Colin Delany: You Can Microtarget Yourself to Death
Episode posted 10/6/2026
Watch/listen here.
Colin Delany interview
[00:00:00] Colin D:
And broadcast TV is 20% of media consumption in this country right now compared to streaming, compared to YouTube, TV, YouTube period, hell. that they are pouring resources into reaching a smaller and smaller percentage of the population who are older, I think part of it's inertia, and part of it is 15% commission on TV ads.
[00:00:26] Peter:
Hi, welcome back to The Campaign Strategist, where we dive into the art and science of electoral and advocacy campaigns with the practitioners who plan and run them. If you like this kind of conversation, please like, share, and subscribe so that other people have a chance to see it and hear it too.
Today's guest has been working at the intersection of politics and technology since the time when political campaigns were trying to figure out whether they needed a website. Colin Delaney is a digital [00:01:00] strategist and the founder and editor of epolitics.com, which he launched in 2006 to examine how campaigns and advocacy organizations use technology to organize people and to communicate.
Over nearly three decades, Colin has watched political organizations adapt to quite a few technology innovations. The shortlist includes the internet, email, online fundraising, social media, digital advertising, data and targeting, and now artificial intelligence. He's also advised campaigns and advocacy organizations and written extensively about what actually works once you get beyond the hype surrounding the latest technology.
And that's why I wanted to have him on. I also wanted to have him on because we worked together two decades ago at National Environmental Trust, and he's always fun to talk to. Now, political professionals are constantly being told that some new technology is about to transform campaigning, and sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not, and sometimes the technology matters, but not for the reasons we initially thought it would.
[00:02:00] So I wanted to ask someone who's lived through several generations of these changes a fairly simple question: What has technology actually changed about campaigning, and what hasn't changed at all? So let's get into it with Colin Delaney on The Campaign Strategist
[00:02:18] Peter: Colin, welcome to The Campaign Strategist. Thank you for joining.
[00:02:22] Colin D: It's my pleasure
[00:02:24] Peter: so you've been working in digital politics since the mid-1990s. You've watched campaigns discover websites, email, online fundraising, social media, digital advertising, data and targeting, and now AI. Looking back across all of that change, which technologies actually changed the way that campaigns operate, and which ones turned out to matter less than people thought they would?
[00:02:50] Colin D: Oh, good timing because I am working on an article with this particular focus right now for, my site, EPolitics. I think three [00:03:00] things. video, YouTube, so which basically means bandwidth, right? Because something like YouTube couldn't exist until broadband, was pretty widely available to people.
because that opened up the world of political video and the internet, right? Before, you had to wait two or three minutes to download a 20-second clip, right? so that to me was transformative, and not just because it's something campaigns can use, but because as we see every day now, for instance, on this recording, it's something that everyday people or political insiders or anyone else who wants to make a point can make a point
[00:03:43] Peter: And out of those technologies, are there any that you feel beyond broadband, like
[00:03:49] Colin D: Yeah.
[00:03:50] Peter: made a difference
[00:03:50] Colin D: think,
[00:03:51] Peter: campaign?
[00:03:51] Colin D: sure. The next one on my list would be data-driven field organizing, right? If you go back to the late 20th century, when I got started in [00:04:00] politics, we were in a total broadcast era, except for folks like, in some cases, the moral majority and, some folks on the right, labor unions, and some civil rights groups, on the left, grassroots politics had dropped out, right?
The role of the voter was to absorb our television ads and vote accordingly, right? Yeah. And
[00:04:22] Peter: of
[00:04:23] Colin D: yeah, starting in 2003 with the blogs, the self-organizing people did around Howard Dean's campaign, and then we jump forward to 2007, 2008, and Obama's campaign builds the first real ... the Republicans had ex- had played with this in Ohio in '04, but Obama built out the first real, at scale, f- national field campaign, and that expertise carried through, right?
I remember, 2012 just improved the model. in 2013, when Terry McAuliffe was running for governor in Virginia, that [00:05:00] Obama network was still extant, and he squeaked out a win by two odd points. fast-forward to the last time McAuliffe ran, he got, beat by about two points, and there was no sign anywhere of that data-driven field organization.
The people were gone, right? The technology was, forgotten, and, so these things are too ephemeral, right? And then the third one I would put in there is targeted advertising, right? The ability to get at least down to household level and, in a lot of cases, down to the individual level. Although, of course, the kids can always be using mama's phone, right?
[00:05:38] Peter: So no targeting is perfect. And a lot of TVs ... But at the same time, a lot of, TVs on broadcast channels are playing to empty rooms, Yeah.
[00:05:48] Colin D: there. But yeah, I think those are the three things, video, period, field, and, digital advertising. But the overarching change, and we've touched on it some, is that [00:06:00] people are far more involved, individual people, activists, your neighbors, whoever, are far more involved in the political process now than they were in 1991 when I started working in the Texas legislature.
[00:06:16] Peter: So, this is a really interesting answer because, you're talking about how these technologies have actually helped support some of the traditional approaches, like being able to use vast amount of data that we have when people are canvassing. So now they can go to exactly the doors that the
[00:06:36] Colin D: wants them to.
[00:06:37] Peter: They don't-- They're not just knocking on every door on a street. They're going to the doors where the voters have been identified as having a certain perspective that the campaign wants to zero in on.
[00:06:48] Colin D: or with, how to reach voters online, which obviously is an online tool, but just in terms of using that technology to figure out exactly who do we want to
Mhm
[00:06:59] Peter: [00:07:00] building... I guess that extends to building models in the voter file
Yeah. so on.
[00:07:03] Colin D: by that, Peter means, basically try to mine the voter file for people who meet certain sets of criteria, right? But I've just got to point out that, just like when micro- microtargeting was the phrase of the day back in the 2016, and Cambridge Analytica and all of that, you can microtarget yourself to death, right?
In two different ways. One, no data model is perfect, right? So if you're using entirely addressable communications, which means, ads or, text message, emails, whatever they are, that are addressed to a s- a specific you're always gonna miss some people, and you're always gonna hit a few of the wrong people.
So you have to be prepared for both eventualities. I think the ... And the second thing, and this is one that people don't talk about as much, is that, one of the knocks against, if you read, the Bulwark article from, I think, April by, [00:08:00] Harris's, former digital director from 24, he talks about there not being enough of a single narrative in that campaign, in part because the super PAC Future Forward and the campaign were not getting o- had different priorities.
the, ... But that people didn't know what she stood for because there wasn't this single unifying thing. And, one of the ... Another article I'm working on, is, this idea of AI being somehow able to crank out vast amounts of content that is uniquely persuasive because what it knows about us.
