Television advertising salespeople are having a spectacular summer! One major marketing analytics firm projects 2022 mid-term political ad spending to exceed $8.8 billion. To put that in perspective, the 2018 midterms generated only $3.9 billion, and $9.5 billion was spent during the much higher profile 2020 presidential election. If you’ve turned your TV on in the past few weeks, you know that political ads consist of demonizing your opponent and hammering that message as often as you can afford. Make your voters hate them even more than your opponent can make their voters hate you. Or just as good, disgust dispassionate voters to the point that they just stop voting altogether, which will allow your core handful of voting superfans to carry you to victory. The profit and power acquiring side of making people as angry as possible isn’t going away. It’s a magic formula that works – we’re seeing the results; we’ll need to understand it better before we can start to do something about it.