Campaign Trend Podcast

Did the internet let politics down, or did we? Eric sits down with his friend Katie Harbath, founder and CEO of Anchor Change and author of the new book Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy. Before spending a decade running global elections policy at Facebook, Katie built GOP.com, ran digital for Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign and led digital at the NRSC, so she's watched this co...

Almost everything written about AI and elections this cycle is about what it will do to voters. Paul Allen thinks the bigger story is what it can do for them. This week, Eric sits down with Paul, co-founder of Ancestry.com and founder and CEO of SOAR and Citizen Portal, who is applying the lessons of turning a huge unread archive into something personal to the records almost no one reads: local government meetings, ordinances and r...

This week, Eric Wilson is the guest. Right after Labor Day, Eric joined Prompt.io president Farz Sokhansanj on Prompt.io's Pulse Check webinar to take stock of where campaigns and technology stand heading into the midterms.

They cover the four kinds of Americans campaigns are trying to reach, and why only about 9% of them are the ones actually talking about politics. Whether 2024 really was the "podcast election," and why po...

Eric is joined by Dustin Tropp, founder of Republican Jobs, to unpack the 2026 Political Careers Survey — 427 political professionals on pay, benefits, and whether they're sticking around.

The headline finding: it's not the job that determines whether campaign work is a real career, it's the employer. Staff at a firm or committee report just 16% with zero benefits. Staff hired directly by a campaign? 64% with nothing. ...

Can you trust a poll when no human ever picked up the phone? Eric sits down with Matthew Hanauer, co-founder of Civly, to unpack synthetic polling — building AI simulations of real, individually-modeled voters (using public voter file, demographic, and donation data) to predict how they'd respond to a survey. Matt walks through how Civly back-tests its models against real election results, why asking AI yes/no questions produ...

Opposition research has always rewarded whoever digs deepest. AI is changing who can afford to dig — and how much stays buried. This week, Eric Wilson sits down with John Artunkal, founder and CEO of Argus AI, who came to politics through open-source intelligence, trained by Bellingcat and schooled at Oxford in the social science of the internet.

They get into how AI is — and isn't — transforming the vetting busine...

Everyone's worried about AI deepfakes in politics. Becki Wright says that's not the real story.

Becki, founder of Proximity and a former candidate and campaign manager, joins Eric Wilson to talk about what AI is actually doing in campaigns right now — mostly quiet, mostly mundane, and mostly happening on downballot races that can't afford a full-time staff. She breaks down the three failure modes of off-the-shelf AI tools (the...

Every pollster knows the problem: for every hundred voters you ask to take a poll, only one or two actually respond. So what if AI could just answer the questions for them? It's a seductive idea — and Ben Leff has put it to the test.

Ben is co-founder and CEO of Verasight, a survey research firm founded by academics and trusted by leading institutions and media organizations. He and his colleagues G. Elliott Morris and Peter E...

AI adoption in political consulting is accelerating — but is the industry keeping up, or splitting in two? Eric Wilson sits down with Julie Sweet, Director of Advocacy and Industry Relations at the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC), to dig into the findings of AAPC's March 2026 member survey on AI use across the profession. They unpack what real integration looks like versus chatbot-level tinkering, why lar...

Adrianne Marsh, CEO of Altum Insight, came to rural Nebraska expecting to hear about the economy. What her team found instead stopped them cold: deep, values-rooted fear of artificial intelligence — not about jobs or data centers, but about trust, truth, and a way of life under threat. Adrianne joins Eric to break down the qualitative research behind that finding, what it means for Democratic strategy in 2026, and why the gen...

Winning arguments doesn't win elections. Persuasion does — and they're not the same thing. On this episode, Eric Wilson talks with Josh Bandoch, head of policy at the Illinois Policy Institute and author of How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion (Simon & Schuster), about what the neuroscience and psychology of persuasion actually tell us — and what most campaigns keep getting wron...

For decades, campaigns have won by borrowing — getting union endorsements, buying TV ads, riding the audiences others built. But a small and growing number of candidates are doing something fundamentally different: building their own audiences from scratch and keeping them well beyond election day. Doug Usher, a partner at Forbes Tate Partners and co-founder of the Analytics Program at Columbia University, joins Eric Wilson t...

Connected TV spending is growing — but the real question in 2026 isn't whether campaigns should be buying CTV. It's who should be managing the buy.
Eric Wilson sits down with Chauncey Southworth, CEO of CrossScreen Media, to untangle the debate between TV buyers and digital buyers over who owns the streaming buy. Chauncey breaks down where the CTV growth is actually coming from (hint: down-ballot races are surging), why si...

The 2026 midterms present a fundamentally different electoral landscape for Republicans. In this episode, pollster David Kanevsky breaks down exclusive post-election survey data from Virginia and New Jersey that reveals how campaigns are now dealing with two distinct electorates: highly engaged partisans who consume news across every platform, and politically disengaged voters who stream without ads and intentionally avoid politica...

Host Eric Wilson sits down with John Link, Senior Vice President of Data at Ad Impact, to unpack the eye-popping numbers behind the 2025-2026 political cycle—projected to become the most expensive midterm in U.S. history at $10.8 billion. Link reveals that three to four Senate races alone could hit the unprecedented $500 million mark, with Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, and potentially Texas leading the way.

The conversati...

What happens when a poker champion with $3 million in tournament winnings pivots to political texting? You get Phil Gordon, founder of Prompt.io, dropping wisdom on selective aggression, ethical influence, and why your campaign texts might be getting ignored.

Whether you're managing a 50-50 race or just tired of your texts going straight to the spam folder, this episode is your permission to fold the bad hands and go all-in on what ...

Wired senior writer Makena Kelly joins Eric Wilson to unpack how online fandom culture—the same energy that drives Swifties and K-Pop fans—is now fueling political movements. Through the lens of Zohran Mamdani's New York City mayoral campaign, Kelly reveals why young voters aren't just supporting candidates anymore—they're creating fan cams, remixing rally speeches into songs, and building participatory communitie...

What if the political consulting industry isn't the competitive free market everyone assumes it is? Jordan Lieberman, CEO of Powers Interactive, analyzed over 54 million federal campaign transactions to reveal the hidden architecture of political consulting. In this episode, Jordan shares eye-opening findings about vendor survival rates, the power of alumni networks, and why 93% of consultants don't make it a decade in the business...