How Tech, Money and Culture Are Shaping the Future of Politics

Campaigns are starting earlier and lasting longer than ever. Artificial intelligence technology is moving fast. Public trust in institutions – the government, the media, political parties – is dwindling. 

Political consultants are bracing for a whirlwind of change in the coming years and decades that they say could – and most likely will – reshape nearly every facet of their profession, from the work of entry-level campaign staffers to the very business models that have dominated the industry for decades.

In interviews with Campaigns & Elections, several veteran campaign staffers, strategists and firm leaders stressed the need for the politics industry to adapt to rapidly evolving technologies, business realities and media consumption habits, arguing that those who fail to do so risk being left behind in a fast-changing world.

“It’s going to be more important as we move forward that consultants kind of change their skillsets – change how they look at the work,” said Phil Vangelakos, the president and managing partner of the Republican digital firm Push Digital Group. “We’ve been strategists. But the next generation of consultants will have to be part strategist and part coder and part cultural anthropologist. Culture and technology aren’t going to slow down. They’re going to speed up.”

Perhaps more than anything else, consultants said, it’s AI that stands to be the biggest disruptor for the business of politics. Some acknowledged that the emergence of AI tech would likely cost at least some jobs in the industry. Others cast it as a way to increase efficiency. 

But there was one point of universal agreement: Campaigners and consultants can’t afford to eschew AI. 

“​​Just look at the difference that generative AI has made in our whole media ecosystem in a very short time,” said Betsy Hoover, the founder and managing partner of Higher Ground Labs, a Democratic-aligned venture fund and tech incubator. “It’s hard to imagine what 2028, 2030, 2032 are going to look like. We have to figure out the role that this is going to play. All these things are tech enabled.”

For Hoover, the future of political tech can’t come fast enough. She got her start in politics nearly two decades ago as an organizer for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s first presidential bid. Since then, she said, many of the strategies and mechanics that campaigns rely on have remained largely unchanged, even as the rest of the world has moved on.

“I actually think not enough has changed about how we campaign or how we run elections,” Hoover said. “In the 18 years that I’ve worked in politics, the world has totally changed, the way we communicate with one another is totally different. It’s all digital, it’s all online, it’s all fast.

“We’ve gone from high-value, highly produced brand integrity to a much more distributed content and distribution model,” she added. “We’ve gone from trusted outlets and common voices to lots of different outlets that we don’t know we can trust. We have to keep up.”

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Politics is an industry that is notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. As companies like Facebook and YouTube grew their user bases in the late 2000s, early digital operatives struggled to convince their principals that these new platforms were worth the investment.

Eric Wilson, the executive director of the Center for Campaign Innovation and a managing partner at Startup Caucus, recalled “fighting for the proverbial seat at the table” as a young digital strategist at the firm Engage in the late 2000s and early 2010s. 

“We were happy if a candidate raised $10,000 online in a month, and if we got to spend $25,000 on digital advertising, that was a win,” Wilson told C&E. “It was a real struggle convincing people to invest in these new platforms and these new channels.”

Times have changed drastically since then, Wilson said. Consultants now advise their clients to run “online-first” operations and tech incubators on both the left and right are pushing campaigns to more quickly adapt to the changing technological landscape. The future of campaigns, Wilson said, has to develop hand-in-hand with new tech.

There’s some evidence that more political consultants are putting AI tech to use. A survey commissioned earlier this year by the American Association of Political Consultants found that most consultants – 59 percent – used AI for work at least a few times a week. But much of that use has been driven by individual curiosity and experimentation rather than a concerted effort by industry leaders to integrate the tech into their work.

Hoover said that in order for the campaign industry to get to where it needs to be with tech, AI adoption has to “be a priority at the top.” 

There are other barriers to wider-spread AI adoption. State governments have moved in recent years to enact a patchwork of regulations governing the use of AI in political campaigning, making it difficult in some cases for consultants to fully deploy the technology. At the same time, consultants are grappling with a more human question: Does AI mean layoffs, fewer jobs and cheaper costs?

One of the people mulling that question is Jonathan Barnes, the CEO of the Democratic digital shop Authentic. Barnes, who took over as the firm’s chief executive earlier this year, has been among the most vocal proponents on the left for AI experimentation. He told C&E that there’s still work to be done to fine tune AI’s use in politics, but said that skepticism in the emerging tech is “misplaced.”

Nevertheless, he conceded, AI is likely going to eventually mean downsized staffs and smaller budgets. He said that the onus will be on firm leaders to find a balance between AI-enabled work and the need for real human voices in the political space.

“I think it is going to impact jobs,” Barnes said. “I think it’s on leaders in the space to figure out how we protect jobs and augment jobs rather than replace jobs. That’s one of the things we’re trying to do at Authentic is have those conversations with the team, be collaborative about what we can use it for, making sure it is augmenting their work.” 

Of course, there’s always going to be a need for the human element in politics, Barnes said. 

“Because of the need for human oversight, especially in politics, there’s probably going to be a limit to what we can lean on AI for. So much of what we do, especially messaging, is going to need human oversight,” he said. “The big exciting things that are technologically possible are still kind of limited in our space because the principal’s voice is so important.”

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The rise of new tech and the injection of big money into the business of politics also has the potential to reshape the very business models that have thrived in the campaign industry for years. 

Private equity has taken a new interest in political shops in recent years, providing once-small firms with the capital to grow into larger, more-consolidated consultancies. At the same time, the potential of AI to automate work that currently requires large teams of people could eventually prompt practitioners to search for alternatives to the commission structure that many firms work under, Wilson said.

“I’d be interested if, with technology, with more people being able to service more campaigns, are we going to see new business models?” Wilson said. “Maybe it’s more gig work where prices rise and fall with demand. Or is it something like an assets-under-management model? I think that’s kind of the next area of innovation. How do we deliver all of this?”

Vangelakos, the managing partner at Push Digital, said that the emphasis on tech threatens to blur the very partisan battlelines that firms operate within. As political work becomes more and more tech-centric, he said, the industry is likely to see an influx of professionals who are more tech driven and less ideological. 

“I think the next era is going to be less about party aligned firms and more about agile political mercenaries – people who are tech savvy and the mission is to the contract,” Vangelakos said. “There are still going to be Republican and Democrat firms, but I think those lines are going to start to blur.”

The idea, he said, is for firms to become “more nimble and more freelance and more boutique.” As technology develops and political professionals adopt new, more-efficient digital tactics, “it’s going to be very, very tough to maintain big, bloated shops and big, bloated payrolls,” Vangelakos said.

Practitioners also said there are plenty of bright spots that come with new tech. AI efficiencies could free up firms to work with clients that they previously would have passed up. Down-ballot candidates could see easier access to high-end consulting. Faster communication means campaigns and causes can reach more people. 

“I’m always optimistic about an industry that’s focused on preserving and protecting and engaging with democracy,” Barnes said. “That may be naive. But the fact that there’s an industry around this work allows us to reach more people and be effective in how we reach people. And that has a ripple effect around the world.”

This story appears in the commemorative 45th Anniversary print edition of Campaigns & Elections magazine.