department of Homeland Security ended some federal funding for two partnerships used by thousands of state and local governments. A spokesperson for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed it terminated a $10 million partnership with the Center for Internet Security for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, and the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center.

Ahead of the 2024 U.S. election, there was widespread fear that generative artificial intelligence (AI) presented an unprecedented threat to democracy.

For years, as the social-media and startup world exploded, the tech industry was known for the outspokenness of its employees — largely liberal-skewing young technologists on the West Coast, who pushed their companies hard to build policies that then became models for a new kind of American workplace. This is changing faster than anyone expected.

On October 16, 2024, the Center for American Rights (CAR) filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requesting an investigation into WCBS, New York, NY, for “news distortion” in the airing of a “60 Minutes” interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris. On February 3, 2025, in response to a request from the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, the WCBS licensee provided the Commission with an unedited transcript and video of the 60 Minutes interview in question.

On Jan 16, the Federal Communications Commission denied four filings that asked the FCC to use the agency's licensing authority to penalize broadcast television stations because of content or coverage aired on the stations. In a statement released alongside the denials, outgoing FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel explained the decision, writing, "The facts and legal circumstances in each of these cases are different. But what they share is that they seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.

Governance, media, business and global geopolitics are all being reordered at breakneck speed—all simultaneously.