Q&A: How Big Tech Forever Changed the Campaign World
When it comes to digital campaigning, Katie Harbath has been around the block.
She developed GOP.com for the Republican National Committee back in 2004, served as the chief digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 2010 cycle when the GOP flipped the House and picked up six Senate seats and became one of the go-tos at Facebook for campaigns trying to suss out how to use the platform.
Campaigns & Elections sat down with Harbath ahead of the launch of her upcoming book, Disrupting Politics, which comes out Oct. 6, to talk about the early days of digital strategy, how campaigns misjudged social media and what the AI era means for the business of politics.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
C&E: I think it’s fair to call you one of the OGs of digital campaigning. You helped develop GOP.com for the RNC. You led digital for the NRSC in 2010 when a lot of these tactics were just starting to go mainstream. And then you headed up Facebook’s elections program. Thinking back to those early days, did you have any sense of what the relationship between technology and politics would become?
Katie Harbath: We had an aspiration, which was that the president of the United States would be using the tools themselves – which came true – but I don’t know that it had the impact, necessarily, that we were expecting for it.
I loved that it brought Democrats and Republicans together. Those of us that were doing digital would oftentimes talk, because even though we were supporting different candidates and elected officials that had different positions on different issues, we all wanted them to be using these digital tools a lot more.
It took a while to get everybody on board with that, but the goal was to get it so that elected officials and campaigns could have a direct line to voters, and voters could have a direct line to them, which, I could argue, was achieved.
C&E: Staying around that same period, when campaigns really started dabbling with social media, what was something they misunderstood about social media then? And on that same note, were some of the early mistakes and missteps avoidable?
Harbath: Well, what’s interesting about that broad period is that was the rise of the Tea Party. I talk about it in the book, because I was at the [National Republican] Senatorial Committee then, as you mentioned, and we were seeing incumbents like [former Rep.] Mike Castle in Delaware lose their primary to people like Christine O’Donnell from the famous “I’m Not a Witch” commercial. And you had people like Sharron Angle – and I think Rand Paul came up in that in that era, as well – really using digital in a way to reach out to not just voters but donors. They’re like: “Oh, we can use the internet to help. And then also by being on cable news and everything else like that, we can raise money on our own. We don’t need the national party to do that, and we don’t like the way they’re running things anyway.” They were really able to, I think, tap into that part of the internet and the anti-establishment component of it.
And then I think, at that point in time too, incumbents still were very wary of the internet. When I was on [Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign] in ’07, they wouldn’t really let us post, because they were worried about what the people would say in the comments and if the press would talk about it. They didn’t want to let go of the control of the message. And I think a lot of incumbents – and not just the candidates themselves, but the staffers – were also sometimes very nervous about using and putting stuff up on digital…There were very few candidates who were kind of willing to let go of some of that control and see where the internet community took them.
C&E: You’re out with a book next week. In it, you detail your time working in this space and how these tactics and strategies and conversations around politics and tech developed in real time. What were you trying to accomplish in writing this? And why now?
Harbath: The first reason is kind of a selfish one in that I just didn’t want anybody else telling my story. There’s a lot of stories out there from colleagues of mine, from people reporting about what happened – particularly during the Facebook years – and I just didn’t want to have my story as part of that pile, if you will, because people are going to be writing the history of this time many, many, many years from now.
When I was talking to Garrett Graff, who writes a lot of oral histories, and I was asking what he would like the most when he’s writing these books, he’s like: just more stories. So I want to get my story out there, and I want to do it in my way.
Two, I still think that we need to be having a much more nuanced discussion around some of these impossible trade-offs that are oftentimes happening when there’s no playbook to follow. It’s not like we’ve been through this before to know exactly what we should do. And so I wanted to bring people into the room and I wanted to remind them what it was like. People will come to me and say: “Let’s talk about the relationship between tech and Republicans.” And I’ll say: “Okay, we’re going to go back to 2003. I wanted to remind people of the earlier time periods, because you can kind of draw a line from then to where we are now, and I wanted to bring people into the rooms and show them what that was like, what we were thinking at that time, what were the decisions that we were weighing.
I’m not asking people to change their mind about decisions that we made at Facebook, but if I can get them to say, “huh, that was a lot harder than I thought,” or “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” that’s a win for me.
