Campaign Trend Podcast

When a voter asks a chatbot about a candidate, the answer often comes from Ballotpedia. Research from the Center for Campaign Innovation found it cited in about 30% of chatbot answers about candidates, and in 42% of Google Gemini’s. Eric sits down with Leslie Graves, founder and CEO of Ballotpedia, to find out why. Her answer is simple: structure, original content and plain text. They dig into why candidates should fill out Ballotpedia’s Candidate Connection survey. A race’s page on Ballotped...

Just 4% of voters say they used an AI tool for election information in the past month. But 38% got it from a Google AI summary, and about half of them didn’t realize it was AI. Eric sits down with B.J. Martino, president and CEO of The Tarrance Group and part of the bipartisan research team behind the AAPC Foundation’s new national survey of likely voters on artificial intelligence. They dig into the partisan gap on whether AI will do more harm than good, why just 1% of voters call AI their m...

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 collision from both sides. Eric and Katie trace how real-time an...

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 regulations. They get into how Citizen Portal transcribes publi...

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 podcasts haven't worked down the ballot. How AI is showing up in this ...