As traditional metrics like cash on hand and TV ratings lose their predictive power, momentum is now judged by a simpler indicator: more content, more followers, and more engagement.
The health and trajectory of a political campaign were judged by a simple, familiar scoreboard, where a candidate’s strength could be quickly assessed through three key metrics: the cash on hand reported in quarterly FEC filings, the weight of their television ad buy measured in Gross Rating Points, and their standing in the latest public polling.
But as a new analysis from the Center for Campaign Innovation argues, that entire scoreboard is now broken. In today’s deeply fractured media environment, where successful campaigns must operate more like relentless media creators than traditional advertisers, those legacy metrics have lost their relevance and predictive power. This has created a vacuum for donors, party leaders, and the media, who all need a reliable way to gauge a campaign’s true strength and momentum.
Into the vacuum left by traditional gatekeepers, a new and far more intuitive metric of campaign strength has taken hold: volume. Contemporary campaigns that win are not merely better funded or better messaged; they are omnipresent. They produce more content, occupy more platforms, activate more followers, and trigger more peer-to-peer engagement at scale.
Research on social media and political mobilization shows that influence now compounds through repetition and network effects rather than persuasion alone. For example, during the 2010 U.S. midterms, mobilization messages delivered through close social ties on Facebook were four times more effective at increasing validated voter turnout than informational messages or controls, underscoring how scale and social reinforcement outperform traditional outreach.
“Messages sent via social media influence users’ emotions, which ultimately results in actual real-world actions… online political mobilization messages disseminated by close friends in a given personal social network exert significantly greater influence than informational messaging alone.” — Olaniran & Williams, Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement
This dynamic has intensified as social platforms reward frequency, emotional resonance, and shareability over verification or deliberation. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, more than one billion election-related tweets were posted, with highly active partisan users and automated accounts amplifying a relatively small number of messages into dominant narratives. In this environment, campaigns no longer compete primarily on message quality or resource efficiency, but on their ability to sustain attention across fragmented media ecosystems.
The old yardsticks offered a clean, straightforward way to compare candidates. A bulging war chest signaled the financial firepower needed for a sustained campaign. Heavy television ad buys suggested a message was blanketing the district. Favorable polling indicated that the strategy was working. The problem is that none of these signals are reliable anymore, a fact that has been repeatedly and painfully demonstrated in recent election cycles.
Cash on hand, once seen as the ultimate measure of a campaign’s viability, has become a misleading figure. A large balance can be easily inflated by simply delaying payments to vendors and consultants, creating an illusion of financial health that crumbles after the next reporting period. More importantly, a top-line number fails to distinguish between a campaign propped up by a few wealthy, max-out donors and one fueled by a broad, enthusiastic base of grassroots supporters.
The value of television Gross Rating Points has similarly plummeted. In the broadcast era, a GRP had a clear meaning, representing a fixed percentage of a captive audience. Today, that audience is gone. It has splintered across dozens of streaming services, many of which have ad-free tiers. Viewers who still have cable often use DVRs to skip commercials entirely.
A high GRP score no longer guarantees mass reach; it may only prove that a campaign is over-saturating a shrinking and aging demographic that still watches linear television, while completely missing younger and more diverse voters.
Public polling is also facing a full-blown crisis of credibility. The industry’s methodologies were built for a world of landlines and cooperative respondents, a world that no longer exists. Pollsters now struggle to reach a representative sample of an electorate that is increasingly mobile, distrustful of unknown callers, and sorted into complex media bubbles. This has led to a series of high-profile polling misses in recent elections, undermining confidence across the board.
The obsolescence of the old scoreboard is a direct result of a fundamental shift in campaign strategy. The top-down, mass-marketing era, where a campaign crafted a single polished message and broadcast it to a wide audience, is over. It has been replaced by the creator-candidate era, where the candidate must operate like a media entity, constantly producing a stream of content to earn and hold voter attention across a multitude of platforms.
In this new reality, a voter’s attention is the single scarcest and most valuable commodity. A campaign is not just competing with its opponent for airtime; it is competing with Netflix, TikTok, YouTube, and every other source of information and entertainment vying for a slice of a person’s day. To break through this noise, a candidate cannot simply run a flight of ads a month before the election. They must build an audience and a community over time, which requires a relentless output of content that is authentic, engaging, and platform-native.
This creates a disconnect between how campaigns operate internally and how they are perceived externally. Inside a modern campaign, staffers have access to a wealth of real-time, granular data, from email open rates and social media engagement to digital ad conversions and volunteer shift sign-ups. These are the numbers that guide day-to-day decisions.
Outside observers, however, do not see this dashboard. Donors, party committees, and journalists need a simple, public-facing signal to determine which of the dozens of candidates on the ballot are running energetic, viable campaigns. This is the vacuum that the metric of “more” has begun to fill.
While it may seem simplistic, “more” has become the most reliable directional indicator of a campaign’s energy and its ability to connect with voters. It manifests in several key, observable ways that, when taken together, paint a clear picture of momentum. First is more content and more appearances. The analysis points to the 2024 presidential race, where President Donald Trump was featured in approximately 70,000 podcast episodes compared to just 12,000 for Kamala Harris.
While podcast metrics lack the formal auditing of television ratings, the sheer disparity in volume tells an undeniable story about which campaign was more successful at dominating the audio landscape and capturing mindshare. This same principle applies across the media spectrum, from interviews on niche YouTube channels to a constant stream of posts on platforms like X and Instagram. The candidate who is simply everywhere is the one who feels most relevant.
Second is more followers and more engagement. In the creator era, social media follower counts are not just vanity metrics; they are a public measure of a candidate’s audience and reach. A steadily growing follower base, combined with high engagement rates like comments, shares, and likes, is visible proof that a message is resonating.
It signals an active, energized community that can be mobilized for future action, whether that is donating money, volunteering time, or sharing content with their own networks. This digital enthusiasm serves as a powerful, real-time proxy for the kind of grassroots support that wins elections.
The final and most concrete form of “more” is more donors and more volunteers. A surge in the number of individual small-dollar donors is a far more powerful indicator of a campaign’s health than a single large check from a wealthy benefactor. It demonstrates a broad base of financial support from people who are personally invested in the candidate’s success.
It is important to acknowledge that “more” is a blunt and imperfect measure. It does not necessarily measure the quality of a campaign’s message, the efficiency of its spending, or whether its flurry of activity is actually reaching persuadable voters in the middle. A candidate can easily generate endless online chatter that excites their base but does nothing to win over the undecideds who will ultimately decide a close race. A high volume of content is not a substitute for a coherent strategy.
Despite these limitations, however, in a chaotic media environment where the old signposts have been removed, “more” remains the most intuitive and persuasive directional gauge of campaign momentum available. It reflects a candidate’s work ethic and their campaign’s ability to generate authentic grassroots energy. Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, this trend is only set to accelerate.
Candidates who refuse to adopt the mindset of a media creator, constantly producing content and building a community online, will appear stagnant and will struggle to be seen as viable. Party committees and donors will increasingly look past the flawed, traditional metrics and instead use these clear signals of digital energy and grassroots enthusiasm to decide which campaigns are truly worth a major investment.