Personalized Voter Outreach Can Be the Difference Maker in ’26
Last cycle I ran for Congress in central Kentucky’s 6th District. I didn’t win, but my experience revealed a growing need in the political market that I’m working to meet.
Every candidate knows they need to give a good stump speech to get elected. But where you really win people over is in personal conversations on the sidelines of a meeting or local event. That’s because you get to hear what’s impacting them personally and share how you’re going to help.
Right now, most outreach tools are an extension of the stump speech. You sort voters into buckets and send each bucket a version of the same message. It’s efficient, but it also erodes what matters most: personalized connection.
That’s why we founded Overton Blue, which provides AI-powered personalization technology for political campaigns. My co-founder, Thomas Szczygielski, and I wanted to build a tool to give campaigns the power to have personal conversation with voters — at scale.
After my congressional campaign ended, we got to work and built out an entire platform with a neural net backend. Using our proprietary data analysis and weight system, we can enrich the often-thin data campaigns already have and turn it into a clearer picture of the voter.
Whether you’re coming to us with a dataset from a reputable broker or the voter file you got access to when you filed to run, we can flesh out the names on the spreadsheet to make sure that your talking points get matched to the people who need to hear them.
The parent on your list could get an email from you about elementary school funding or safety issues. A senior could hear about a plan to bring down the cost of prescription drugs. The veterinarian could hear about a proposal to fund more no-kill shelters in the area. The voter with never-ending road construction in front of their house could hear about a local infrastructure plan. Our process isn’t localized to Kentucky. We get the same level of confidence enriching data for candidates in California, Texas, Vermont, Florida, or any other state in the country.
We’re enriching each file individually and then allowing our clients to reach voters in their preferred channel, whether that’s persuasion mailers, fundraising texts, email, or live responders.
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This goes beyond data modeling. We aren’t pulling from a subset and extrapolating to a census bracket. We get to know each person individually and match language and messages that will resonate.
Our best examples come from our ability to relate to the activities where people invest their time. Someone who volunteers with a gun violence intervention group is going to be listening to gun policy very differently than a member of the NRA. Knowing these facts helps us decide what to say, when to say it, and when to leave a subject untouched.
AI tools have the power to bring people together if used responsibly. That’s why I started Overton Blue. Not just as an “AI company,” but as a persuasion company that happens to use a powerful new engine to do an old job better: say the right thing to the person actually receiving the message.
And to ensure that we help the most people, our code of ethics requires that each candidate’s data is separate from anyone else’s and that data is anonymized. If a person comes to us in a primary and they have their list, even if their opponent comes to us with the exact same list, we run a separate enrichment on those two sets of data because we don’t keep and share those names across any other field.
Right now, there’s so much noise to cut through before you reach voters, and the only answer seems to be to spend more money for the biggest megaphone. We need better tools to help us create those personal conversations at scale. This lets the policies speak for themselves and allows a campaign to focus on having the best message for the most people.
David Kloiber is the co-founder of Overton Blue, which provides AI-powered personalization technology for political campaigns. He can be reached at: david@overtonblue.com
