As political campaigns move from the Mass-Marketing Era to the Creator-Candidate Era, the scorecards we use to judge success have to evolve as well. When the ingredients of an effective campaign change, the benchmarks for assessing that effectiveness must follow suit.
The Old Scoreboard
For decades, campaigns were judged by a tidy trio of yardsticks. Quarterly filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) revealed cash on hand, the raw balance of money raised minus money spent. A bulging war chest signaled the firepower needed for a sustained barrage of television ads, direct mail pieces, and other broadcast-style tactics. Television gross-rating points (GRPs) offered a second, seemingly objective yardstick: match your opponent point-for-point on the airwaves and you were competitive; swamp them and you were presumed to be winning. Finally, public polling fed the horse-race coverage that shifts donor enthusiasm and media attention from week to week.
Yet each metric has grown less reliable. Campaigns can delay paying invoices to inflate their cash-on-hand numbers. Audiences have splintered across streaming services, so a single rating point no longer commands the reach it once did. And polling—never an X-ray, only a snapshot—has struggled to keep pace with changing voter behavior, producing more surprises and fewer certainties.
The New Reality
Inside a modern campaign, granular data on direct voter contact, digital engagement, and micro-donations now guide day-to-day decisions. But outside observers—party committees, donors, journalists—still need an at-a-glance sense of momentum across dozens of races. The old scoreboard is wobbling, and no single replacement offers the same simplicity or comparability.
Enter More
In the Creator-Candidate Era, the clearest indicator of momentum is often just more: more mentions, more followers, more volunteers, more small-dollar donors, more events, more content in more places. Take podcasts in 2024. Donald Trump was featured on—or discussed in—roughly 70,000 podcast episodes, compared with about 12,000 for Kamala Harris. Podcasts don’t map neatly onto congressional districts, and their audience metrics aren’t audited like Nielsen TV ratings. Yet the sheer volume of appearances tells a story: the campaign that commands more airtime wins more mindshare.
“More” is not a surgical instrument; it won’t pinpoint when an effort hits diminishing returns, nor will it explain why one initiative goes viral while another fizzles. But as a blunt, directional gauge of how hard a candidate works—and how eagerly the public responds—it remains the most intuitive, persuasive metric available.
Traditional scoreboards won’t vanish overnight, but their authority is fading fast. In a landscape where attention is the scarcest commodity, campaigns that generate more conversation, more engagement, and more community put themselves on the shortest path to victory.
