They turned off our ads. We still don’t know why.

Hey team,

Over the weekend, our digital fundraising team noticed that our Facebook ads weren’t reaching the number of people we anticipated.

It turns out that a technical glitch led to an outage that meant thousands of voters and supporters who would normally see our ads just … didn’t.

This is bad. For many reasons. While our team worked with Meta to figure it out, we lost out on thousands of grassroots donations heading into the biggest quarterly fundraising deadline yet.

We’re pivoting to make up the fundraising gap from this weekend and letting everyone know: 1. Yes, this is bad. 2. No one is panicking. Here’s Plan B:

Facebook ads aren’t the most glamorous part of a campaign. But Ohio has 88 counties and 12 million people, and the fact is we can’t knock on every single door – digital ads help us reach undecided voters and Sherrod supporters who may not be subscribed to receive a fundraising ask elsewhere.

Here’s how Sherrod put it in his Substack on this yesterday:

We rely heavily on ads like these to fund our campaign. On some days, thousands of folks give to us on Facebook and they account for the majority of our online fundraising. I don’t call on outside billionaires or corporate special interest groups to fund this operation, but that means grassroots support makes or breaks our bottom line.

So when these ads stopped delivering, grassroots supporters who wanted to chip in $5 or $10 simply couldn’t. And now, we’re seriously behind pace for where we need to be at this point in the month…

More than ever, I need your help spreading the word about this critical race. Share this, post it on Facebook, tell your friends in person. We need everyone to understand what we’re fighting for here in Ohio.

And if you’ve been on the fence about chipping in to this movement, now is a time when it would really matter. Every dollar will help us out immediately and means a whole lot to me personally.

As of this writing, we’re back up (!) – but the lost time means we’re still making up for the fundraising loss, and it’s going to take more donations than normal from supporters to close the gap.

Thanks for being part of Team Sherrod and everything you do to support this effort and our campaign. We appreciate you! Please donate today before the big deadline and share this post.

-Team Sherrod

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A message from Team Sherrod 📣

Election analysts say we have a real shot of winning in Ohio this November, but flipping a Senate seat doesn’t come easy. It takes organizers on the ground in every one of the 88 counties in the state, ads that cut through the noise, and a team that can go head-to-head with an avalanche of dark money.

That’s the work made possible with you on board – and even a $5 donation from you today will put us one step closer to flipping this seat.

Sherrod’s opponent is a Washington insider backed by the Republican establishment with virtually unlimited resources at his disposal. We don’t have our opponent’s billionaire backers, but we do have a strong grassroots foundation of thousands of folks who believe that Ohio – and our country – deserves better.

Every dollar you chip in goes towards building the kind of campaign we’ll need to defy the odds and flip this seat. Donate today and be part of our path to victory. Everything counts in a race this close.

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