Advertising
How AI deepfakes are upending political advertising
WBUR
“We don’t need additional laws and regulations just because AI came onto the scene.”
Campaigns
How James Talarico’s team “wrote for the internet.”
Kyle Tharp
“Because everything lived under one roof, I’m able to work backwards from virality — everything from the speech delivery to the edit of the cut to the text on screen, all that stuff was owned by my team, and not siloed like they are in a lot of campaigns. Everything fed off each other.”
Winning candidates appeared on more podcasts
Axios
“Winning congressional candidates made nearly three times as many podcast appearances as their losing opponents, according to Spotify data shared exclusively with Axios.”
Content
Candidates flipped seven Senate seats this election. The winners are all on Substack.
Substack
“Op-eds need to be pitched and edited and then may run behind a paywall or in an outlet that may come with ideological baggage. On Substack, you hit publish, and it lands directly in your subscribers’ inboxes.”
A Blue Wave Of Newly-Elected Senators and Congresspeople Moved to Substack
We Are Digital Diplomacy
“Of the 107 new Congresspeople taking office on January 3, 2027, 48 are on Substack, 55 are not, and 4 races are still not being called. Of the 48 Congresspeople already on Substack, only 2 are from the Republican Party.”
Fundraising
My Journey to the Center of America’s Political Spam Text Hell
WIRED
“The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee alone sent 60 of them—22 in the first 20 days of October—from 28 different numbers. My relative had given it $5, once, in 2020.”
Social Media
How the DNC won the FYP
Rachel Karten
“In a way, approval processes are like a stack of Swiss cheese: There are ways to get through each level of approval, but if you’re layering 15 different slices of cheese on top of one another, not much of anything is going to get through. I’ve found that two or three slices are much more manageable.”
Technology
ChatGPT provided Democracy Works info to voters more than 16 million times this cycle
The Hill
“When a user of ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini asks for logistical, nonbiased information about Election Day, the models are likely pulling from the Democracy Works API.”
Synthetic Voters Aren’t Voters: Where AI Belongs in Campaign Research and Where It Doesn’t
Campaigns & Elections
“The dividing line should be clear: AI can support the process of understanding voters, but it should not silently become the voter.”
Dispatches from the First AI Election
Caucus AI
“In a survey experiment with Florida voters, a persuasive chatbot transcript, written in the neutral style typical of chatbot text, was 44% more persuasive than a video ad for the same candidate.”