And one, I would say, if that's available to politicos, that's also available to Hershey's and Toyota, right? So our uniquely persuasive content will be competing with a lot of other uniquely persuasive content. But it also makes the mistake that, a campaign's communications, ads, social media posts, whatever they are, they're not people's [00:09:00] only source of information, right?
They're gonna talk to each other, and if one person is seeing one person and another person ... one person seeing one message and another person seeing another message, you can end up with kind of a cognitive dissonance, and again, people not knowing what you stand for. So there's this balance. Sometimes you need a rifle, sometimes you need a shotgun.
It's best to have both
[00:09:25] Peter: I
[00:09:26] Colin D: Yes, I've used that line before.
[00:09:30] Peter: w- and that tracks with actually the last interview I just posted, Ritti Singh talking about surround sound communications and how you wanna get
[00:09:38] Colin D: the same narrative being conveyed from a whole bunch of different directions generally. and she's talking about, a- and a lot more people are talking about is happening online
Mhm
[00:09:50] Peter: of at the door, which is something I personally felt campaigning for Harris back in '24.
I
like, good grief, I'm d- like, getting a minute or two at the [00:10:00] door, but that's coming, like, in the middle of hours and hours of social media, whatever they're absorbing. it just felt futile trying to,
[00:10:10] Colin D: Mhm
[00:10:12] Peter: change minds when they've already been set. And it's also related to, I mean, w- I'm just wondering if you agree with this. One, one element that's changed, I think, is campaigns are now they should be always on. It's not something that you can just leave as ha- has been true for the last many decades like, right after Labor Day and you have the burst of TV ads, and that's, when people really think that the campaign starts up.
But people are already getting to the end of the summer pretty solidified in what they think, and it's because they're getting constant exposure all the time
[00:10:47] Colin D: Yeah, it's the, the reason you were having to do persuasion at the door is they started too late, right? that field outreach should have started the year before, or January, or March, [00:11:00] right? When you have time to begin to work on people, begin to, create those little cracks in a worldview that might allow, a different idea to sneak in.
and that to me is one of the, the tragedies of Democratic campaigning over the last 10, 12 years. the Hillary campaign, I, went back and reread some articles from '16 the other day. The Hillary campaign did not use a, canvassing app, right? The ki- the MiniVan would be a good example. The thing that lives on your phone and, canvassers go door to door.
The information's on the phone. They enter notes about what the con- how the conversation went. He- the 2016 campaign didn't wanna pay for it And that tells you a lot about their priorities, right? They did not care about grassroots politics. The people at the top knew best, right? Yeah. It was the opposite under Obama.
The Obama people set up...
[00:11:59] Peter: Yeah
[00:11:59] Colin D: [00:12:00] it wasn't just- they weren't just looking at polls, right? the, the, the trends that field teams were seeing, they had a system to funnel that information up the ladder so that, like, when David Plouffe and those guys were deciding where to send surrogates, where to spend extra ad money in the last few weeks, their, biggest weapon was Michelle.
Wherever they sent Michelle, they got a, a tremendous response, right? And, they would use polling, sure, but, and, talking to, to, their, staff on the ground, but also they had a way to get information from field organizers. And I'll note that there are some A apps out-- AI apps out there that are automating that process, and this is one of those, this kind of thing AI is great for, right?
nobody's got time to transcribe all these things, but a, a volunteer can leave a voice memo, and then you can derive trends from all of that. Yeah. I think we went a little far afield on that, but here we are.
[00:12:56] Peter: all right. are there, has there been like a shiny object [00:13:00] that, you think political professionals were like, "Oh, that's gonna be the thing," and it n- you know, just didn't pan out? or that they just misunderstood about how it really worked
[00:13:10] Colin D: it's hard to separate the political professionals from the press coverage, right? Because, yeah, in that, one of those articles I'm working on, I lay out a history of the X election. 2012 was the Twitter election. Really. Barack Obama had 100,000 followers. You're gonna tell me that won him the election, right?
2016 was the Cambridge Analytica election. the Trump campaign barely used their data, 'cause Facebook's internal data was far more actionable and frankly useful, right?
[00:13:42] Peter: That's interesting.
[00:13:43] Colin D: Now, uh, if you go back, I would say 2012 was the data-driven field and, email fundraising and, uh, digital advertising election, right?
Because those were the kinds of things that actually won or helped them [00:14:00] win
[00:14:02] Peter: and it's really interesting in how different campaigns-- usually you think of campaigns learn from the previous campaign.
[00:14:10] Colin D: Nope.
[00:14:11] Peter: just the anecdote about the Clinton campaign not being interested in the door feedback in contrast to
[00:14:18] Colin D: is interesting. And the, I've been, hearing this theme of political consultant class that is really rooted and grounded in a certain way of doing things, and that's part of why it is so difficult for the Democrats to adapt, 'cause they've got this consulting class that all the candidates use, that is used to do-
[00:14:40] Peter: so are you seeing that as well or do you think is there
[00:14:44] Colin D: Mhm
[00:14:45] Peter: else at work when campaigns don't take advantage of the digital tools that are available?
[00:14:50] Colin D: Yeah, excellent question. there is very little Barack Obama did many things that I appreciate. However, he was a [00:15:00] terrible leader of the Democratic Party as an institution, right? We lost, what was it, 700 or 800 state legislative seats, a bunch of legislative chambers, governorships, because this is the downside of focusing on the guy at the top, right?
They did not invest in infrastructure. And in part, it is the job... And then the state parties, like you look at New York State, the, Cuomo's friend who was chair there for a long time, he spent a whole lot more time keeping progressives off the ballot than he did investing in any kind of infrastructure, right?
So if you don't invest in the state parties or you don't invest in outsider... There used to be a group called the New Organizing Institute, but it, imploded due to bad management, An absentee board and bad management. we have to nurture institutions like that. NOI trained thousands of Democratic staff and nonprofit, right?
And individual activists, right? we tend to talk a lot about the campaigns, but so much is [00:16:00] nowadays being done by local organizers. you're, we're getting to the point, I hadn't thought about this before, but we're getting to the point where maybe like Indivisible chapters become part of the institutional memory.
