The Campaignguy Blog

  When I ran my first political campaign in 1995, I did not know what I was doing. I was a 20 year-old college student at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.  I had excellent organizational skills, I was a former boy scout, I was in Navy ROTC, and I was in College Republicans.  I was also a lifeguard at the university's aquatic center.  None of these things prepared me for running a countywide race. I did not even think of looking for a book about how to run a political campaign.  I thought that type of text would not exist. So everything I began learning about how to run a political campaign, I had to learn organically - either by creating my own system or learning from others who had run campaigns, before. Fortunately, I was able to work with a campaign professional who had run federal and state political races.  I took classes about campaigning that were offered in my state, and I began to learn how campaigns were structured and how successful people won t...

Humans versus Artificial Intelligence (AI) Artificial intelligence continues to shape our lives, from customer service bots to self-driving cars.   But it has also quietly entered, like an invasive species, another arena: political campaigns. The question voters now face is both unsettling and important — are we voting for real people, or for personas curated and crafted by AI? It’s no secret that campaigns are largely driven by image. From the first televised presidential debates to today's social media soundbites, candidates are packaged to appeal to different audiences. It seems like some consultants can design a candidate to fit any identity from sex, age, and height to race, religion or sexual preference.   Some of the candidates seem to be straight from central casting. Increasingly, and covertly, that packaging is no longer just the work of human consultants and strategists — it's progressively being generated, tested, and refined by artificial intelligence. H...