Q&A: What’s Next For National Campaigns?

Campaigns & Elections sat down last month with two campaign veterans to discuss the political landscape and the future of national campaigns at a whirlwind moment in U.S. politics.

The conversation touched on the increasing nationalization of state and local campaigns, the changing technology and media environment and the need for senior staffers and operatives to understand, not just politics, but culture in the modern era of campaigns. 

It also delved into the shifting political allegiances of key voting blocs and the forces driving those changes.

The panel featured Gail Gitcho, a communications director and adviser at Gail Gitcho Group and a longtime hand on Republican campaigns, as well as Maya Rupert, the former campaign manager for Democrat Julian Castro’s 2020 presidential campaign who later became a senior adviser on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s White House bid. 

The following excerpts from the discussion have been edited for length and clarity. 

C&E: Gail, you were an advisor to [Republican] Herschel Walker’s 2022 Senate campaign in Georgia. That was obviously a statewide race, but it had huge national implications. How do you approach a campaign like that? Do campaign staffers and managers and consultants need to be more prepared for things to go national?

Gail Gitcho: That’s such a great question. Honestly, it sounds so simple to say, but you have to work hard. You have to put the hours in. Whether you’re a local operative or an intern or anyone, it’s just like anything else. You have to want it. You have to work really hard. I mean, I’ve seen staffers that are like, “okay, it’s six o’clock, I’m going to head out.” And I’m like, well, you’re never going to make it. You know that you have to pay your dues, put in your time and be in the foxhole at all times. 

And when the national media descends on your state – because it is very salacious, it’s very headline driven – the campaign has to own it. You have to be on offense every single moment. So that is really the goal. Whether you have a statewide race like that, or you have a national race like the presidential campaigns, you have to be on offense all the time. If you’re not on your heels in those scenarios, then you don’t deserve to win, because you’re missing these opportunities to be on offense. 

That’s how you get the positive stories. That’s what gets your side out. That’s what reaches the voters. That’s what hopefully makes the headlines. That’s what makes it around on social media. I think that’s why President Trump is where he is. He’s always on offense. There’s never a time where he is on defense. You see him going up against reporters that are hard nosed, that have studied him. I think JD Vance is the same way. 

That’s what campaigners have to keep in mind, is the campaign has to be on offense. You have to know what your message is, and you have to drive it. And that requires working very, very hard no matter what race you’re on.

C&E: Maya, I want to throw the same question to you. You managed [Democrat] Maya Wiley’s mayoral campaign in New York. It’s the largest city in the country, and so there’s still a kind of national interest in it. At the same time, when you’re running this campaign, you have to keep it focused on issues like local transportation and affordability. How do you balance those competing pressures?

Maya Rupert: I think at the end of the day, mayoral races and gubernatorial races can reach the national stage. And they are right now for a lot of reasons. But at the end of the day, if you’re running for those offices and you’re working on those campaigns, you need to be hyper focused on what the voters are focused on.

New York City voters deserve a mayor that is talking about them, right? And I think that one of the things that we have seen with the success of someone like [Zohran] Mamdani, for example, is he is talking relentlessly about the issues that matter to New York. There will always be invitations to nationalize a race like that one, because it’s New York City, right? I mean, the New York City Mayor becomes a national figure because of the size of New York City. But I think it’s also because of the moment we’re in right now. 

There are a lot of people who are looking at what is going on right now and want to be that front line of defense between the people and emerging authoritarianism. Who are going to be the people really pushing back? And people start to look to their local leaders, they look to their state leaders to constrain executive power. So that really does nationalize a lot of those conversations. 

You need to be able to do two things. You need to be able to situate the race within the national sphere, because it would be silly not to. To Gail’s point, yes, you do constantly need to be taking advantage of every opportunity. And if that’s the conversation, you want that campaign to be a part of this larger mosaic of what people are doing across the country. This is what we’re seeing in states all over. This is what is energizing Democrats. But it can’t be national politics all the time, right? I think Mamdani did such a great job in constantly bringing the issues back to the people who are living in New York City, and I think that’s important. That’s what voters want and it is what they deserve, and we need campaigns that are worthy of their votes. 

I think we’re going to see this again in 2026. It’s going to be the same thing, right? Everything is going to get nationalized, because there’s a national appetite for change and resistance. But for people who are running at a local level, they need to keep laser focused on what they’re running for and let their campaign be a part of that national conversation, but let their issues and their focus remain on their people.

C&E: Switching gears and looking at the future, what kind of changes have you seen in the world of national campaigning? Outline some of the big ones that stand out to you and what you think has been really transformational to the campaign business.

Gitcho: First of all, it’s the electorate. I mean, Republicans used to do much better in midterm years, and now Republicans are doing better in presidential years, and that is because Republican voters have a new coalition. And it’s important to talk about this new coalition, because we’re going to have to keep it together. Last cycle, in ’24, we saw people making less than $50,000 a year and the less educated go overwhelmingly for Trump. That used to not be the case. I mean, those are Democrat voters, but now they go for Trump. The thing is, they’re also lower propensity, so they are not going to be voting in the midterms as much as a coalition. The challenge is for 2026 for Republicans. This new coalition – people who earn under $50,000 and don’t have a college degree – how do you get them to the polls? How do you get them to turn out? 

We have all of this incredible technology now. I mean, you’ve got this social media thing, and you have texting and all of these things that are really hyper-targeting voters. You can do your best to turn them out, but traditionally, they have not been part of the Republican coalition. So the challenge for Republicans is: can we keep it together for 2026? Same for 2028. I mean, you’re not going to have Donald Trump running again, so what does the next generation of Republicans do?