But one of the things that, Hopium, Simon Rosenberg, very good at raising sta- money for state parties, right? He has a big, Substack, and he's raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for state parties. Jon Ossoff gave a big chunk of change to the Georgia party. Now, part of that may be because he wants to get Bottoms, Kesha Lance Bottoms, the Democrat, into the governor's mansion so that if he becomes president, they get to appoint a Democratic senator, right?
But also,
[00:16:38] Peter: Mhm
[00:16:38] Colin D: more and more candidates are recognizing... the Michigan Democratic Party came back from the Trump loss in part because Debbie Stabenow put a few hundred grand into off-cycle field organizing, right? They began to build a presence on the ground in like 2017. Yeah.
the, for years there was very little [00:17:00] institutional memory. Like the Obama team preserved what they did, right? But then people scatter. Like I was talking to somebody about Virginia after, McAuliffe got creamed. Or two points isn't creamed, though.
McAuliffe got beat. and I was talking to the political director at this organization I was working with, and he said, "The time you get your raise or your promotion is after you win," right? So if people do really well- It re- it scatters them to the winds because they can suddenly go off and get much better gigs, right?
This ephemeral campaign structure I think is a big reason. And then you brought up the consultants, right? I was, talking to a friend who, has been in the business a long time and been in the digital, world a long time, and he says that, funders, consultants workings, working with funders for, independent groups, PACs, super PACs, whatever, they all want to talk about TV, [00:18:00] and they want to talk about broadcast TV.
[00:18:02] Peter: And broadcast TV is 20% of media consumption in this country right now compared to streaming, um, compared to YouTube, TV, YouTube period, hell. Um, that they are pouring resources into reaching a smaller and smaller percentage of the population who are older, I mean, is that all because these firms get
[00:18:32] Colin D: Fifteen percent?
[00:18:33] Peter: wet
[00:18:33] Colin D: Yeah
[00:18:34] Peter: they place an ad? I mean, it's just because they're making tons of money, so they keep the candidates locked into TV? Is it,
I, and stupid?
[00:18:43] Colin D: I think it's, it is pro- from talking to- 'cause I ask this question to people a lot, right? Like, why the hell is this way? And, it seems to be a combination of inertia, right? And I, my suspicion is that once you get up to the [00:19:00] super PACs and all of that, they're just talking to a handful of people,
[00:19:03] Peter: talking to some 25-year-old who just came up with a very cool idea, right? They're talking to somebody who's been doing TV for 30, 40 years, somebody they're comfortable with, somebody they trust. And some of those folks adapted very quickly and became, multimedia. and I will- I was looking at some ad data the other day, that, Democrats are spending more on pure digital advertising at the moment, the candidates are, as a percentage, than the Republicans are.
[00:19:31] Colin D: But I have not, I wanna go back to the source and see if they can break out fundraising versus everything else because a ton of people are running fundraising ads on YouTube. And, I'm running, fundraising ads, to, on, on things like Facebook, for clients. how much of the digital advertising Democrats are doing is fundraising versus, once we get further in, GOTV and persuasion.
But yeah, I think part of it's inertia, and part of it is 15% commission [00:20:00] on TV ads. Yeah
[00:20:01] Peter: Okay, so why don't consultants get fif- get s- not that I wanna promote, you know, taking 15% off the top of anything, but, w- why are, don't consultants get 15% when they, you book a bunch of Facebook ads?
[00:20:15] Colin D: depending on the firm, you do.
[00:20:16] Peter: way?
[00:20:17] Colin D: Yeah. A lot of firms use a commission structure. It's often lower. Yeah, it's often, When we were working with a, a, a, a good meaning good quality Democratic firm to, place a bunch of, uh, Facebook ads, they were charging, what was it? It was, like, 12% on stuff up to 100 grand, and then above that it was, like, 10%, right?
And, I have, I... I have done smaller projects on commission, and it absolutely sucks because the little projects take up at least as much time as the big projects, and you're charging less. Yes. So I try to go by project whenever I can. But that's just me. I'm not a 200-person firm that has a lot of mouths to feed.
Yeah. So [00:21:00] yeah, I think inertia plus incentive
[00:21:03] Peter: Okay. Let's turn to AI. You mentioned it, and you've also written AI isn't an I win button for campaigns. What do you think AI genuinely changes about running a campaign, and where do you think we're in danger of confusing greater efficiency better strategy?
yeah, that's a great question. look, plenty of people are using AI very effectively right now. if I need to turn, a PDF report into 20, tweets or Blue Sky posts, Yeah
[00:21:32] Colin D: will do it a lot better and quicker than I would. people, a lot of people use it for email fundraising, iteration.
the downside of content creation is that by definition it can't come up with something new, right? It's just a statistics engine trying to figure out the next word based on correlations among all these concepts it's encountered, right? you end up with a lot of flat writing, right? which may or may not inspire.
[00:21:58] Peter: Some of it I'm sure is gonna work [00:22:00] extremely well, right? But it is a danger. the, A lot of folks that I hear are using it for things like internal project management. Mhm.
[00:22:08] Colin D: it's far, it's also for things like client reports. Got big spreadsheets, ask AI to find the trends in them, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
it is really good for Yeah. But, if you're gonna use it for a work product, you have to check, right? There was just the story, it snuck in last week, that an intelligence, analyst using ChatGPT, ChatGPT misidentified the cargo of a Chinese ship, and we almost attacked it. The plane was in the air. Yeah. So
[00:22:46] Peter: That would have been an oops
[00:22:48] Colin D: Yeah.
And, going back to that idea of the mass content customization, I think that is probably, the most over-hyped thing because it sounds scary. It's gonna be super persuasive, right? where, [00:23:00] mass content tailoring. But, you've got to review every one of those variants. Besides all the problems we talked about earlier, you gotta review every variant for, c- uh, campaign finance violations or outright political insanity, right?
You don't know what this thing's gonna say. Yeah
[00:23:17] Peter: Right, especially if it's creating thousands of somethings.
[00:23:20] Colin D: Yeah
[00:23:22] Peter: yeah, thousands of posts or whatever. Like, one of the things that I worried about, and I think others were, is that AI would unleash, just, a torrent of AI-generated videos that, you know, show the opposing candidate to be, you know, doing whatever disqualifying thing the, you know, the, the, the maker thinks is gonna be most harmful. It doesn't seem like that's happened
[00:23:51] Colin D: Mhm.
[00:23:51] Peter: yet. I also thought if I was gonna do that, I would do it really close to the election so there's not time to find out that it's [00:24:00] BS
[00:24:00] Colin D: Mhm.
