Foundation Releases Data on Costello Campaign TV Spending

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A sneaking suspicion that political advertising is increasingly swaying public opinion drove the Sunlight Foundation and a host of partners to dig into this year’s election data, and Chester County is one example where that correlation holds true, according to a recent Technical.ly Philly report and the raw Sunlight data that backs it up.

Local voters saw Democrat Tom Wolf outspend and defeat incumbent Gov. Tom Corbett, but they also saw Republican congressional candidate Ryan Costello outspend and defeat fellow challenger Manan Trivedi. A look at the numbers shows Wolf’s campaign spent more than 57 percent of the candidates’ combined advertising total, and he won the election by nearly 55 percent of the vote.

Ryan Costello for Congress paid $333,588 for 439 TV spots to reach voters in Chester County and the rest of the 6th Congressional District, outspending Manan Trivedi’s Trivedi for Congress, which paid $282,771 for 321 TV spots, by a margin of about 54 to 46 percent. The election result favored Costello 56 percent to 44 percent, spanning a difference of 26,257 votes.

Costello, currently chair of the Chester County Board of Commissioners, ran at least three different TV ads, while Dr. Trivedi ran just one.

Read more about the effort to “‘capture, record and analyze all the data we could on political advertising’ in the Philly TV market,” as the Technical.ly Philly article stated, here.

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