Latest news with #MarkPenn
The Hill
14-07-2025
- Business
- The Hill
Voters split on Trump's ‘big, beautiful bill:' Poll
Voters are evenly divided on President Trump's 'big, beautiful bill,' according to a new poll. A Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll released on Monday found 44 percent of respondents who said they supported Republicans' major policy bill while another 44 percent said they didn't support the legislation. A separate 12 percent said they were not sure. Among the provisions that fared the best among respondents included expanding health savings accounts and increase support for farmers, ranchers and disaster recovery (76 percent); reducing federal spending by $1.3 trillion (69 percent); and creating a permanent child tax credit that is now at $2,200 per family (67 percent). Some of the provisions that fared the worst among respondents include removing tax and registration requirements for firearm silencers (31 percent); imposing a 5 percent tax on remittances sent abroad (43 percent); and raising the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap to $40,000 for those earning under $500,000, which decreases to $10,000 after five years (47 percent), among others. Polling also found respondents divided on whether Trump's megabill helps or hurts the economy. Forty-eight percent said it will improve the economy while 52 percent said it will make the economy worse. Both Republicans and Democrats are leaning into the GOP policy bill as a part of their midterm messaging, with the GOP pointing to its tax cuts as a major benefit while Democrats have criticized the Medicaid cuts included in the bill. The divide over Trump's key package of priorities raises questions over whether voters will see the legislation as an aide or liability for the party heading into the 2026 midterms. 'Like everything else in the country, attitudes towards the bill are split right down the middle. But there are a lot of popular tax cuts in the bill that the [R]epublicans could capitalize on,' said Mark Penn, chairman of the Harris Poll, in an email. The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey was conducted from July 6 to July 8 and surveyed 2,044 registered voters. It is a collaboration of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and the Harris Poll. The survey is an online sample drawn from the Harris Panel and weighted to reflect known demographics. The margin of error is 2.2 percentage points.
The Hill
14-07-2025
- Business
- The Hill
Democrats underwater in new poll
The Democratic Party's approval rating is underwater at 40 percent, according to a new poll, the latest troubling sign for a party still grappling with its losses from November. A Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll released on Monday found that only four in 10 respondents approved of the job that the Democratic Party is doing, a slight drop from June when 42 percent of respondents answered similarly. Of the 40 percent of respondents who gave the Democratic Party a thumb's up, they included 72 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of independent or other voters. The latest poll shows that the party's disapproval rating sits at 60 percent, slowly inching up from 58 percent in June. Twenty-eight percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independent/other voters contributed to the overall 60 percent disapproval rating of the party. By comparison, the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found the GOP with a 48 percent approval rating, which includes 85 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of independent/other voters who had that sentiment. Overall, the GOP had a 52 percent disapproval rating. The polling underscores a broader trend for Democrats who have grappled with low approval ratings as the party has attempted to reset after a disappointing November election. While the party has begun to regain some of its footing with its messaging as it rallies against the Medicaid cuts included in Republicans' major policy bill, the party is still searching for national leaders to help guide the party. 'Democrats are doing a good job throwing jabs at the administration but that's not helping them with their own image which remains in the cellar,' said Mark Penn, chairman of the Harris Poll, in an email. However, the Harvard CAPS/Harris polling indicates there may be several openings for Democrats: For one, the latest poll found that only 40 percent of respondents said the country was on the right track while 51 percent said it was on the wrong track. And while 52 percent of respondents believe the U.S. economy is strong today, only 38 percent of respondents also say that the economy is on the right track. One thing likely to play in Democrats' favor is that the president's party in power typically faces headwinds during the midterm cycle, which could aid Democrats in retaking the House and making inroads in the Senate. The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey was conducted from July 6 to July 8 and surveyed 2,044 registered voters. It is a collaboration of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and the Harris Poll. The survey is an online sample drawn from the Harris Panel and weighted to reflect known demographics. The margin of error is 2.2 percentage points.