[00:24:01] Peter: people... But on the other hand, if people have already made up their minds, I don't know. So, do, or d- what, think that we're likely to see a bunch of, AI-generated fake videos,
[00:24:12] Colin D: you already
[00:24:13] Peter: into the campaign, or is it already happening and we're just not aware of it, or
[00:24:17] Colin D: Yeah,
[00:24:17] Peter: here?
[00:24:18] Colin D: go back to Spencer Pratt when he was trying... Was he governor or mayor? I think he was running for governor in California in the spring. Oh, there were so many breathless...
[00:24:26] Peter: of L- mayor of LA.
[00:24:28] Colin D: Yeah, it was mayor of LA, not, governor of California, the, the press was breathless about all the AI videos talking him up.
da, da, da. They got all these views, and he didn't make the runoff, right? I think one thing is, older folks are more likely to fall for the fake videos. Younger folks have gotten accustomed to things not being true online, right? your mom thinks the video of the cat jumping from one end of the basketball court to another or [00:25:00] whatever, "How did a cat do that?"
they didn't, so that's one thing. The other thing is there is just so much information out there, right? Like there was, again, a little bit of breathless coverage. The Times was... played it pretty straight, but some of the people covering it didn't. But a Russian, propaganda effort, lots of fake tweets and bots on Twitter.
Who's gonna see them? It's Twitter. Twitter is already bots, right? I don't think... And, the other thing is that there is just so much information out there, that even if a Russian fake video gets viewed 100,000 times, one, it wasn't viewed 100,000 times, right? It flipped by on a screen no one was looking at a lot of those times, yeah.
And a lot of... If it's on Twitter, a lot of those accounts were fake, right? the, uh, people creating fake video are competing against all the other video we're creating, It's very hard, I think, for somebody to get traction. [00:26:00] Now, where, Russian disinformation or something like that can make a big difference is in a, a particularly, a smaller country that is less used to being wired.
[00:26:09] Peter: A place like Moldova in, Europe, where they have, put out real and fake content to discredit journalists, opponents of the Moscow, backed faction. so yeah, I think in places where people haven't built up the antibodies in a way, Yeah So, I, and I wanna go back to that 'cause it just got me thinking. people are increasingly skeptical about what they see online. does that do to the future of digital communications?
[00:26:40] Colin D: Ah, the kids, always on my lawn. Yeah. No, that's a really good question. woof. I think so much of it's gonna come back to compelling content, right? and relationships. the, uh, we haven't talked about relational organizing, which is basically...
[00:26:55] Peter: back to who the messenger
[00:26:57] Colin D: Yeah.
[00:26:57] Peter: do they
[00:26:58] Colin D: yeah, yeah
[00:26:59] Peter: the video's [00:27:00] coming from more than the actual
[00:27:01] Colin D: Yeah. And can that video compete with their, beloved cousin who's volunteering for the campaign and is saying, "This is not true." That's the relational part, organizing people through their personal connections usually.
[00:27:15] Peter: Yeah
Yeah. So, so is that up to the campaigns to make sure that there's relational organizing set up and functioning? Is that part of a strategy to just bat down disinformation or
[00:27:32] Colin D: Yeah, I think,
[00:27:33] Peter: bullshit
[00:27:33] Colin D: this... Yeah, I've been saying this for years that, the best, uh, countermeasure you have against disinformation is your own supporters and s- trusted surrogates. hometown preachers, The sheriff,
[00:27:47] Peter: Attracts
[00:27:48] Colin D: officials, the actor you went to high school with,
people who are trusted voices. this is one reason that influencer, organizing or influencer outreach has gotten a lot of attention, this [00:28:00] cycle. Although, I think it's probably gotten more attention than it has actual investment. You know what I mean? i.e., it's shiny, so people look at it.
But,
[00:28:10] Peter: Yeah
[00:28:10] Colin D: I would say still a vast minority of all campaigns, if you look up and down the ballot, are doing some kind of influencer outreach. But the higher up you go, the more plausible it becomes. And anybody can have, a local person that other people listen to, right? When we say influencers, it could be the guy who owns the coffee shop everyone goes to,
[00:28:30] Peter: yeah. We're all influencers in someone's circle
[00:28:33] Colin D: sure. We are ... and, in my e-book, How to Use the Internet to Change the World, I talk about your supporters are ambassadors, right? And that was probably something you and I were talking about 20 years ago,
[00:28:44] Peter: I remember 20 years ago when, we were both at National Environmental Trust and you said you were leaving to start this and, you were very ahead of the curve. I
[00:28:53] Colin D: I guess I fell behind at the time.
[00:28:55] Peter: so another question about, I guess, AI and [00:29:00] more broadly is i- if everybody's got access to the same, roughly the same technology, does competitive advantage
[00:29:08] Colin D: question.
[00:29:09] Peter: campaigns come from?
[00:29:10] Colin D: Yeah, excellent question. first off, the candidate, right? Is the candidate a good candidate? Is the staff competent? Is the staff experienced? Do you have enough resources to work with, i.e. money and volunteer time?
are you in an area where it makes sense to be able to spin up something like that? Like for instance, canvassing in rural Idaho might mean driving 20 or 30 minutes between houses, right? And then you've got to persuade them to let you come a quarter mile up the, dirt road to get to the house,
it's gonna vary based on where you are. some people are better at things than others, right? But I really, I think, with campaigns, it has to start at the top, right? Obama did not build a massive volunteer army by himself, right? He [00:30:00] hired people who believed that was the, what they ought to do, right?
He was a community organizer. He believed in the model, and then he found really good people who could, put into effect what he wanted. somebody running for dog catcher, a little bit different story, but they can still be out there, uh, "Hi, I'm talking to voters at blah, blah, blah, at the county fair.
Here's video. Here are three of my supporters, why they support me. Here's one of my volunteers urging you to volunteer," right? You can do that with your, cousin's kid as a digital staffer. the basics, I think-- I think it is just shocking how few people or how often just the complete basics of politics get forgotten, This is about relationships. This is about trust.
[00:30:48] Peter: So when campaigns are struggling with digital strategy, are they forgetting those lessons, or are they missing an important tactic, or are they spreading themselves too thin [00:31:00] to adequately staff up the
[00:31:02] Colin D: decided to pursue? what do you think
Yeah. That's a good que- I think it's a lot of things. one of them is just ignorance, right? There is no easy central place to go learn how to do this stuff. A guy I knew in North Carolina, was trying to do a Democratic candidate conference a few years ago. Unfortunately, he lost his shirt organizing it, because he couldn't get enough people to come.
and it was supposed to be an educational training thing, right? to me, a lot of it is on the state parties, and this is, Republican and Democratic too, but on the state parties to develop, a basic, checklist. Here's what you need. Here's where you go, right? The ... and in case of the North Carolina Democratic Party, they're just gonna give you, the van.
