This is a small theme: nine quotes from five voices. Five come from a Democrats of Greater Tucson postmortem, most of them from a speaker who works on digital ads at the firm Uplift. The rest come from The Wall Street Journal, Washington Week, Donna Brazile speaking at American University’s School of Communication, and Australia’s Scanlon Foundation. Five quotes come from the Left, two from the Center and one from the Right.

The Tucson speaker’s advice is concrete. Congressional and statewide candidates should move money into streaming TV because “people are cutting their cords.” One-to-one digital targeting misses too many voters, so campaigns should cast a wider net online. YouTube reaches Hispanic and Latino audiences better than broadcast or connected TV. And “nothing beats organic content,” because “people know what an ad looks like.”

The national outlets make the spending case. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Week both say Democrats put too much into television ads, which have diminishing returns, and too little into direct voter contact such as door-to-door canvassing.

Two voices focus on trust. Donna Brazile says national news and social media have lost the public’s trust and that coverage sticks to the horse race over substance. The Scanlon Foundation, discussing Australia, argues that messages land through trusted voices in people’s communities more than through institutions.

A fixable problem

No one in the study treats ad mix as a culture-war issue, and the theme draws no Far Left or Far Right voices. The fixes are operational: move budget from broadcast and mail to streaming and online video, broaden targeting, and invest in organic content and in-person contact. A party could make these changes within a single cycle.