Last week, a deep-red district in Pennsylvania made a stunning shift: Lancaster County elected Democrat Jim Malone to the state Senate, flipping a seat that had been in Republican hands for decades. This wasn’t a traditional campaign backed by major party infrastructure—it was a grassroots, all-volunteer effort that leveraged smart digital outreach to make every dollar count.

DSPolitical’s Director of Engineering, Justin Kenel, volunteered on the campaign and played a key role in setting up a winning digital ad strategy using DemocraticAds.com. This win highlights a game-changing reality for smaller campaigns: you don’t need a massive digital budget, a high-powered creative agency, or a team of advertising technology experts to run effective digital ads. With the right tools, even any campaign can maximize its reach and impact. That’s why we built DemocraticAds.com—to democratize access to powerful digital advertising, ensuring that smaller, grassroots campaigns can compete on the same playing field as well-funded races.

Flipping Red Districts: A Growing Trend for Democrats

Malone’s win wasn’t an isolated event—it’s part of a larger trend of Democrats flipping Republican strongholds across the country. From Pennsylvania to Iowa, traditionally conservative areas are seeing major Democratic gains.

Why does this matter? Because it shows that no district should be written off. With the right strategy, digital tools, and messaging, Democrats can be competitive in places they’ve never won before. This is exactly what we highlighted in our recent post on key elections shaping 2025 and beyond.

Making Digital Advertising Work for a Volunteer-Run Campaign 

We sat down with Justin to learn more about his experience volunteering with Senator-elect Malone.

Q: How did you use DSPolitical’s self-serve platform, DemocraticAds.com, to run digital advertising for Malone’s campaign?

Justin: We had about two months to pull this race together, and resources were tight. Our budget for digital ads was small, and we had no funding for professional creative production. But we knew digital ads were crucial, so we turned to DemocraticAds.com to launch a targeted, affordable, and easy-to-run ad campaign.

All of our creative was produced in-house by volunteers—Lancaster County has an amazing group of dedicated, talented Democrats. Because we didn’t have the luxury of complex audience modeling, we took a practical and achievable approach: reaching every registered Democrat in the county. Our VoteBuilder voter universe was the same for canvassing, phone banking, and mailers. The goal was simple but critical: maximize voter turnout.

Making the Most of a Limited Budget

Q: How did digital ad impressions translate into increased voter engagement and turnout?

Justin: As a small, volunteer-driven campaign, we didn’t have the capacity to track sophisticated voter engagement metrics, so we focused on what we could control: ensuring Malone’s name was consistently visible to Democratic voters. Rather than overcomplicating our digital strategy, we set a clear, high-level objective—boosting awareness and turnout among our base. DemocraticAds.com allowed us to execute this plan efficiently, making the most of a limited budget by automating ad placements and ensuring repeated exposure. This approach reinforced our broader campaign efforts, aligning digital outreach with our canvassing and voter contact strategies.

DemocraticAds.com was designed for exactly this kind of campaign—one where every dollar counts, and digital outreach needs to be as efficient as possible. It allowed us to stretch our limited budget and ensure Malone’s message reached as many voters as possible. Because the platform is self-serve, we didn’t need an outside agency or technical expertise to launch our ads. Instead, we focused our resources where they mattered most—getting the message in front of Democratic voters.

By automating ad placement and maximizing reach and frequency, DemocraticAds.com became an essential tool for ensuring every potential voter saw Malone’s name and message. Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to execute an effective digital campaign at this scale.

What Worked: Messaging & Ad Strategy

Q: What ad formats and messaging resonated most with voters in this historically Republican district?

Justin: We focused exclusively on display ads because they were the most practical and cost-effective option. A local volunteer put together a few simple but effective designs featuring Malone’s image and bold, direct messaging like “STOP MAGA” and “VOTE DEM.”

These ads may not have been flashy, but they were deliberately simple and powerful—designed to cut through the noise, stand out, and reinforce Malone’s name at every opportunity. Repetition matters in political advertising, and digital ads gave us the ability to keep hitting the message home.

A Strategy Any Small Campaign Can Use

Q: What advice would you give to other smaller or under-resourced campaigns looking to maximize their digital efforts?

Justin: The key is to focus on what’s achievable with your resources and build a digital strategy that reinforces your overall voter outreach. For us, that meant using DemocraticAds.com to ensure every Democratic voter in the county saw Malone’s name multiple times before Election Day. Instead of worrying about complex data models or micro-targeting, we prioritized consistent, broad visibility—which paid off in a big way.

For small campaigns, the biggest takeaway is this: you don’t need a massive budget or a team of tech experts to run a winning digital strategy. By using self-serve tools, automating ad placements, and aligning your digital efforts with canvassing, phone banking, and mail, you can create an efficient and effective voter contact program—even with a small team.

Key Takeaways for Grassroots Campaigns

Malone’s victory is proof that even the smallest campaigns can win with the right digital tools. If you’re running a campaign on a tight budget, here’s what you need to know:

• You don’t need a massive budget—DemocraticAds.com is designed for affordability and ease of use. You can run ads with whatever budget you have.
• You don’t need a team of tech experts—Even as an engineer, I didn’t need special skills to make this work. The platform’s automation and targeting tools handled everything for us.
• You do need a clear goal—For us, that goal was simple: maximize awareness and turnout. Your campaign’s digital strategy should be focused on what’s most achievable with the resources you have.

If a volunteer-driven campaign in Lancaster County can flip a deep-red district blue, your campaign can succeed too. The key is using the right digital tools to work smarter, not harder.

What’s Next for Democratic Gains?

As we’ve seen in this election and others, Democrats are flipping districts once considered unwinnable. That means we can’t afford to ignore any race or assume that traditional strongholds will continue to hold.

Democrats can’t afford to sit back and watch Republicans implode—we need strong messages, sustained digital outreach, and aggressive engagement in districts that were once considered out of reach. This election reinforced that investing in strategic digital campaigns isn’t just a luxury for big races, it’s a necessity for winning everywhere. Expanding the map requires smart, persistent voter contact, and digital tools like DemocraticAds.com make that possible even for smaller, grassroots campaigns.

Learn more about DemocraticAds.com and contact us to launch your campaign today.