They're gonna give you organizing technology. I wish more states would do that. But, I also think... remember that list that you read out at the beginning of the changes since you and I got into this stuff? I think it would [00:32:00] be daunting if you were 23 years old going to work on a campaign and being told you gotta do digital, because you're talking about everything from Facebook ads to fundraising to text messages, targeted streaming advertising, right?
like, you and I could learn this kind of stuff as it came out, right? I think it would be daunting. And people don't know where to start, so you go all the way back to the way things were, when I started writing about this stuff in 2006. what does your nephew think you should use, right?
So all of a sudden you're big on TikTok even if no voters are on TikTok in your district, right? so yeah, you see stab in the dark things when really you've gotta just go back to the basics. when they were voting in the, uh, forum in Athens in 450 BC, people had lists of supporters, right?
And you had lists of people you were going to try to persuade, right?
[00:32:56] Peter: I wasn't there, but I guess [00:33:00] so.
[00:33:01] Colin D: Yeah, we showed those Persians.
So I think a lot of it is just there is too much.
they're stretched too thin, and the big consulting firms aren't gonna look at a small campaign. And when they do, you're only gonna get so much time. I think, out in the States there are, a lot of smaller consulting firms that are often, you know, quite good. and I don't know, maybe that, maybe they're not being taken advantage of enough.
I don't know. I have... I was talking to a friend who's a mail vendor a while back, meaning direct mail, and he said that a, a handful of big vendors are beginning to squeeze out, smaller firms like his. So I don't know if the same thing's happening at the digital level, but firms that were 10 people a few years ago are 150 now,
[00:33:46] Peter: Yeah. w-
Going back to, you mentioned in a couple different ways now, you know, we talked about How organizations struggle to take advantage of the [00:34:00] technology or if the technology's the magic solution. And one of the things I took away from what you said is, you know, a- as has been true throughout history, a tool is only as good as the proficiency of the person who wields it.
So
[00:34:15] Colin D: And where you point it.
[00:34:16] Peter: with
[00:34:17] Colin D: Yeah.
[00:34:17] Peter: AI
[00:34:18] Colin D: and all these tools and technologies, you still need to have people who understand how to use them
most effectively in a strategic way.
Mhm.
[00:34:27] Peter: and, do you th- are there a lot of cases where campaigns just, throw a bunch of money 'cause other campaigns are spending it this way and they don't really understand how to use it, but then they figure, that's what others are doing?
[00:34:40] Colin D: I can't think of a good example off the top of my head, but that certainly has been true. And again, at the higher level, right? if they're gonna misuse it, they're more often gonna spend it on broadcast television, like we talked about. But, one thing... it's easy to spend money on advertising comparatively.
It's a lot harder to set up a field campaign, [00:35:00] right? And we definitely have ... Now, this is less the campaign level, more the independent expenditure group level, but, funders like to fund shiny things, right? They don't like to fund... They want shiny things they can put their name on. They don't like to fund, infrastructure.
They don't like to fund grassroots organizing as much. And it's difficult to get people to work on long-term persuasion. going back to what we were talking about with fields, the importance of starting early. I grew up in, in Bible Belt East Texas, right? And if you're 90% of white people in that county, you are never going to encounter a liberal or Democratic idea in its original form.
You're only gonna get it filtered through Fox News or equally or worse conservative local news or talk radio, right? Because no one's out there persuading. There are ... no field organizer goes to the McDonald's where the old man, get coffee every day, [00:36:00] in Palestine, Texas. that's the kind of sustained long-term presence that we have to build out because we have to be talking with people, you know,
[00:36:11] Peter: All the time,
[00:36:12] Colin D: all the time
[00:36:13] Peter: and that's a theme I'm hearing increasingly. Like Will Robinson has talked
Absolutely. cycle of campaigns ramp up for a year and a half, maybe two
[00:36:21] Colin D: Mhm.
[00:36:21] Peter: then suddenly they're dead, they're gone, and there's no... You've created all of this potential infrastructure, but unless you continue to engage
[00:36:30] Colin D: Mhm
[00:36:31] Peter: and manage it and cultivate it, it dissipates over time, and then you gotta start over again
[00:36:36] Colin D: And conservatives are very good at creating
[00:36:39] Peter: are
[00:36:40] Colin D: institutions to preserve knowledge, right? even before the digital era of politics, back in the '80s and '90s, they were funding, think tanks where, senior staff could go between campaigns, right? And yeah, we created CAP, but... or Center for American Progress, but that was one thing.
[00:37:00] And, it has its own issues, right?
[00:37:01] Peter: Instead of a dozen
[00:37:02] Colin D: Yeah. Yeah
[00:37:04] Peter: So when you advise a campaign, how do you talk to them about use of digital
[00:37:11] Colin D: Great question. first off, you always have to ask the basics. Who you trying to reach? What kind of messages you trying to reach with? Where do they spend their time, right? With some audiences, you're better off speaking at church, than you are trying to reach them digitally,
it's trying to match the-- And then the resources question always comes in. for example, if you're running in a very compact district, with... You may be able to run just zip code-based YouTube ads, more cost-effectively than you could do with some kind of special targeting, right? But if you're in a more mixed area politically, you, you may have to go down to that addressable level targeting.
But then the question is, are we doing web video, right? Which [00:38:00] has fallen out of favor, the inventories. In other words, the placements don't look very good anymore. too much is on a ph-
[00:38:05] Peter: What do you mean, what do you mean by web
[00:38:07] Colin D: Oh, it would be like you're gonna watch a video on, a news site and the, yeah, pre-roll video they call that.
[00:38:16] Peter: Like the ad's gonna pop up before or after your video. But there are also video ad units on, websites, right? The kind of things that annoy you and you turn them off as fast as you can. So 10 years ago, web video was a pretty good option. It seems to have fallen in favor a lot. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:38:32] Colin D: banner ads.
[00:38:33] Peter: their stuff on YouTube
[00:38:34] Colin D: Yeah, so YouTube does that, but YouTube...
[00:38:36] Peter: it's more likely to actually get seen
[00:38:38] Colin D: to get seen, but, it, YouTube does not allow us to upload a list of targets for politics. Yeah. Yeah. So, so they...