Donald Trump has laid out a playbook for how to create this coalition and how to keep it together. It will be up to whoever the next nominee is, whoever the next generation of Republicans are, to figure out, “okay, what from this playbook can I use to keep this coalition together that turns out in election years?” And a lot of it has to do with just listening to them. 

I go back to the change I saw when Hillary Clinton talked about the “basket of deplorables.” And right then was just a moment for me, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, she’s saying the quiet part out loud.” She was saying that poor people are icky or that less-educated people have no business supporting her or being in her coalition. And it felt to me like a shift. It was absolutely an elitist move. And so Republicans were able to capitalize on that by just saying, “wait a second, you know we’re for more jobs, better jobs, lower taxes, keeping your housing affordable – all that stuff.” That was part of the reason why this coalition came together. You saw the same thing with Kamala Harris, that voters making less than $50,000 without a college degree went for Trump. So it’s just that’s how the electorate has changed.

C&E: Maya, do you have any thoughts on the changes that you’ve seen since your first national campaign? Are there any big changes that you are looking toward as you work with causes and candidates? Is there anything that you think has been transformational or will be transformational in the way you do your job?

Rupert: I think the coalition that’s going to win for Democrats is a multiracial coalition of working voters and working-poor voters, coming together and realizing that we, as communities, have more in common than what our opponents try to divide us on. And I think that when we see the political imagination of Democratic voters captured, of young progressive voters captured – I think that that is the key to moving forward. 

That means being able to speak to voters across differences, not to ignore differences, but to speak to people across communities. I think right now the Democratic Party is grappling with just that; with how to get that done. There are some voices that are urging us to sort of turn away from our roots as a party, to stop listening to the groups in our coalition, and to sort of focus on certain issues and pretend as though they impact every community the same way. And I do not think that that is going to work for us. 

People know how things actually are playing out for them and their neighbors, and we need to be able to tap into that…I definitely think that there is an assumption that there is some kind of a cultural divide between a number of Democrats and a number of working voters. I think that perception is not the reality, and it’s certainly not the reality in people’s policies. What we need to do is figure out a way to link what people are saying they want to do for families to the perception of Democrats as people who are fighters for working and poor people across this country. 

For a very long time, there has been a lot of this message of “don’t worry, we’ll return to things being okay.” But it makes the assumption that everything was okay. I think people saw Democrats as saying, “don’t worry, we’ll pull us back.” And I think what voters are telling us, across the board, is that the system as it is is not working for people. They want bold solutions. And I don’t think that they’re necessarily saying we want bold solutions that look like x. They’re saying we want bold solutions, and we’re only hearing those solutions come from one person. 

I think what Democrats need to do is stand strong in values and show people that, no, we’re not just nibbling around the edges. We’re talking about coming in and changing things and changing things for the better.

C&E: It seems to me that both of you are making a similar argument. We’ve seen success by candidates that offer big change and translate the frustration and disappointment that voters feel into a workable, communicable message – candidates who can tap into something deeper. 

If you’re a campaign manager, a senior advisor, a deputy campaign manager, to what extent will you need to understand, not just the nuts and bolts of politics, but also culture and being able to translate a candidate’s message and their vision into real things that people can grab onto? Do you need to understand that culture now in a way that maybe you didn’t have to in the past?

Gitcho: Yes. For us, it’s being able to capitalize on the Democratic Party identity crisis – and my own view is that the Dems are having an identity crisis. They don’t know who they are anymore. You’ve got part of the party who is going far, far left, and then you’ve got the other part that’s like, hold on a second, that’s not who we are. 

But when they’re pushing issues like partial-birth abortion or late-term abortion, people just can’t get on board with that. Having trans surgeries for minors without the consent of parents – people can’t get on board with that. Having a wide-open border without knowing who is coming in – people can’t get on board with that. 

For Republicans, what you saw was the capitalization on that in the debates and in advertising and on TV. I remember seeing an MSNBC segment, it was like Rachel Maddow and I think Jen Psaki. They were on TV and they were commenting on a poll that was just released saying that immigration was the number one issue for voters, and they were laughing at it. That’s the moment that I was like, wait, why are you laughing at it? That’s what that’s what people think. So if you’re not going to listen, fine with me. But I couldn’t believe the reaction that it was funny. Like, anybody that lives in New York, that hangs out in a green room – they don’t know what is happening in border towns or border states, or what it’s like for people to feel unsafe because of what they’re seeing on the news. You know that that’s not funny, that’s reality.

Rupert: So I would say yes, it’s definitely important that senior campaign officials understand both the politics and the cultural piece. And I think it’s particularly important because, at this point, we are dealing with culture being dictated by information that is not true. There is no such thing as a partial-birth portion. That’s not a thing. No one is pushing for minor trans kids to have surgery without the consent of their parents. These are fear mongering tactics that are being used to paint positions as radical and beyond a point of reasonableness. 

What we need as Democrats is to be able to, with moral clarity, stand in our values and say, “I absolutely support abortion rights for every single person, and no, no one is saying ‘have a partial birth abortion’.” 

We can’t treat these things like they don’t matter. But the fact of the matter is that people hear that more than they hear the actual position. And so figuring out a way to get the culture piece to match up to what the politics and the policy actually are is going to be really important. It’s going to be especially important in a media environment that is consistently less concerned with getting the facts right.