According to Roll Call, over $7 million has been expended as of Tuesday in the CD13 race between David Jolly and Alex Sink in Pinellas County. That's when you combine all of the spending from the candidates, the political parties and third-party groups.
And guess what? In the future you'll be able to get more political ads - through Pandora.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Internet radio service is planning on rolling out a new advertising service next week that would "enable candidates and political organizations to target the majority of its 73 million active monthly Pandora listeners based on its sense of their political leaning."
Apparently this is all about certain websites (none bigger than Facebook) who have the ability to compile as much information about you as possible to create a demographic profile that they can sell to online advertisers.
Pandora customers who don't pay for the service will have to contend with this intrusion - but if you go for their ad-free premium service at $3.99 a month, you're spared.
I guess this makes sense, right? Nothing on the Internet is truly free, and if it is (like Facebook or Twitter), you're paying in another fashion, by giving up more and more of your personal information for advertisers to collect and end up marketing back to you. As to whether this Pandora gambit is really going to work, well, I guess the idea is to tie your musical preferences into how you usually vote in an election. I do know
several people who don't fit into the stereotype of liberal or conservative, certainly not based on their pop cultural preferences.
Yesterday the Tampa City Council began the debate about what they may eventually decide to do with the roughly $13 million in tax increment finance dollars being generated in the downtown area annually that will be freed up by the end of next year. While there's been some speculation it could be a possible conduit towards raising up to $100 million for a downtown baseball stadium that could play home to the Tampa Bay Rays, there was zero appetite for that scenario to unfold during the discussion.
And we're just getting started with the public discussions that will take place all year in Pinellas County on their transit tax that will go before the voters in November.