[00:38:48] Peter: with Facebook, you can tell it who you wanna n- get
[00:38:51] Colin D: Yeah. And you'll get, if I upload a list of, say, 20... I just did this for an organization. I'm raising money for them. we're pushing stuff out on Facebook, [00:39:00] but I don't want to target, in this case, people who have already signed up, right?
So I push an audience of 35,000 people up to Facebook so I can exclude it from certain campaigns. Um, uh, they matched about 20,000 out of them, right? So out of that 35,000, um, 20,000 it identified a Facebook user it thinks is the same person. Now, it's not always going to be right? and, uh, what-- it occurred to me after working in Virginia in 2020 on some very targeted stuff on Facebook that, a lot of us were hitting the same people over and over because they were the people that could be matched with the data that's in the voter file.
So I did it. Somebody else did it with a little bit different cross-section of the district. Somebody else did it over here. Meantime, we may be missing, 20%, 25% of the audience that's there. Facebook just didn't match them, right? So there again, [00:40:00] you're like, okay, you're the campaign, who you're trying to reach, what kind of resources do you have?
And you've got this matrix in your head of like pre-roll or, sorry, streaming video, like on Roku Channel or, wherever you can get inventory, Hulu if you got good money, that, that's probably the most effective, right? Because people are looking at the big screen. But it also costs like five times more or 10 times more than banner ads.
And if you're a down-ballot campaign, sometimes a bunch of banner ads just as people are cruising around the web can give you that name recognition, Because like you mentioned earlier, it becomes like- How do I reach people from a bunch of different directions? And if you're down ballot, where, a familiar name may be the thing that carries you to victory.
Yeah. I ran, a few years ago, or a couple years ago for a state rep in, or he was a challenger, Democratic, in Wisconsin. he only [00:41:00] had a few thousand dollars, he recorded a 15-second video and, we put it out there on streaming and served, two, 300,000 impressions. He won by 200 votes.
I'm a correlation does not equal causation kind of guy, so I'm always gonna be leery. He thought the videos won the election for him, right? So but it was like he needed face name recognition in, he, like he had represented part of the district on city council. and, he needed to build up name recognition.
[00:41:29] Peter: Clearly, what tools and how is very much a campaign to campaign question because there's a lot of different factors you've got to take into account. But are there some generalities about what the optimal uses
[00:41:47] Colin D: Mhm
[00:41:47] Peter: for, the plethora of digital tools and analysis and information that we have at our disposal?
[00:41:54] Colin D: You have to reward people for giving you time. Oh, I just thought of that. That's not bad. [00:42:00] That if you want them to pay attention to you, you have to make it worth paying attention to, right? one mistake that the TV people love to make is treating online video like TV, right? TV.
[00:42:12] Peter: of, right.
[00:42:14] Colin D: TV.
[00:42:14] Peter: TV ad and just put it online
[00:42:15] Colin D: So a TV ad can get away with a slow burn, right?
You can have 13 seconds of setup and two seconds of delivery, and it works. Online, somebody already clicked away, right? little things like have the candidate's name on the screen all the time, right? I see that mistake constantly. You've got something playing in the background with no sound, right?
Because you have to click the sound on, and people are doing things, but I don't know what's going on, right? But if they just had the person's name on there, that might have stuck in my head, right? So there are so many little, not even optimization tricks, it's almost like common sense optimization tricks.
[00:42:55] Peter: Mhm
[00:42:55] Colin D: But ultimately, you're trying to get a compelling message [00:43:00] in front of the people you're either trying to turn out or persuade, right? and the more that message can be delivered from someone they trust, the better. But, there's so many little niche applications, right? if I'm doing, if I've got canvassers out in the field, can I target their canvassing targets?
Can I try to reach those people with digital ads in the day before so that it primes the pump for the canvasser, right? So there are lots of little good practices, but, you know, at the top level, it's, you know, message, candidate, and moment. You know? You gotta have the right message for the moment, and then you've got to be able to use the resources you have to get it in front of the people you need to see it, you know?
And, uh, there are-- Once you get up the ladder on capability, there are some really sophisticated, like, audience analysis, like who's actually seeing [00:44:00] this, and how can we, turn what we learn from this, set of media recipients to fine-tu-tune what we're putting out there. but those aren't available if you're ju-just dumping your money into broadcast TV.
Yeah. So yeah, it's, it's-- Yeah. It-- There, the resources or the options available to you expand as you go up the ladder, but you can't get away from the having the right message in front of the right people
[00:44:25] Peter: You mentioned relational organizing a little while ago. you explain how does a campaign implement relational organizing strategy?
[00:44:36] Colin D: great question. you need, organizers, right? So sometimes you can get away with just volunteers, but you're probably gonna need a staffer whose job it is to make this happen, right? So relational organizing tools typically are phone-based, and, as an example, as someone volunteers for your campaign, they, uh, the, they download an app, a canva- or a, an organizing app.[00:45:00]
And for instance, it might go through their phone contacts and try to match it with priority voters on the voter file, and then ask you, "Hi, do you know this person? Is this the same person? Do you know this person?" And then you've got a text mess- a pre-drafted text message or talking points if you wanna call, that...
Although if you're under 30, no one's ever gonna call. But, yeah, the, So and then, the field organizers, these tools will let you set up, individual field teams that can communicate. But then there's so much that gets down to good practices there, right? there are systems now, and this used to be kind of a rarity, but there are more common, systems now that I see in presentations and such, where, as someone signs up for the campaign's email list, within 30 minutes they get, uh, or to the mobile list, they get a, a text, or if they signed up for the email list, they get an email, but it comes from their local organizer.
It's not just a big [00:46:00] picture, "Hi, welcome to the campaign." This is, "Hey, I'm Jenny. Wanna get coffee?" That kind of thing.
[00:46:06] Peter: Yeah
[00:46:07] Colin D: you can automate that whole intake process. But so from the minute that a volunteer gets involved, you're trying to build the relationship. And, one of the brilliant things about things like Indivisible, the No Kings rallies, is they get people together in person, right?
yeah, the, the media covers the No Kings rallies as, here is a demonstration of political will, a demonstration of we want things to change. But what's also going on is a massive amount of people signing up for things, Yeah.
[00:46:38] Peter: Yep.
[00:46:39] Colin D: local organizations, national organizations, those things become organizing hubs.
And, yeah, getting people together once, investing in some pizza and getting people together once a month is not a bad idea.
