In some cases, the videos are turning women who were until recently not even widely known in their own neighborhoods into national sensations.
“It’s a new way for an underdog to raise their profile nationally and rise up above the crowd,” said Mark Putnam, whose firm has created several hit political ads. These ads also have helped male candidates, but Putnam said they seem to be particularly valuable to women because so many are little-known and have compelling life stories.
And while many candidates are trying to make campaign videos that make a splash online, Putnam says the “ones that are getting the most attention are for women.”
Unlike past years, female candidates are not pictured in their own ads with coifed hair and plain pantsuits. Women running this year fit no one model, each presenting themselves as ordinary people with varying backgrounds, just like voters. Many are minorities and young.
Kelly Dittmar, a political scientist at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, said women used “to neutralize their looks.” But now, Dittmar said, “there is an expanding image of what it is to be a candidate.”
MJ Hegar
Putnam’s firm helped produce a 3½ -minute biographical ad for MJ Hegar, a Texas Democrat who is trying to unseat Rep. John Carter, a Republican who has been in Congress since 2003.
Hegar, an Air Force pilot shot down by the Taliban in Afghanistan, was a political unknown until her ad made waves. Titled “Doors,” the ad has been viewed online by nearly 5 million people. It features the door from the chopper whose crash she survived and refers to the glass door she says her mother was thrown through by her abusive father.
Inspired by Hegar’s story, donations have poured into her campaign.
Hegar still has a tough battle ahead as she tries to unseat Carter, 76. For starters, she is a Democrat running in a conservative Texas district, where her message about the political system “shutting doors” on people like her may have limited effectiveness.
But her viral video gave her campaign a jump-start and spread word of her candidacy well beyond her district’s boundaries north of Austin.
One fan praising her video from a distance was the creator of the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda.
After seeing it, he tweeted to his 2.4 million followers: “MJ, you made the best political ad anyone has ever seen.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
In New York’s Democratic primary on June 26, 28-year-old activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocked off incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley, a 20-year veteran and power broker in Congress, partly on the strength of her online video.
In it, Ocasio-Cortez, a community activist who tended bar and waited tables until recently, introduces herself to her heavily Hispanic district in the Bronx and Queens. She’s seen in her apartment, on the subway platform and at the corner store.
The day Ocasio-Cortez posted her ad, she gained 6,700 new Twitter followers, according to the social-media analytics firm Talkwalker.
It would have cost a fortune to air the ad on TV in the New York market, but through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter she inexpensively explained her working-class Puerto Rican roots and her demands for “Medicare for all” and free public college tuition. Millions of people have viewed her ad, and her victory over Crowley was greatly aided by her far bigger presence and reach on social media.
“She went from relative social-media obscurity to being talked about overnight,” said Todd Grossman, the Americas chief executive of Talkwalker. The way she used her online video and social media accelerated her candidacy, Grossman said.
Amy McGrath
In Kentucky, Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot who has never held elected office, overcame a 47-point disadvantage in early polling to win the Democratic primary, defeating the mayor of Lexington. She won without Democratic Party backing but with the help of a biographical ad that has been seen at least 1.8 million times just on YouTube.
Kathleen Williams
In Montana, Kathleen Williams beat better-funded competitors in a June Democratic primary, a key hurdle in her bid to become the first woman elected to Congress from her state since the 1940s. Her ad, shared widely on social media, showed her as a caregiver for her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and as a state legislator fighting for better health care.
