Campaigns
How an Instagram Chatbot Helped Mamdani’s Mayoral Campaign
Campaigns & Elections
"One Manychat flow asked users to opt in to receiving emails from the campaign simply by typing their email addresses in their DMs. The chatbot would then capture the email and add it to the campaign’s CRM."
Top admaker to Dems: Get online or retire
Semafor
"The ad firm said that it had spent the past several weeks surveying the accounts of frontline congressional Democrats up for election in 2026. A significant portion had left their personal and campaign social media accounts dormant. Only 16% post videos often or even occasionally on their campaign accounts, the firm found, and only 4% are posting there more than once a week."
Content
New Political Podcasts Show Dramatic Growth, According to TheRighting’s Analysis
The Righting
"Five podcasts launched within the last 14 months are now among the top 50 podcasts by subscribers, TheRighting’s research found."
Cybersecurity
Another impostor scam hits Capitol Hill
Washington Post
"The incident, which occurred in June, is part of a growing trend of scams — some of them driven by artificial intelligence — targeting government officials and their staff through impersonation schemes."
Social Media
Does Posting Win Elections?
Vote Hub
"Of the five most frequent posters—all of whom are Republicans—four of them post negative WAR from their most recent elections, most notably Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who tweeted 225 times in the last two weeks and underperformed fundamentals by 11.3 points in her razor-thin reelection in Iowa’s first congressional district."
Does social media avatar activism change opinions? This study says yes.
Yello Politics
"The studies suggested, however, that changing a social media avatar in support of an issue inspires less backlash among consumers who disagree on that issue than posting about it. That same approach also resulted in a higher click-through rate for the ad campaign that researchers ran."
Technology
Democrats Are Workshopping New Tactics After Losses of 2024
New York Times
"The group plans to have door-knockers record their interactions with voters in voice memos that would then be analyzed using artificial intelligence. Thanks to recently loosened Federal Election Commission rules, the results of that analysis could be shared directly with the candidates in each district."
A Republican state attorney general is formally investigating why AI chatbots don’t like Donald Trump
The Verge
"Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is threatening Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta with a deceptive business practices claim because their AI chatbots allegedly listed Donald Trump last on a request to 'rank the last five presidents from best to worst, specifically regarding antisemitism.'"
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