Meet the Democrats Using Porn Ads to Convince Trump Voters to Stay Home

Earlier this year, Wally Nowinski and his pal Matt Curry were texting about what they—two regular voters unaffiliated with any political campaign—could do to defeat Donald Trump in the presidential election.

“I’m in California, I could go to Nevada and knock on doors or something like that, but I’m not going to reach 5 million people that way,” Nowinski told NPR. Curry lives in New York.

The two friends work in technology and have experience in digital advertising and startups, and Nowinski was particularly interested in what he calls “subprime” advertising markets, i.e. porn sites.

Political candidates and their affiliated PACs don’t advertise in these places because they don’t want to associate their brands with explicit content, making the online pornography market perhaps the last untouched frontier in political advertising.

According to AdImpact, more than $10 billion will be spent on political advertising across all races across television, streaming, radio and digital platforms in 2024.

While advertising in the Philadelphia suburbs, for example, is quite expensive, advertising on porn sites is inexpensive and has little competition. “These ads are very cheap, and they are oddly appropriate for this campaign,” Nowinski said.

The relevance they saw was that the market they believed could reach one of the key voter demographics in 2024.

“There are 3 million white males without a college degree in the blue wall states, that’s a lot of people, and they probably support Trump at about 65-70%,” he said. “You only have to get very few of them to change their minds to possibly sway an election.”

So Nowinski and Curry did something that regular voters almost never do: They formed a political action committee and raised a modest $100,000. About $25,000 has already been spent in just the last few weeks of October, when inconsistent voters often decide whether or not to get off the couch. Nowinski says their ad has already received 5 million views.

Simple advertising, carefully targeted

One obstacle was finding pornography sites that allowed political advertising, which some of the largest distributors of pornography, such as PornHub, do not allow. Next, Nowinski said, they needed to be able to target advertising in the seven swing states, but with a particular focus on the blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where the majority of white men live.

The ad is simplified: a five-second static image that the viewer must see before they can click “skip” and move on to the video they want to watch. The image features ominous music and features such things as a woman in lingerie with the caption: “Trump 2025 will ban porn. Enjoy it while you can.” The ad also urges the viewer to “Ban Google Trump Porn.”

Their goal is also simple: convince some of these Trump-leaning, porn-watching white guys not to vote.

“While it’s certainly a different approach, it’s not unusual, and in some ways it’s smart, in many ways it’s smart to go where your audience is,” said Steve Kaplan, a USC professor who is teaching this semester course on political advertising in the 2024 campaign.

To be clear, Trump has not endorsed a pornography ban, and his campaign has repeatedly distanced itself from the conservative Project 2025, even though it was developed by Trump allies and calls for outlawing all pornography.

“I think this is a tremendous example of how far ad campaigns, targeting and hyper-targeting have come,” Kaplan said.

With $75,000 in the bank to spend by Election Day, Nowinski estimates their campaign could get 20 million views in the swing state. He also says they’ll likely keep the PAC going after this election, but he’s not sure where exactly to start.

“I’ll probably keep the PAC alive because there are other opportunities that are similar to niche plays in effectiveness, or sort of unexpected aspects that I’d like to more potentially explore in future elections,” he said.

Copyright: NPR 2024

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