Swing Left
When we started this project, we were told that Swing Left wanted to use celebrities who volunteered to donate their time to be in videos promoting democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. Of course using celebrities has it's advantages, given their built in online following and general buzz they create with any project, but I also was concerned about a possible backlash. In the 2016 election there were several political ads that featured celebrities, but they may have backfired as everyday Americans felt like the celebrities were a bit out of touch with their non-celebrity lives. In writing this campaign, we wanted to take advantage of the stardom that came with Samuel L. Jackson (7.5 million Twitter followers), but used him in a way everyday people could relate to. The result were pretty dramatic, polls showed that both Angie Craig and Colin Allred’s races were toss ups as of late Sept before the spots ran in early October, come election time in November they won by comfortable margins, Craig by 12% and Allred by %8.