Hello Merge Tag: Where Social Media and Politics Intersect

A.J. Carrillo was searching for Adam Hamilton’s ActBlue page when he stumbled onto a series of spam PAC donation pages designed to siphon money from his campaign into the pockets of the PAC operators. Then he found something similar for James Talarico.

The same tactic also appeared to be used to fundraise for John Hickenlooper’s safe Senate seat.

The Hickenlooper campaign says it was not involved and has worked with ActBlue to take down pages designed to look like it was raising money for Talarico or Hamilton.

A.J. joined me on the pod to walk through how he found these pages, what patterns he’s seeing, and what it means for the rest of this cycle.

What to watch for before you donate:

Before giving to any candidate you found through a search or an AI summary, check that the page links to that candidate’s official ActBlue account. If something looks off, report it. Campaigns, start monitoring for lookalike pages now, before someone else does it for you.

Find links, transcript and more at HelloMergeTag.com.

"Don't join my cool kids club if you're not coming to vote. This club votes."

Erika Harrison built Black Girls Who Brunch as a food blog. Over ten years, it became a platform where she talks about politics, policy, and culture with an ever-growing audience.

She recently started using a tool called Sway to do something most content creators never attempt: turning her followers into an organized voting bloc.

The results have been striking. In the primary, her Sway group had 83% turnout. In two races, her group's votes exceeded the margin of victory.

She's using Sway to help people navigate Harris County's 100+ item ballot. She's moving people to vote in down-ballot races they didn't know existed. She's doing her part to change how elections work in Texas.

Claire Shorall, Sway's founder, joined her to talk about what happens when you give creators the tools to actually organize voters — not just talk to them.

Key Takeaways:

• You don't need a massive platform to move elections. You need an organized one. Erika's 2,400 followers with high intent beat millions of passive followers.
• The backend data matters. Knowing exactly where your voters live (down to state house district) changes what you can do.
• Down-ballot races are where organizing can really move the needle. Most people don't pay attention. If they know the name, they vote differently.

If you've got a platform — whether it's 500 followers or 500,000 — Sway was built for you. Learn more about turning your followers into voters with Sway.

Find all links, video of this episode and all additional eps at HelloMergeTag.com.

Most campaigns are still organizing around persuasion and turnout. But by the time persuasion starts, it's often already too late.

In this episode, we dig into what I'm calling the Bedrock Approach — the idea that winning campaigns aren't built in the final weeks before Election Day, they're built over time through consistent, authentic content that creates familiarity long before voters are ever asked to decide.

We get into why traditional persuasion is less powerful than most campaigns assume, what brand marketers have understood about this for decades, and why your real competition isn't your opponent — it's everything else competing for attention in the feed. Plus a few stories from actual races where this approach turned underdog candidates into household names.

If you're working on a campaign, an advocacy org, or just trying to build genuine support for something you believe in, this one's for you.

This episode was adapted from a blog post which you can find on my site at joshklemons.com/bedrock. Along with a full transcript, you can also find lots of fun graphics accompanying the post.

I mentioned I had built some new tools.

ShareSparrow helps you easily turn tweets, Bluesky posts and articles into Instagram-friendly graphics. Try it out at SharrowSparrow.com.

FUline.org helps you write friendly emails to the allies in your life to stop using Uline products. Because friends don't let friends shop Uline.

I also mentioned I have a new album out. It's called Live Amongst The Flames. You can listen and download it (for free) at joshklemons.com/music or find it wherever you listen to music.

Big thanks to our sponsor Civic Shout. Learn more about the great work they’re doing to help Democratic campaigns and progressive nonprofits build their lists ethically at civicshout.com/partners.

"Every day that we are not adopting this stuff, the other side is moving faster. And I think ultimately that's going to translate into votes." — Jack Welty

This is the first election cycle where what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok say about candidates could actually shape how voters decide. And as Jack Welty sees it, our side isn't ready.

Jack served as Deputy Chief Analytics Officer on the Harris for President campaign and led paid digital analytics for Biden-Harris in 2020. He co-authored a paper on practical AI adoption for campaigns and is the co-creator of Caucus AI, a tool that monitors what AI chatbots are telling voters about candidates across more than 1,100 races.

