A multipronged dark money effort by advisers to Elon Musk targeted liberals, Jews, Muslims and Black voters with ads that were not quite what they seemed.

Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.

What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.

The project, funded with anonymous donations, micro-targeted messages across the battleground states, often with ads that appeared to be something they were not — a tactic the organizers sometimes referred to internally as “false positives.”

With digital spots, direct mail, text messages, influencer marketing and mobile billboards, the overall project was a high-tech experiment in misdirection — an old political tactic that has been sharpened in recent decades with increasingly precise targeting techniques.

Ads tested better if Muslims felt they were seeing a message meant for Zionists, “Bernie bros” felt they were hearing from the far left, and “Zyn bros” felt they were hearing from activists who wanted “a world without gas-powered vehicles,” a ban on fracking and affordable housing for undocumented Americans — policies Harris did not actually support during her campaign.

“The worst part is Kamala Harris talks out of both sides of her mouth,” said one of the ads, which was designed by Trump supporters to look as if it was advocating for leftist priorities like “free health care” and a “break on tuition.”

The entire effort grew out of research by Building America’s Future, a conservative political nonprofit that was founded during the first Trump administration by Republican consultants Generra Peck and Phil Cox. With others at P2 Public Affairs, Peck and Cox, former advisers to DeSantis, were top strategists for a separate effort, America PAC, the super PAC funded by Musk to support Trump. Musk donated to Building America’s Future in 2022, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The group’s leaders have declined to comment on their donors.

Starting in February, Ryan Tyson, a former pollster for DeSantis, began holding a series of about 25 focus groups with specific communities of targeted voters, with most of the research effort focused on likely Democrats who were uncertain about voting. The goal was to figure out how to help Donald Trump win during a campaign in which Democrats were vastly outspending Republicans on digital advertising.

“Clearly, you had a White liberal demographic that hated Donald Trump. That was without question. You could see that coalition everywhere. But once you get past White progressives, every other historical demographic stronghold from the Democrats just started to drop off,” Tyson said about the effort. “What did exist was a tremendous amount of voters on the left that were disaffected. And the only persuasion question was whether they could be persuaded to vote.”

The effort worked in concert with a separate project by the Trump campaign to depress turnout for Harris — knowing that Trump would be unlikely to drastically expand his vote totals. In 2020, Trump received about 74 million votes to Joe Biden’s 81 million votes. In 2024, Trump received a little less than 76 million votes to Harris’s 72.6 million votes. In other words, Trump’s total went up slightly, while Harris dropped about 8 million votes.

“The entire goal of the campaign was to push her numbers down,” said a top Trump campaign adviser, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy.

Building America’s Future tried to focus its spending where the Trump campaign’s top advisers publicly signaled an interest, investing heavily in Muslim communities that the campaign was targeting and seeking to magnify the candidate’s appearances on podcasts with significant White male audiences.

“We studied the strategy that was put in place by Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita and James Blair very closely,” Peck said. “And we did what outside groups can do. We tried to amplify and support the direction in which they were taking the earned and paid media.”

They also deployed multiple brands to place the ads, concealing their common origin — Future Coalition PAC, Duty to America PAC, Americans for Consumer Protection and Progress 2028, according to people involved.

Democrats grew alarmed in the final weeks of the campaign as the ads started appearing on Facebook and Google. Priorities USA, a Harris-backing super PAC, made efforts to get spots taken down from both platforms because of their deceptive nature. Google eventually struck at least one spot in which one of the Building America’s Future groups took footage from a Harris ad in Pennsylvania targeting Jews and began targeting it to Muslims with the words “This is a real Kamala Harris ad” superimposed.

Other efforts to get ads taken down were not successful. Facebook, which has pared back its ad restrictions since 2020, declined to act on a number of requests to take down ads from Progress 2028 that praised the Harris agenda while also describing policies she did not support in 2024, like mandatory gun buybacks, universal health care for undocumented immigrants and “the most progressive Green New Deal yet.”

“There is plenty of blame to go around for another election cycle riddled with misinformation online,” Priorities USA executive director Danielle Butterfield said in a statement. “Big Tech is still unwilling to hold bad actors accountable, Congress is unwilling to step in and write new rules for the 21st century, and Republicans will continue to slander and lie to voters to make their case. Because of all of this, Democrats lose, and we need to acknowledge this reality and figure out new ways to communicate with voters on today’s internet.”

The Harris campaign also responded to the spots being geo-targeted to Dearborn, Michigan, where many Muslims live, by running their own digital ads showing the vice president discussing her concern about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Andrew Romeo, who led the creative strategy for Building America’s Future and also worked as a spokesman for Musk’s America PAC, said they decided to simply ignore their detractors during the campaign.

“People were upset on both sides of the aisle on it, said it was dishonest, disingenuous, we shouldn’t be running ads that look like Harris’s. But it worked and the numbers are undeniable,” Romeo said. “We had a ton of inquiries on these efforts from the media. We didn’t answer any of them. We just ran our strategy and we didn’t care what anyone said. I think that we learned from the Trump campaign in that respect.”

One part of the effort, under the banner of Americans for Consumer Protection, targeted 2.7 million voters with more than 247 million ads and 70 million video completions. That effort also advertised about Biden administration support for a ban on menthol cigarettes to Black voters in Ohio, where Republicans successfully defeated Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Building America’s Future also hosted 18 events around the country, including a gathering of farmers in Pennsylvania that aimed to promote Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick, who was projected by the Associated Press as winning that race against Sen. Bob Casey (D), who has declined to concede. A recount effort was launched Thursday.

“The key to most of our creative was homing in on the idea that the Biden-Harris administration had misplaced priorities,” the group wrote in an after-action report obtained by The Post. “Instead of banning menthols, our ads argued, Biden and Harris should be focused on lowering costs and fixing the chaos of the country.”