The Hill
14-07-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Trump's immigration policies get strong backing in new poll
A majority of voters gave President Trump's immigration policies high marks, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released on Monday. Sixty percent of voters said they support Trump's efforts to close the border, including 89 percent of Republicans, 55 percent of Independents and 34 percent of Democrats. Seventy-five percent of respondents also said they support the administration's efforts to deport criminals who are in the country illegally, including 93 percent of Republicans, 70 percent of Independents, and 59 percent of Democrats. 'Huge majorities of Americans support the removal of criminals here illegally but also care about human rights and due process being observed,' said the poll's director Mark Penn. The same poll found that voters were divided over Trump's approach to immigration enforcement. Fifty-two percent said the administration was 'doing the right thing' in enforcing its immigration policy, while 48 percent said it is 'going too far in its enforcement actions.' Fifty-nine percent of respondents said there needs to be more due process guaranteed hearings to prevent unfair deportations, while 41 percent said the government needs to act quickly to deport criminals from the U.S. The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey was conducted from July 6-8, 2025 and surveyed 2,044 registered voters. It is a collaboration of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and the Harris Poll. The survey is an online sample drawn from the Harris Panel and weighted to reflect known demographics. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.
Wall Street Journal
13-07-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
The Hipsters in Brooklyn Don't Speak for Gen Z
Mark Penn and Andrew Stein's op-ed 'Gen Z, the Useful Idiot Generation' (July 8) oversimplifies my peers. While Brooklyn, N.Y., influencers may have naively cast their ballots for a socialist, don't forget that millions of Gen Zers swung to the right last November and voted for Donald Trump. Other young people feel politically homeless and disaffected with the two-party system. The Park Slope Food Coop doesn't speak for everyone. As Messrs. Penn and Stein acknowledge, my generation can't be compared with others that shifted right once they got married and started families. Give us time. My peers will live longer and have kids later. Despite long-term trends away from religion, young people are bucking hipster atheism, and young men especially are engaged with Catholicism.
Times
12-07-2025
- Business
- Times
Why advertisers are wrong to shun news websites
As a former student journalist, pollster and political strategist for both Bill Clinton and Sir Tony Blair, Mark Penn considers himself an avowed 'news junkie'. Research by his advertising group Stagwell suggests he is in good company, with 90 per cent of chief executives and 25 per cent of the public falling into the same category. So when he left politics to work as an executive at Microsoft, Penn was surprised to learn that the tech giant did not advertise its products on news websites. 'It was really puzzling,' said Penn, who rose to become chief strategy officer. He went on to embrace news advertising on Microsoft's behalf, and says it paid off with a significant boost in sales. Later, after Penn launched Stagwell, he learnt that many other large companies were partially, or entirely, withdrawn from digital news. This he describes as 'ludicrous'. Not only does he believe that companies should want to support journalism but he also thinks companies are missing out on reaching large cross-sections of society. Stagwell's claim that a quarter of people in the UK are 'news junkies' — checking reports four times a day — may cause eyebrows to rise but his belief that these people tend to be 'higher-educated, higher-income' than most chimes with others in his sector. In Penn's view, much of the blame for this lies with a handful of outfits, known as 'brand safety companies', that are virtually unknown outside his sector. He speaks of being 'harassed' by these companies to avoid placing adverts next to certain news content. News, he says, has been 'demonetised by this expanding brand safety movement'. In some cases, company bosses have knowingly reduced their expenditure on news for fear of their brands appearing next to politically divisive or upsetting stories. But in many other instances, Penn believes business leaders are unaware of their company's news avoidance. Some ad teams have years-old lists of 'keywords' that will trigger brand safety companies to block adverts from appearing on a news story. Farcical case studies abound. Fiona Salmon, boss of brand safety challenger Mantis, which is owned by Reach, the UK publisher whose stable includes the Mirror and Express newspapers, says BBC Good Food has lost out on adverts because of references to chicken 'breasts'. References to 'shots' have damaged football websites. And, she says, some blocklists still include Ariana Grande eight years after the Manchester Arena attack. Penn estimates that '30 to 40 per cent of stories, generally in newspapers like yours, are being demonetised' in this way. He says: 'I think a lot of CEOs don't realise.' Now Penn and an alliance of peers, concerned about the trend of ad revenues being shunted from journalism to Silicon Valley's tech giants, are encouraging business leaders to return their ad dollars and pounds to news. Among the converted is Tracy-Ann Lim, chief media officer of banking giant JP Morgan. 