DraftKings, Meta, AI Firms Have a New Election Playbook: Flood State-Level Races With Cash

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(Bloomberg) — Rusty Glover, an Alabama Republican state senate candidate accustomed to bare-bones political campaigns, this year is facing an onslaught of advertisements on video streaming services attacking him as a greedy “career politician.” 

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A group funded by sports gambling companies FanDuel and DraftKings poured more than $2.2 million into ads to defeat Glover, a gambling opponent, in a suburban Mobile district with fewer than 150,000 residents, according to ad analytics company AdImpact. The same group also barraged the district with more than a dozen mailers and a wave of anti-Glover phone calls.

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US corporations, faced with a legislative logjam in Washington, are increasingly bringing their financial power to bear on state-level election campaigns through super political action committees targeting those contests as they seek to shape regulations.

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“This represents a new frontier of the super PAC game,” said Michael Beckel, a money in politics expert at bipartisan ethics group Issue One. “More and more companies are putting money into state legislative races, where they can see almost immediate return on investment.”  

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Meta Platforms Inc. earlier this year gave $45 million to a super PAC targeting state races. Leading the Future, a pro-artificial intelligence super PAC backed by AI billionaires Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz which plans to spend a combined $125 million this year on state and federal elections, announced in April it would intervene in state contests across Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Texas. 

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The companies behind the sports gambling platforms FanDuel, DraftKings and Fanatics Sportsbook poured $41 million into a new super PAC to spend on state-level candidates across the country. 

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During the last midterm elections four years ago, the largest corporate-funded spender on state races was the National Association of Realtors, which put $16 million into state and local races, according to OpenSecrets. 

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The $2.24 million the sports gambling companies have deployed against Glover dwarfs all other spending in his Republican primary — more than 16 times the total of the next-largest spender, his opponent’s campaign, which had spent less than $134,000 as of May 13. 

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The video ads attacking Glover on streaming services such as YouTube and Hulu don’t mention gambling and identify the sponsor only as the American Conservative Fund, a Virginia-based organization entirely funded by the sports gambling companies’ super PAC, Win for America.

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“Of the people I talk to, nine out of 10 are completely unaware that this is not a conservative group and it’s being funded by gambling,” Glover said. Glover opposes efforts to repeal Alabama’s ban on gambling, which if lifted would open more business to the sports betting companies. A measure to legalize gambling fell one vote short in the state senate in 2024.