[00:46:50] Peter: As Anat Shenker-Osorio says, "If you want a bigger party, you gotta throw a better
[00:46:54] Colin D: Ah, that's good. I like that. Yeah
[00:46:57] Peter: she's good at those things.
[00:46:58] Colin D: I know. Funny, a [00:47:00] professional communicator. Yeah.
[00:47:02] Peter: But it, I mean, it, it, there is an irony in this, in that, getting people gathered in real life is actually an important element
[00:47:11] Colin D: Mhm
[00:47:12] Peter: digital strategy. Like thinking about Turning Point USA's
[00:47:15] Colin D: Right
[00:47:16] Peter: you know, sort of creator farms at all of these campuses where they would bring people in because they were handing out swag and doing something that was fun and, built around some kind of a culture or
[00:47:28] Colin D: Mhm
[00:47:28] Peter: some kind of an event that they can draw people to. And we're social critters. People like to be with other people and like to be part of a group that, like, has some sort of unifying way of
[00:47:43] Colin D: Yeah
[00:47:44] Peter: and that really draws them in, and then they become, you know, ambassadors when they go back home and go online.
[00:47:49] Colin D: And I think these things are especially important now. even before COVID, so many local connections, There's the bowling, book called Bowling Alone, which, it uses an [00:48:00] example the decline of local bowling leagues, right?
[00:48:03] Peter: Yep
[00:48:05] Colin D: among, people who profess to be Christians, fewer, smaller percentage are going to church.
people feel... And then COVID really put the song, put the zap on us. people need to get together with other people, and y- you get a dopamine, boost out of it. we want to see each other. So how can you create opportunities? And I will note that the great innovation of the Dean...
[00:48:30] Peter: Besides email fundraising, the great innovation of the Dean campaign was when its supporters started using Meetup to get together locally, the campaign didn't get in the way, right? they didn't start people doing all that, but they embraced it quickly, Yeah.
[00:48:48] Colin D: And I was just talking to somebody I'd never met before the other day who'd been on the Dean campaign and then continued to work on this stuff 22 years later, So that was, an incredibly influential thing. The Blue State [00:49:00] Digital, which was running digital for Obama, s- came out of the Dean campaign.
[00:49:05] Peter: Oh, did not
[00:49:06] Colin D: yeah
[00:49:08] Peter: one of the themes that I keep ending up on is this question of infrastructure, and the challenge the left seems to have with investing in it, where even there's so much proof of the value it creates just by looking at what the right has been able to do and how much they're able to shape and influence things. So I'm curious, if you were, you know, talking to political or, issue advocacy donors, would you make the case ongoing investment in infrastructure?
[00:49:47] Colin D: That's a great question. first I would lay out what the different kinds of infrastructure are. everything from training resources to organizing technology that you can give candidates access to. but mostly it's [00:50:00] human, field organizers and, I don't know what the word would be, candidate nurturers, like people who are there to help the candidates make the right decisions, in the moment.
how do you make the case? I-
[00:50:15] Peter: in the local area and just one campaign to another, they're, they can offer some of
[00:50:21] Colin D: I think you have to go to the state and county-
[00:50:23] Peter: or
[00:50:23] Colin D: I think you have to go to the state and county parties for a lot. And again, so many... I was working in Texas politics in the early '90s when the Texas Democratic Party imploded, and you could just see, the talent was going to the Republicans, The Repub- I was friends with more Republican staffers than I was Democratic, and part of the reason was, the folks were more interesting, again, that was a blip, and I don't mean to tarnish every Democratic staffer. I, for instance, was one. It was just, a trend I would notice, yeah.
So I wanna go back to the infrastructure question 'cause I think you laid out, I would [00:51:00] start with here's what infrastructure means.
And then-
[00:51:05] Peter: make the
[00:51:05] Colin D: Mm-hmm
[00:51:06] Peter: that they should be in what- whichever form of infrastructure that we need to invest in it? How do you make that case? How do you
[00:51:13] Colin D: Mm-hmm. Sure. I think, well, I don't know how you close it, but, um, I think the case you make is that your dollar will go a lot farther if you're spending it a year in advance than it will at the last minute. And it will position, you know, any work that you do in the fall for better success, right? That this is, um, uh- Good to-- yeah, I do think that that cost effectiveness argument, I think we should make more because the funders are- Yeah
you know, very often businesspeople, you know? And, uh, uh, uh, maybe, you know, the more we can... Well, sales team sounds terrible, but like, you know, companies have sales reps, you know? [00:52:00] Like, they have people out there building support for their products, right? Yeah. Year-round. Year-round.
[00:52:07] Peter: All the time in various
[00:52:08] Colin D: Mm-hmm. But it is so hard to get people to spend early.
Yeah. Um, I think, um,
[00:52:15] Peter: Yeah
[00:52:16] Colin D: I think more Ossoffs and Debbie Sabenows, um, more people are going to-- more candidates, high-profile candidates are gonna have to stand up and invest their own money in the kind of infrastructure. You know, when I was doing work with the Michigan Democratic Party, uh, 20, uh, 2000 to 2024, um, they talked constantly about, uh, this was projects that were supporting state leg candidates mostly, and they talked about building the vote from the bottom up, right?
But it's too easy for the media and, uh, for big donors to only wanna fund shiny, shiny, shiny things. So maybe that's [00:53:00] another argument for small donors, right? I mean, again, I'm gonna go back to, uh, Simon's, um, Hopium list. You know, he's got a few hundred thousand people on there, and they have donated millions of dollars this cycle already.
Um, he's giving more support to some of these way down, you know, like a late, late, you know, Congress members who won their-- or, uh, candidates who won their primaries in August. He's given them money before the DCCC is, you know? And, ah, it's something I hadn't really thought of. if you have a million dollars, another $5 million will get you a lot, right?
But if you've got zero and you get a million dollars, that's a much bigger change, right? Yeah. Because it lets you invest in those basics. Get the basics right. build your supporter list. Get the organizers rolling. Get enough of an online [00:54:00] presence. you're putting out content on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube.
You're giving people-- You're getting in front of people in the places where they live. And once you've got those basics done, you can start pouring more into media, i.e. ads. But if you don't have those basics, you're gonna get a whole lot less value out of the ads. And thank you. I never-- I had not thought of it quite that way, thank you for pushing me in that direction.
Yeah.
[00:54:26] Peter: Sure. happy to facilitate expansion of our
[00:54:31] Colin D: Future blog posts.
