Washington Post data reporter Lydia Sidholm and her colleagues recently reviewed $1.6 billion in campaign ads.

We analyzed over 8,000 ads across competitive congressional and gubernatorial races.

And what we did is look at the topics that have been talked about in these ads.

Some of those topics won't surprise you.

Nearly three in five ads aired in competitive races mentioned the economy.

specifically talking about the economy being bad.

But parties are focusing on different elements of it.

And go straight to social issues, which means anything race or gender related or that obstructs efforts to make America great again.

What did the scale of those payments tell you? And how did the number of prescribers change over time?

Right.

So the scale was what made me and my colleagues want to really pursue this story, because the way that we looked at this data was basically we can see the government makes public every single time a company, any company pays any doctor for any drug.

And what we found is that there have been more doctors that have been paid for related to GLP-1s than any other drug.

And that's out of over 400 drugs that we looked at.

And so we kind of were wondering why are the companies focused on spreading kind of the gospel of GLP-1s to such a wide range of doctors.

They haven't necessarily paid the most money out of all of the drug companies, but they've paid the most doctors.

In speaking with physicians for this piece, what did they say about the growing demand for GLP-1 drugs and maybe the need for clinicians to understand how to manage patients who are already taking them?