如果你问专家，2024年是播客选举（这也意味着它是YouTube选举）。也许2026年将是网红选举。但一件事，喧闹的一类人不会称之为电视选举——因为众所周知，每个人都已经不看电视了。但事实并非如此，政治竞选的运作方式根本不是这样。即使在2026年，在这一选举周期中估计花费的116亿美元中，超过60%仍将用于传统的广播和有线电视。
If you ask pundits, 2024 was the Podcast Election (which also means it was the YouTube Election). And maybe 2026 is the Influencer Election. One thing the chattering class won't call it is the Television Election — because everyone knows everyone has stopped watching TV. Except that's not how political campaigns are run, at all. Even in 2026, more than 60% of the estimated $11.6 billion spent in this election cycle will go to good ol' fashioned broadcast and cable TV.
另外20%将用于流媒体电视。如果你认为这几乎没有留给你和你认识的大多数人花费大量时间的平台——YouTube、Reels、TikTok等——的空间，那你就是对的。政治专业人士也知道这一点。那么为什么情况没有改变呢？我采访了Rob Flaherty，他一生中的大部分时间都在为民主党做数字政治工作，包括为希拉里·克林顿、乔·拜登，以及最近的卡玛拉·哈里斯服务。
Another 20% will be spent on streaming TV. If you think that doesn't leave a lot of room for things where you and most people you know spend a ton of time — YouTube, Reels, TikTok, etc. — you're right. Political pros know it, too. So why isn't that changing? I asked Rob Flaherty, who has spent most of his life doing digital politics for Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and, most recently, Kamala Harris. Flaherty offered up a bunch of reasons why TV remains so dominant in political spending, even as it gets less relevant to voters.
Flaherty给出了一系列理由，解释为什么即使对选民的相关性在下降，电视在政治支出中仍然占主导地位。但一个根本原因很简单：政治操盘手在电视上花钱，是因为其他政治操盘手也在那里花钱。Flaherty甚至承认，在他目前的工作——共同运营一个反对AI的超级政治行动委员会——中，他一直在购买一些电视时段，只是为了让政治圈里的其他人认真对待他。
But a base reason is simply that political operatives spent money on TV because other political operatives spend money there: Flaherty even admits that in his current work — co-running an anti-AI super PAC — he has been buying some TV time just so other people in politics will take him seriously. You can hear our entire conversation about how campaigns work in the TikTok era — and how they ought to work — on my Channels podcast. The following is an edited excerpt of our chat. Peter Kafka: You said that when you were working on the Harris campaign, you spent roughly 50-50 between TV and digital — but that most campaigns still spend 70% of their budget on TV. Make the best case for why a campaign should still spend half or more of its money on TV.
你可以在我的《Channels》播客中听到我们关于竞选如何在TikTok时代运作——以及它们应该如何运作——的完整对话。以下是我们对话的编辑摘录。彼得·卡夫卡：你说在为哈里斯竞选团队工作时，你大约有50%的预算用于电视，50%用于数字媒体——但大多数竞选团队仍然将70%的预算用于电视。请说明为什么一个竞选团队仍应将一半或更多的资金用于电视的最佳理由。
Rob Flaherty: Well, I would not advocate for that. But I think the steelman case that you would hear is: Digital political ad inventory is actually quite limited. There are only so many places you can spend. Social media is not a mind-changing surface; it's a base-building surface. Meanwhile, television is concentrating on a smaller number of higher-view surfaces. So you actually want to spend more money on TV because it's more expensive to buy against an NFL game than it was just to buy across from the local news and in prime time. That sounds a lot like the TV industry's own argument for years: "Yes, ratings are down, but that means the shows people are still watching are more valuable." Look, this is an industry that has a nobody-ever-got-fired-for-hiring-McKinsey problem. If you do the same thing everyone else does and you lose, then you did everything right.
罗布·弗拉赫蒂：嗯，我不会主张这样做。但我认为你会听到的“钢人论点”是：政治广告的数字库存实际上相当有限。你能投放的地方其实只有那么多。
And if you try something different and you lose, it's you who made bad decisions. I'll even say candidly: I run Tomorrow Together, a new super PAC where we just launched a bunch of ads. We're advertising against people who don't want AI regulations.
社交媒体不是改变思想的表面，而是建立基础的表面。与此同时，电视正专注于更少但收视率更高的节目。因此，你实际上想在电视上花更多的钱，因为与NFL比赛对抗购买广告比仅仅在地方新闻和黄金时段对抗购买广告更昂贵。这听起来很像电视行业多年来一直在提出的论点：“是的，收视率在下降，但这意味着人们仍在观看的节目更有价值。”
And even I — Mr. F—ing Digital — felt this pull, like I needed to have pretty significant TV spending. Because otherwise the industry won't view it as legit, because TV is legit. We still spent mostly on digital, largely because it's a super PAC and we're spending late. But I prioritized making sure we had some TV in there, because otherwise people don't think it's real. And also, the way a lot of this works is: The general consultants who are the top consultants to the candidate, very often are economically tied to the margins of TV. Spell that out.
