Most campaigns aren't producing enough video for social media, but the footage usually exists. Events, town halls, press gaggles, candidate interviews on the road. The problem is that most of it never gets clipped and posted.
Ed Elson at Prof G Media made this point well in a recent piece called "The Clip Economy." His argument is that clips are no longer a byproduct of long-form content – for most audiences, clips are the content. Campaigners that understand this realize that a single well-recorded candidate appearance isn't one piece of content. It's a week's worth, if you have the right tools to unlock it.
Here's a rundown of the tools worth knowing.
Opus Clip
Opus Clip uses AI to watch your video and surface the moments most likely to perform on social. Upload a long recording – a speech, a town hall, a debate – and it identifies the top clips automatically, already trimmed and formatted for vertical video. It adds animated captions by default and scores each clip by estimated engagement.
For campaigns without a dedicated video editor, this is the closest thing to a shortcut. A staffer can upload a 45-minute event recording and have five shareable clips in under 20 minutes. The AI doesn't always get it right so expect to do light cleanup, but done is better than perfect.
Descript
Descript transcribes your video and lets you edit it like a document. Highlight a sentence and delete it, then the video cuts accordingly. For candidates doing regular interviews, sit-downs, or podcast-style content, this is the most intuitive way to get to a clip without learning traditional video editing.
Anyone comfortable with Google Docs can pick this up quickly. It publishes directly to social, and the transcript makes it easy to find moments without scrubbing through footage frame by frame. The free tier is usable, but the paid Creator plan unlocks the features campaigns actually need to save time.
CapCut
CapCut is free, fast, and widely used. The mobile app makes it possible to clip, caption, and post from a phone in under 10 minutes, which matters when you’re working on the go.
The auto-caption feature is solid. Templates track trending formats, and the desktop version handles more involved editing when you have time for it. The tradeoff is that you're still doing the editorial work of finding the moment.
Submagic
Submagic is built for captions, and it does them better than most tools in this category. It generates word-by-word animated subtitles in the style that performs on Reels and TikTok – color highlights, emoji placement, speaker identification – without you having to build any of that manually.
Submagic turns your footage into posts that look finished quickly with reliable captions.
Conclusion
The right tool depends on your volume and your team. If you're posting daily content from live events, you need speed, but if you're building polished content, you need something more deliberate. Most campaigns end up using more than one of these – an AI tool for event clips and a more hands-on workflow for the content that actually represents the candidate.