Know Your Audience: "Campaigns Sometimes Know Their Issues Better Than They Know the People"

Campaigns keep pouring money into broadcast TV while their voters are on YouTube, and targeting people too narrowly can backfire. Digital strategist Colin Delany has watched every new political technology arrive since the mid-1990s, and he explains which ones actually changed how campaigns win. Colin is the founder of Epolitics.com and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World. We cover the three shifts that mattered most (online video, data-driven field and targeted adv...

Someone with 1,500 followers who reliably gets 250 people engaging is a person who can move 250 people — and a door knocker isn't reaching that many in an hour. Narrative strategist Ritti Singh explains how New York's tenant movement built a surround sound communications machine, and what any advocacy organization can take from it. Ritti led communications for Housing Justice for All and the New York State Tenant Bloc, including the Freeze the Rent campaign in New York City's 2025 mayoral ra...

Will Robinson has made ads for Democrats for forty years. He opens this conversation by calling his own profession parasitic. We start with what artificial intelligence has done to political communication since late 2025. Voters searching for a candidate increasingly get a synthesized paragraph instead of a list of links, and only about one percent click through to a source. Will searched himself and found out he is a Republican state representative from Florida. His conclusion: thirty years...

The tactics most campaigns were built on are quietly breaking, and the reason isn't messaging — it's trust. Host Pete Altman talks with Amanda Brink, executive director of The Empower Project, whose recent essay "The Rules of Engagement Have Changed" argues that real persuasion now happens in the group chats, DMs, and comment sections where people decide who to believe. Amanda makes the case that we're organizing in an environment where credibility travels through people rather than instituti...

"If you're not focused on democracy and holding the line there, anything else you're doing is just busy work." That's movement strategist Dana Johnson, and it's the spirit of this whole conversation — clear-eyed about the moment, and unwilling to retreat from it. Dana is the founder of Strategic Movement Collective and the former Senior Director of Strategy and Federal Policy at WE ACT for Environmental Justice. In this episode she walks through how she actually designs a campaign — from the ...