'Investing in news is not a charitable choice, it's a business decision,' she said at a Stagwell event during the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France in June. She criticised other firms for being 'hypocritical' by advertising with news 'in a fleeting way', depending on the politics of the day. How did it come to this? The rise of the internet gave companies the opportunity to reach potential customers with immediacy and at low cost through so-called programmatic advertising. In the past, companies would appoint media-buying agencies to spend weeks or months negotiating prices to secure marketing slots on advertising boards, television screens, newspapers and magazines. Today, with up to 90 per cent of UK advertising money spent online, media-buying agencies have automated much of this process and deals can be struck in nanoseconds. When an internet user clicks on a link or app, in the time it takes to load, media-buying robots compete in auctions to buy ad slots. That lack of human oversight brings risk, hence the growing business of brand safety. Many trace the term 'brand safety' back nearly a decade. It was around this time when companies began to come under pressure over adverts that appeared alongside, and so inadvertently provided funding for, extremist groups. A 2017 Times investigation found a Mercedes advert running on a pro-Isis YouTube video, and Waitrose being promoted on Britain First's website. Panicked, the ad industry scrambled to find ways to stop this happening without disrupting programmatic advertising. One of the simplest solutions was for companies and their media-buying agencies to draw up long lists of words to avoid. Those charged with implementing the restrictions included DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (IAS), which are today seen as the world's leading brand safety companies. These are no small outfits. They are both publicly listed in New York and have valuations of $2.5 billion and $1.4 billion respectively. During the split-second process of an advert appearing on a screen, the technology of DoubleVerify and IAS can intervene to block the transaction completing, so depriving the website publisher of funds. The intention of the brand safety movement was to stop wholesome brands from appearing alongside extremist blogs, pornography and other unsavoury content. But as politics became more divisive, many started to expand their lists to rule out web pages that might include serious news stories. Jean-Christophe Peube, chief operating officer of French advertising business Equativ, says that lists grew to 'thousands of words' and 'that's really not the right way to do it'. In 2023, America's Time magazine landed an exclusive interview with Taylor Swift, one of its biggest journalistic hits in recent years. But, says Mark Howard, chief operating officer, the company missed out on significant advertising revenue because it was deemed 'unsafe' by one of the brand safety outfits. He said this was because it included references to the 'sexism' and 'the exclusion of women from power' that Swift had helped to challenge. To further exacerbate the problem, many in the ad sector say teams have been too cautious to remove words from their lists. 'So people are still blocking 'Hillary Clinton',' says Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer of Ad Fontes Media, another challenger to the brand safety companies that seeks to inform advertisers of political bias in news publishers. 'She's now a grandmother living in upstate New York. She's no longer a controversial figure like she might have been in the 2016 election.' While DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science have earned bogeyman status among some in the sector, it is worth noting that they say their role often consists of merely upholding the wishes, and keyword ban lists, of media-buying agencies and companies. But many believe their technology has not evolved fast enough and that they have not done enough to help struggling publishers. Ross Jenkins, the European boss of media-buying agency Mediahub, says his company has moved away from blocklists and uses new tools, and its own technology, to measure whether a web page is desirable for advertisers. These consider 'context', to avoid keywords being taken out of context, 'sentiment' in an article and an assessment of whether a website or app tends to command 'high attention'. More and more marketing money is going towards big tech platforms and social media. Lukas Fassbender, a senior vice-president for Europe of The Trade Desk, which helps companies advertise on parts of the internet not controlled by big tech, including news sites, said more marketers should trust news outlets. 'Journalism is curated,' he said, while on social media, brands still run the risk of appearing next to 'terrorism or someone just throwing stupid videos on social'. Still many powerful marketing executives live in fear of what will be in the news. Speaking in Cannes last month, Gordana Buccisano, global brands strategy director of Reckitt, the maker of Durex and Strepsils, disclosed that her company had imposed a 'blanket ban' on adverts during last year's US election for fear of 'negative exposure' on a divisive story. Appearing alongside her at an event hosted by European broadcast RTL, Caroline Proto, global media boss for EssilorLuxottica, which makes Ray-Ban and Oakley sunglasses, said her company was also reducing its spend on news advertising, citing the risk to its brands in the 'current climate'. Challenged on how she knew that appearing alongside a story about Donald Trump was bad for a sunglasses brand, Proto admitted: 'We don't. But it's not a risk … that we're willing to take.' Evidence is growing that, in fact, there is no risk. Last year Penn's company, Stagwell, conducted a survey of 50,000 Americans to determine whether placing an advert next to a positive or negative news story made a difference to consumer perceptions. The study found that ads 'placed adjacent to stories covering politics or gun shootings perform as effectively as ads placed next to a positive business story, on par with sport and entertainment'. Penn's conclusion is that marketers' fear of news is 'irrational'.
