With YouChoose 2010, federal and state candidates who want to leverage YouTube in their campaigns can apply to have their own YouTube Politician channel. The political offering supports branding, longer videos, custom thumbnails, and includes Google Moderator and YouTube Insight for video analytics.
Candidates on YouTube can also pay for the ability to add call-to-action overlays to videos, run their TV spots as in-stream ads in other YouTube videos and promote select videos as ads for search terms via Promoted Videos.
The Google Campaign Tools feature is less impressive; it's merely points candidates to existing Google Apps should they wish to leverage other Google products for the duration of their campaigns.
For candidates in states who have already held their primary elections, these tools are being offered a little late in the race. Still, they can help candidates use Google products to get their message in front of larger audiences in upcoming elections. During crunch time, that may be all that matters.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke