Meet the Democrats using porn ads to convince Trump voters to stay home

Earlier this year, Wally Nowinski and his buddy Matt Curry were texting back and forth about what they — two regular voters with no ties to any political campaign — could do to defeat Donald Trump in the presidential election.

"I'm in California, I could drive to Nevada and knock on doors or something, 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 tech with experience in digital advertising and startups, and Nowinski was particularly interested in what he calls "sub-prime" ad markets, aka porn sites.

Political candidates and their allied PACs don't advertise in these spaces because they don't want to associate their brands with explicit content, making the online pornographic market perhaps the last untouched frontier in political advertising.

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

While advertising in the Philadelphia suburbs, for instance, is quite expensive, ads on porn sites are inexpensive and have almost no competition. "These ads are like real cheap and it's like weirdly relevant to this campaign," Nowinski said.

The relevance they saw was a market they believe can reach one of the key voter demographics in 2024.

"There’s 3 million non-college white men across the 'blue wall' states, that's a lot of people, and they're probably breaking for Trump like 65-70%," he said. "You only need to make a very few of them change their mind to possibly make an impact on the election."

So Nowinski and Curry did what virtually no regular voters 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 to get off the couch or not. Nowinski says their ads have already notched 5 million views.

Simple ads, carefully targeted

One of the hurdles was finding pornographic sites that would allow political advertising, which some of the largest distributors of pornography, like PornHub, do not allow. Then, Nowinski said, they had to be able to target the ads in the seven swing states, but with a heavy focus on the "blue wall" states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where larger demographics of white men reside.

The ads are simplistic: a 5-second static image the viewer must see before they can hit “skip” to get to the video they’re there to watch. The image has ominous music and features things like a woman in lingerie with this message: “Trump’s Project 2025 will ban porn. Enjoy while you can.” The ads also instruct the viewer to “Google Trump porn ban.”

Their goal is also simple: Convince some of these Trump-leaning, porn-watching white guys to sit out the election.

"While this is certainly a different sort of approach, it's not unusual and it's smart in some ways, in a lot of ways it's smart to go where your audience is," said Steve Caplan, a professor at the University of Southern California, who is teaching a class this semester 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 blueprint Project 2025, although it was crafted by Trump allies and it does call for all pornography to be outlawed.

"I think it's a fascinating example of how far campaign advertising, targeting and hyper targeting has evolved," said Caplan.

With $75,000 in the bank to spend by Election Day, Nowinski estimates their swing state ad campaign could hit 20 million views. He also says they'll probably keep the PAC alive after this election, but he's not sure where exactly to take it from here.

"I'll probably keep the PAC alive because there's other opportunities that are like niche efficiency plays, or kind of unexpected angles that I'd like to explore more potentially in future elections," he said.