看，这个行业存在一个“雇佣麦肯锡从未有人被解雇”的问题。如果你做了其他人都在做的事情却失败了，那么你做得一切正确。而如果你尝试了不同的做法却失败了，那就是你做出了错误的决定。我甚至可以说得坦率一些：我负责“明天共同行动”，这是一个刚刚推出一系列广告的新超级政治行动委员会。我们正在针对不希望监管人工智能的人投放广告。
You're running a campaign. Why do you have an economic incentive to buy TV? Because you get a cut of the buy. The more TV a campaign buys, the more money you make. Basically. Usually, the general consultant hires up all the other consultants. Those consultants get a cut, either a fee or a cut of media spend. TV margins are great. They are really, really great. They are better than digital margins.
即便是我——这个“该死的数字人”——也感受到了这种拉力，觉得自己需要进行相当可观的电视广告投放。否则，行业不会认为这是合法的，因为电视才是合法的。我们仍然主要在数字平台上投放广告，很大程度上是因为我们是一个超级政治行动委员会，而且我们的投放时间较晚。但我优先考虑确保我们在这些广告中包含一些电视广告，因为否则人们不会认为这是真实的。
For the consultant, you're making 10%, 15% on a TV buy. And by "margins," you mean the money the person buying the ads gets from the campaign? Yeah. You make more money because there's just less staff time. The other thing that's crazy is a lot of the big TV firms don't actually do the buying. They subcontract to one of three or four buying shops. So everybody's just making money all over the place. There's a rent-seeking thing: The most senior consultants who have been around for a while came up in TV. They talk to the candidates.
此外，很多情况下的运作方式是：为候选人提供服务的顶级顾问——也就是总顾问——通常在电视的利润边缘上有经济利益关系。我说清楚一点。你正在运营一个竞选活动。为什么你有经济动机去购买电视广告？因为你可以从广告购买中分得一笔钱。竞选活动购买的电视广告越多，你赚的钱就越多。基本上就是这样。通常，总顾问会雇佣所有其他顾问。
They push them to spend more on TV. And then you have campaign managers who are typically relatively more junior, particularly on Senate races, who don't want to mess up. They don't want to do something different and radical, and they have to convince the candidate and the general consultant anyway. So you end up in this place where the easiest thing to do is just sort of the same thing. The broader media business had the same problem: Advertisers took a long time to follow consumers to digital. They were still spending on TV when people were leaving in droves.
这些顾问会获得一定的分成，要么是固定费用，要么是媒体支出的一定比例。电视的利润空间很大。它们真的、真的很大。它们的利润空间甚至比数字广告还要好。对顾问而言，你可以从电视广告购买中获得10%、15%的分成。
Does politics eventually catch up? If you talk to any politician, they would tell you digital is very important. It's the internet. And then you look at their media mix, and it's not that. I do think presidential primaries are what drive innovation in politics. I do think you're going to see some people try a bunch of new stuff, and then that will lead to a more cogent theory of how you spend more of your campaign dollars on the places where people actually are.
“所谓‘利润’，你的意思是购买广告的那个人从竞选活动中得到的钱吗？是的。你赚更多钱是因为所需的工作人员时间更少。另一个令人惊讶的事实是，很多大型电视公司并不真正进行购买，他们把这项工作外包给三四家购买机构中的一家。所以大家都在各处赚钱。这是一种寻租行为：那些在电视行业工作多年的资深顾问，他们与候选人交谈，推动他们在电视上投入更多资金。然后，你会看到竞选经理，尤其是参议院选举中的相对年轻的经理，他们不想搞砸，不想做出不同或激进的举动，而且他们仍然必须说服候选人和总体顾问。于是，你最终会陷入一种最简单的做法——基本上做同样的事。更广泛的媒体行业也面临同样的问题：广告主花了很长时间才跟随消费者转向数字领域。当人们大批离开时，他们仍在电视上投放广告。政治最终会跟上吗？如果你和任何政治人物交谈，他们都会告诉你数字化非常重要——就是互联网。但你看看他们的媒体组合，却并非如此。我确实认为，总统初选是推动政治创新的动力。我也认为你会看到一些人尝试大量新做法，进而形成更合理的理论，帮助你把更多竞选经费用在选民实际所在的地方。我对变革的到来抱有希望。但媒体支出的方式在很大程度上是追求利润和寻租的，你必须突破这一点。它上面还有根深蒂固的政治权力层，这也是原因之一。”
I'm hopeful that change is coming. But so much of the way that media gets spent is profit-seeking and rent-seeking that you do have to break through that. It has the entrenched layer of political power on top of it, and that is one of the reasons.