The answer lives in this podcast
What is Priorities USA and what has its mission become since 2016?
Priorities USA was originally a presidential super PAC that spent tens of millions of dollars electing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. After 2016, it pivoted to diagnose and close the Democratic Party's digital investment gap — building an in-house team dedicated to innovation, data, and research to prepare more effectively for each subsequent presidential election.
From presidential super PAC to digital laboratory for the Democratic Party
Before the 2016 reckoning, Priorities USA functioned like most major super PACs: raise money, run ads, elect a president, repeat. It played that role successfully across three presidential cycles, backing Obama, Clinton, and Biden.
The 2016 election changed the organization's self-understanding. Rather than continue as a purely electoral spending vehicle, Priorities USA set out to answer a harder question: why was the Democratic Party systematically under-investing in digital advertising — and what would it take to fix that? This shift in mission is detailed in Pod Save America's conversation with Danielle Butterfield.
Building in-house rather than outsourcing: why the distinction matters
The structural decision Butterfield negotiated when she joined in 2017 was deliberate: no outside consultants driven by profit margins. An in-house team focused purely on innovation, not on billing hours or defending existing vendor relationships.
That internal model freed Priorities USA to invest in unglamorous but essential infrastructure — research, data, and testing — across off-year election cycles, not just during presidential campaigns. As Butterfield explains in this episode of Pod Save America, the goal was to build organizational muscle that outside consultants had no incentive to develop.
The stakes became clearer in hindsight. In 2024, Democrats outspent Republicans two to one on digital advertising — and still lost. Spending more was never the problem. Spending smarter, on the right platforms with the right formats, was. That diagnosis sits at the core of what Priorities USA now does, a point explored further in the full episode.
"Nine out of the ten top YouTube ads in 2024 were just 30-second ads that ran on TV first. We are quite literally practically taking 30-second ads that we run on TV and then putting them on YouTube and expecting people to watch them — and that is quite literally lighting money on fire."
Danielle Butterfield — Executive Director, Priorities USA
Butterfield joined Priorities USA in 2017 immediately after the Hillary Clinton campaign, where she had worked in a digital capacity. She joined the organization precisely as it was beginning to diagnose the structural causes of the 2016 defeat. Initially serving as Digital Director, she negotiated to build an in-house innovation team rather than relying on outside consultants — a model that gave the organization the freedom to experiment without commercial pressure. Under her leadership, Priorities USA expanded its scope from pure electoral spending to multi-cycle digital research, including a major post-2024 study spanning approximately 6 million searches. By 2026, the organization had already launched a $30 million campaign targeting 2028 Republican figures including J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, running during the 2026 election cycle. The full scope of that work is unpacked in this Pod Save America episode.
See also
What is Mark Zuckerberg's vision of 'personal super intelligence' and why does Casey Newton find it dangerous?
Zuckerberg's stated goal is to give everyone personal super intelligence to help run their lives — but Newton argues that super intelligence by definition is beyond what humans can control or fully understand, which is precisely what makes the ambition dangerous.
How does Casey Newton approach AI safety coverage given the extreme range of expert opinion, from dismissal to predictions of human extinction?
Newton says he was advised by readers to focus on what is actually happening today rather than trying to predict the future, because future predictions are too uncertain and too polarized to be useful for most audiences.
What are open-weight AI models and why do they pose a distinct security threat compared to models controlled by frontier AI labs?
Open-weight models can be downloaded and run locally on a personal computer, with no company monitoring activity, no refusal of harmful requests, and no guardrails — making them fundamentally harder to regulate than models hosted by frontier AI labs.
Key takeaways
- Priorities USA spent tens of millions electing Obama, Clinton, and Biden before 2016 forced a fundamental rethink of its purpose.
- The post-2016 pivot was structural: an in-house team built for innovation, not for profit — replacing the outside-consultant model entirely.
- Democrats outspending Republicans two to one on digital in 2024 while still losing proved that raw spending volume was never the real lever.
- By 2026, the organization was already running a $30 million campaign to define 2028 Republicans, operating well beyond its original presidential-cycle mandate.
The full conversation with Danielle Butterfield — including Priorities USA's research on TikTok, YouTube, and AI chatbots — is available on Listenly.
Listen to the episode on Listenly