Do campaign ads and messages matter?

Our speaker is John Sides who is the Chair of the Political Science Department at Vanderbilt and the author of the book entitled The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy. I want to find out from John what he learned by analyzing the data from the 2024 presidential election that explained Trump’s outperformance. I also want to hear what John thinks will be the key metrics to predict the outcome of the midterm elections.