He joined me on this episode of Hello Merge Tag to talk about something I don't think our side is taking seriously enough.

The conversation covered a lot of ground. But the through line was this: Democrats are falling behind Republicans on AI adoption, and the gap isn't closing. The American Association of Political Consultants found that 44% of Republican consultants use AI daily. Only 28% of Democrats do. 

A few things that stuck with me:

The biggest wins from AI aren't the sexy stuff. Jack's argument is that the most underrated use of AI on campaigns is automating the boring, high-volume work that eats up staff hours. On the Harris campaign, his team fed thousands of post-shift volunteer feedback surveys into a language model and got back structured reports by date, state, and issue type. What would have required an engineer and custom code 18 months ago, he says you could now do by dragging a folder into Claude.

AI is a management challenge, not a technical one. This reframe is the most useful thing I took away from the conversation. You don't need to know how to code. You need to know how to delegate, review, and give feedback. The analogy Jack uses — treating AI like an eager but inexperienced junior staffer — is exactly right. You wouldn't hand an intern a blank page and say "write me a report, see you at five." You'd give them examples, context, and check in along the way. Same deal here.

Which chatbot a voter uses quietly determines which media ecosystem they're in. Caucus AI tracks what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok tell voters about candidates. The responses are broadly factual — nobody's telling voters who to pull the lever for. But the sources each model cites are very different. Grok cites social media. ChatGPT leans heavily on its national media partnerships — Axios, AP, Washington Post. Gemini casts a wider net and is more likely to cite local news. Same question, three different information worlds. -Your .gov site matters more than you think. This is something I had definitely been sleeping on. Caucus AI found that official government sites get cited by these models at a much higher rate than campaign sites. If you're an incumbent and your official site is a graveyard of four-year-old press releases, you're leaving something real on the table. Same goes for Ballotpedia — candidates can fill out their own candidate surveys, and Ballotpedia is one of the top two or three cited sources across most of these models. Most campaigns aren't doing this. They should be.

ChatGPT indexed a brand new Wikipedia page in 12 minutes. Caucus AI created a Wikipedia entry for a lesser-known candidate and within 12 minutes, ChatGPT was citing the brand new page. Two-thirds of all sources in its subsequent answers about those candidates came from that single page. There's no fact-checking layer. No delay. It's pretty clear your campaign needs a Wikipedia strategy!

Find links, transcript and more hellomergetag.com.

"It doesn't matter if Democratic senators or members of Congress put out TikTok videos or bring influencers for special hearings. Ultimately, if it's not in their bones that they want to fight with everything they have, the people will see right through it."

Murshed Zaheed has more than 30 years of experience as a leader, organizer, and advocate in a career stretching from D.C. to San Francisco. He’s the founder of Pacifica Strategies, a boutique public affairs firm working with prominent organizations engaged in policy and politics.

He served as the Political Director of CREDO Mobile, empowering its over five million members to fight for progressive change in Washington, D.C., and in state capitols across the country.

He also served as Director of New Media for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in a senior leadership role and was a member of Gov. Howard Dean’s groundbreaking digital team during Dean’s presidential campaign.

He has watched the Democratic Party cycle through the same conversations about tactics — from blogs in 2006 to TikTok in 2026 — and he's tired of it.

Not because tactics don't matter. But because tactics without strategy are just noise.

We covered a lot of ground — from what Harry Reid's war room actually looked like from the inside, to why Congressional staffers quitting Bluesky is exactly the wrong response to getting yelled at online, to how the Dean campaign's approach to email was the soul of what we've since lost.

Some top takeaways:

• Strategy first, always. You cannot layer better tactics on top of a weak political position and expect people not to notice.
• Democratic leaders need to stop treating their email lists as ATMs and start treating them as communities worth actually communicating with.
• Getting yelled at online is not a reason to log off. It's a reason to show up more and listen harder.
• The Dean campaign raised $55 million with a blend of communications, organizing, and fundraising anchored in a real political position. That model exists. We abandoned it.
• Indivisible is one of the only progressive organizations whose emails Murshed actually reads. Pretty sure he's not the only one.

Find links, transcript and more at HelloMergeTag.com.

