Michigan Democratic Senate Primary: Broadcast Ad-Buy Filings Through the Closing Week
Broadcast ad-buy orders for the five Democratic candidates in Michigan's August 4 Senate primary, rebuilt order by order from the stations' own FCC political files rather than from any summary total. Method: poll the FCC public-file API for new uploads in each candidate's folder at five Michigan stations, download each order PDF, extract the WideOrbit and Marketron order templates, and aggregate gross dollars, spot counts, flight windows and filing timestamps per candidate. Three things are kept separate because they answer different questions: dollars against spots, because a cheap heavy-rotation buy and an expensive sparse buy look identical in a spend total; money already committed to flights in the closing week before the primary, against the season total; and the age of each candidate's most recent filing, because a campaign that has stopped filing orders is saying something a spend total cannot. Boundaries are stated rather than smoothed: coverage is five stations across two markets, Detroit and Grand Rapids, so it is not statewide and excludes cable, digital and radio; orders whose PDF does not match a known template are counted in a separate column and left out of the money columns rather than estimated; and every figure is as filed by the station. The underlying files are public. What is not public is any of it in a form an agent can call: the filings sit as individual PDFs inside per-station folders, and the work here is the parsing and the clock.
Michigan Democratic Senate Primary Winner/Structured/Structured Data