[00:54:34] Peter: yeah. so after 30 years of watching campaigns adapt to technological change, what do you think political professionals still fundamentally misunderstand about how technology changes politics?
[00:54:46] Colin D: Absolutely. it is that digital media are interactive. They are back and forth, right? Or at least they allow that possibility. Broadcast media are not, right? So if you don't, my friend Beth [00:55:00] Becker likes to make a strong distinction between digital, outreach and digital organizing, right? Because, advertising outreach, like one-way communications, and it can be the same thing on organic social media too, that is one thing that you do, right?
It's very important to do it, but if you're not trying to take advantage of the back-and-forth nature of digital politics, then you're really missing an opportunity
[00:55:30] Peter: Yeah. that's, I'm glad you said that 'cause it sounds like one of the biggest challenges to adapt is the fact that people are gonna communicate back and rather than view it as a nuisance
[00:55:46] Colin D: Right
[00:55:46] Peter: data, it's information.
[00:55:48] Colin D: And it's relationships
[00:55:50] Peter: about the people that you want to be engaged with.
[00:55:52] Colin D: Yeah. Yeah, and it's every time a voter or a potential donor encounters your candidate or [00:56:00] campaign, wherever that is, a tweet, I'm not calling it X, thanks. A tweet, a, Facebook post, an email, a text message, every one of those things, a billboard, right?
Every one of those things affects their proclivity to vote for you or donate to you, right? you've gotta have that wall of sound effe- I do a training at Netroots, called, Illusions of Ubiquity, which is about using ad targeting... for instance, a state legislature, right? I can workplace target, I can zip code target, I can put an ad in the bus stop.
I can have streaming ads targeting you. When we were at National Environmental Trust, they were doing that kind of thing, right?
[00:56:41] Peter: Mhm.
[00:56:42] Colin D: cable ads, in, Hill zip codes during Sunday morning talk shows, ads in the Metro.
[00:56:48] Peter: that first became a possibility was to,
[00:56:50] Colin D: Yeah. And, I was doing, banner ads to run a national journal,
was to give the sense that everyone is talking about your thing, [00:57:00] when really it's we're just trying to fill your bubble with that thing. Yeah.
[00:57:04] Peter: Yep.
Well, and you've also written, "Attention may be the most precious political commodity right now." campaigns gotten better at targeting people than getting people to actually pay attention? I think this goes to
[00:57:16] Colin D: Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah.
[00:57:18] Peter: as well, right?
[00:57:19] Colin D: Yeah, I think it's just hard to generalize because there are just so many individual actors and all. Yeah, the targeting
The targeting has become more powerful, but as it's become more powerful, you have to do less tar- y- you wanna do less targeting, right? Because of that balance I talked about earlier, right? I wanna be
[00:57:40] Peter: wanna have such
[00:57:41] Colin D: such a narrow focus. Yeah.
[00:57:43] Peter: to reach there's no potential to attract new people
[00:57:46] Colin D: But, and a lot of peop- a lot of campaigns and a lot of firms put out really good video, right?
But too often folks just port over TV ads like we talked about. So yeah, I think it's really hit or miss. It just depends, [00:58:00] how savvy are the people, how open is the candidate, how, skilled is the staff, what kind of resources do they have, and, yeah, that's the main thing. It's, it's, it is tough, Like I said earlier, if I were starting out in the field right now, it would be daunting because there's just so much to learn. Yeah
yeah. so for somebody who's just starting out in the field, advice would you give them now? Mhm
[00:58:28] Peter: or skill would you advise them to learn,
[00:58:31] Colin D: Oh,
[00:58:31] Peter: that you think it'll also matter in, another five or 10
Yeah, getting along with people really? That
[00:58:38] Colin D: that would be the most important skill for any staffer in politics is the ability...
[00:58:43] Peter: are important?
[00:58:44] Colin D: yes, yes. Now, back when, we were working together and, they still trusted me with interns, I would always tell them to just leave people with a good feeling. Do your work, be competent, leave people with a good feeling.[00:59:00]
In 10 years, you may be hiring them or they may be hiring you. You don't know where things are gonna go. But do the job as well as you can and, work well with others, yeah. Um, as far as specific skills, I don't think it ever hurts to know how to write well, right? Um, you know, AI may want to take it away from us, but, um, if you rely too much on the AI, you know, eventually I think it'll, it'll leave you a little short, yeah.
being able to write and being able to think, are- are two things that I don't think are ever going to go away. it really... Yeah, really good to have some video skills, really good to have, image skills. but those are more specialized things. The big point is, and this is so hard for a lot of young people in general, including me at 23, right?
you're not the big wheel, right? You're there to do a job. Do the job, right? we are, As we record this, a couple of [01:00:00] days ago, the Times put out a piece by some disgruntled Mary Peltola staffers where they were mad in part because they had to feed crickets to a lizard. And as someone who's fed crickets to a turtle before, I'm like, "What's the deal?"
it seemed, there was a kind of widespread mockery in the political world that people seem to have a very high opinion of themselves of what they should be doing, right?
[01:00:23] Peter: Mhm.
[01:00:23] Colin D: your staff. Oh, that was a, a good piece of advice I got when I started working in the Texas Ledge from an older staffer was sometimes your job is to be fired, right?
Something blows up, the boss is embarrassed. Somebody's gotta pay the pi- pay the price. And so sometimes a staffer's job is to take the hit, That you are not the big deal, and a little humility goes a long way. But, when you're right out of school, I think it's different if you work instead of going straight to college.
I think it's [01:01:00] different if you join the military instead of going straight to college, right? But if you go straight from high school to college and you come out, you've been in this rarefied environment, and you think things are gonna go certain ways. And sometimes somebody's gonna yell at you, and it sucks.
But it's gonna happen, right? And, Be as graceful as you can, learn as much as you can, and, uh, leave people with a good feeling. Yeah
[01:01:28] Peter: Awesome. I can't think of a better way to wrap it up, so let's wrap it up. Colin, thank you so much
[01:01:34] Colin D: was a joy.
[01:01:35] Peter: with me today.
[01:01:35] Colin D: Yeah, it really was a joy,
Thanks for tuning into The Campaign Strategist, where we dive into the art and science of advocacy. The podcast is produced by Prismatic Strategies to share wisdom and insights from leaders in the field. I'm your host, Pete Altman. Music is written by Andrea Perry and Pete Altman. If you enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to like, subscribe, and share with others who care about making a difference.[01:02:00]
[01:02:00] Speaker: You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again, and see you next time.