And why now? I originally thought about writing this in 2021. I then realized that, as an author, you need your own platform, so I decided to focus on the newsletter first and building up that audience for my “Anchor Change” Substack. Then I just wanted to get this out before the ’26 midterms because tech is always a conversation in any cycle right now. I was seeing where AI was going and I thought this is going to be a huge thing for the ’28 presidential, so I wanted to get the book out before the midterms and then going into the presidential. It helped that I found out the “Social Reckoning” movie was coming out Oct. 9, so I decided to jump on that marketing bandwagon.
Also, it’s not just the book. Any tech book is out of date the minute you write it. And so the book is really meant to be a historical account. It ends with the tech CEOs at the [presidential] inauguration in ’25, because then I want it to drive people to my newsletter where we can talk more about the things that are happening today.
C&E: Just like 20-or-so years ago, when the social media era began, we’re at the start of a new era in tech now with artificial intelligence. What lessons can campaigns take from the past as they think about AI? And are there any mistakes that can be avoided this time around?
Harbath: I know it’s a very tricky thing, but I do think campaigns should be very transparent about how they’re using AI. What’s interesting about this technology that’s a little different from the beginning of the social media era is now we have a technology where we have to think about, not only how are the campaigns using it, but also as a public policy issue – whether it’s data centers, whether it’s national security, whether it’s AI safeguards and all that.
Campaigns are having to balance between how they feel about this as a policy issue, but they also want to be able to use it to help win elections. What does that look like? I think trust is the number one thing that everyone’s trying to build, and it’s very hard to build with people. I’ve just found that being transparent about my own AI use has built up more trust with people, because then they at least know what’s happening and what’s in front of them.
I think I understand why campaigns are nervous about that. But I do think, in the long run, that will help your voters understand. I’m not asking you to give away every nitty-gritty thing you’re doing, but just talk more broadly about how you’re doing it.
And this is the thing about campaigns in tech. We have very short attention spans. We’re really only thinking up to Election Day, right? What do I need to do to make sure my candidate has more votes than the next guy? Then I’ll worry about the next campaign and what that looks like. In tech, it tends to be – I used to say six month cycles, but now I feel like it’s even shorter for what those product cycles look like. I try to take a longer term view of this. Where is this going? How might this play out? What rocks are we not looking under?
I’m worried about AI influencers, especially from overseas, and where they’re trying to make money off of Facebook or YouTube or TikTok or whatever it is, and how they’re going to try to influence the ecosystem. And then, while news organizations are still negotiating with these AI platforms about how their content can be used or licensed or whatever, it’s leaving a big hole for people. If you’re making a site that is accessible for bots, that’s where the bots are going to be pulling information from.
I think campaigns – as you think about the branding for your candidate, your party, your issue, whatever that is – you have to be skating to where the puck’s going, and be thinking about, not only how you build that up to make sure that your candidate is being portrayed in the best way, but also thinking about whether we’re seeding the information environment in the way that we would aspire to seed the information environment.
C&E: A phrase that you use a lot in your writing is “panic responsibly.” We have people who work in AI development publicly saying that this is a technology that could potentially kill us all. We have workers concerned about losing their jobs to AI. And we have a government that can’t agree on how to regulate it or even if it should be regulated. What does “panic responsibly” mean for you, in that context? It also sounds like there might be a reason to panic.
Harbath: But that’s why it’s “panic responsibly.” I’m not saying don’t panic. There are absolutely things to be concerned about. One of the things that I am glad we are doing in this AI era that we didn’t do the first 15-ish years of the social media era is at least we’re talking about the downsides openly and very early. Now, that comes as its own trade-off, in that talking about these downsides brings fear of the unknown. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but at least we’re having those conversations earlier on.
People are being told if they use AI, it’s cheating or people are not going to like them and they’re going to lose trust. But also, if you don’t learn how to use it, you’re going to lose your job, and that can make people just kind of freeze in place and say “I don’t know which direction I’m supposed to go.” One of the things I talk about a lot in the book is that there was no playbook. It was just thinking: “I just have to make the best decision right now and take the next best step forward. I may have to pivot. I may need to change as new things come to light.”
It’s about engaging and moving forward. I talk in the book about remembering that we all have our own agency. It can be very easy to feel like the world is happening to us and that we have no control. We do, at least, have control over the social media platforms we use, the AI platforms we use or how much we’re on our phones – those types of things. I think that it can sometimes be helpful to remember when the world is swirling around you that you also have some control, at least over how you react and how you conduct your day.
