Illinois Dem Releases Comically Bad Campaign Ad

“This is the worst political ad I’ve ever seen.”

Robert Schmad • June 27, 2022 4:05 pm

Longtime Chicago congressman Danny Davis (D.) was ridiculed by Twitter users over the abysmal production quality of a campaign advertisement video he released on Saturday.

The ad is a simple text slideshow featuring a computer-generated text-to-speech narration. Despite its simplicity, the ad contains errors in its text, and the robotic voice talking over it is out of sync with the words in the video. Even the beginning of the advertisement is flawed, with the robotic voice starting its narration midway through a sentence. The ad concludes with its stilted narrator stating that Davis “works 24/7 dot he is the people’s champion.” 

Congressman Danny K. Davis talks Numbers https://t.co/REOV1n1Usv

— Danny K. Davis (@DannyKDavis7th) June 26, 2022

The Davis campaign did not return a request for comment regarding how much it paid to have the ad made. 

Responses to Davis’s ad were almost universally negative, with users mocking its amateur quality and numerous mistakes.

“Yoooo my representative just discovered iMovie,” one Twitter user quipped. Another tweeter remarked that Davis’s video “is the worst political ad I’ve ever seen.”

Davis has a controversial history. The congressman has aligned himself with anti-Semitic preacher Louis Farrakahn, went on a week-long trip to Sri Lanka funded by a terrorist organization, and crowned a Korean man claiming to be the Messiah during a ceremony he sponsored in a Senate office building. 

Davis is in a heated primary, defending the seat he’s held for the last quarter-century from Justice Democrats-aligned progressive Kina Collins. Even with his campaign’s lack of technological capabilities and his questionable history, Davis has won the support of high-level Democrats. President Joe Biden, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker (D.), and both of Illinois’s senators have thrown their support behind the congressman.

The ad isn’t the congressman’s only display of technological illiteracy. Davis’s official YouTube channel features a 22-minute-long video titled “Congressman Danny K. Davis on Unemployment.” The video is totally silent and does not seem to feature the congressman. The video contains a screen recording of Davis’s chief of staff resetting her Zoom password and rescheduling a dental appointment.