Josh Canter is vice president of digital advocacy at McGuire Woods Consulting, where he uses digital tools to influence legislation and shape public policy. His work spans multi-million dollar ad campaigns, interactive platforms, organic content, and full-scale omnichannel strategies — all focused on driving real-world impact. His work has been featured in the New York Times and Wired, and he's worked on campaigns and advocacy efforts around the world.

Josh is also one of the more creative AI builders working in politics right now. He connected Claude directly to the Meta Ad Library API to generate deep, contextualized research reports on political ad spending — automatically. In this episode we get into exactly how he built it, what it can do, and where this kind of AI-powered campaign research is headed.

TOPICS COVERED

• What is the Meta Ad Library?
• How Josh connected Claude to the Meta API
• Building a repeatable research skill in Claude
• Why you still need a human to gut-check AI output
• AI as oppo research tool for campaigns
• Other tools Josh is building (AEO checker, AI topic explorer, zip code tool)
• Facebook groups as a political black box
• Will AI level the playing field for smaller campaigns?
• Why Josh uses Claude over ChatGPT
• One actionable tip for campaigns not yet using AI seriously

Find links, transcript and more at HelloMergeTag.com.

“You’re basically seeing your psyche projected back at you when you open any of these social apps these days.”

Ryan Davis is a longtime progressive digital strategist. He got his start as an internet organizer on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, worked on Barack Obama’s groundbreaking 2008 campaign, and later founded Blue State Digital’s social media team. Since then, he’s worked with hundreds of nonprofits and campaigns around the world. Today, he’s the Founder and CEO of People First, one of the largest social impact influencer agencies in the US, and the author of The Month in Digital.

In this episode, Ryan and I get nerdy about what influencer work actually looks like heading into 2026—especially for campaigns that don’t have a huge budget, a big staff, or celebrities on speed dial.

We talk about why “influencers” shouldn’t be treated like a replacement for celebrity endorsements, why micro and nano creators can be more useful than the biggest names on your feed, and why the real point isn’t “going viral.” The point is scaling persuasion the same way you scale field: more trusted messengers, more conversations, more communities, more repetition.

We also dig into platform fragmentation (your internet is not my internet), why Nextdoor is an underrated battleground for hyperlocal issue conversations, and why campaigns and orgs should be investing in owned content like email and blogs—not just to fundraise, but to tell stories and show up in the places people are now getting information (including AI-driven search).

If you’re trying to run a modern comms program without losing your mind, this one’s for you.

Some key takeaways from my conversation with Ryan

• How campaigns are using influencer relationships right now
• How the TikTok sale affected influencer work (it’s not what you think)
• We nerded out on Nextdoor (yes, it’s a thing)
• Big influencers vs micro/nano influencers
• Influencers aren’t about “going viral.” They’re about scaling field
• Why your internet is different than everyone else’s (and why that matters)
• Why it’s time to think beyond the viral launch video
• How to do influencer work with a small budget
• The new tool People First launched for small campaigns: Val
• Email still matters—but your email can’t only be fundraising
• Blogging, Substack, and the new reality of SEO/AEO
• Serialization that isn’t about the candidate

One of my favorite ideas from the conversation: serialized content that’s about the campaign or the issues, but not dependent on the candidate being the main character. Ryan floated the idea of docu-style vertical series where a staffer or organizer becomes the through-line—letting campaigns produce consistent, platform-friendly storytelling without needing the candidate to carry every single episode.

My favorite quote (and the mindset shift it demands): “You’re basically seeing your psyche projected back at you when you open any of these social apps these days,” he wasn’t just describing algorithmic personalization—he was describing a strategic trap campaigns fall into.

If the people on your team are highly engaged political consumers, your internal sense of “what’s breaking through” is going to be skewed. You’re in the bubble by definition. The job isn’t to dominate the bubble. The job is to build enough credible, distributed messengers (and enough repeatable content) to reach the people who aren’t thinking about you at all.

If you’re running digital for a campaign or nonprofit and you’re trying to build something sustainable—something that reaches beyond the choir—this conversation will give you a bunch of practical ways to think about creator strategy, platform fragmentation, and scaling persuasion.

Find links, transcript, video and more at HelloMergeTag.com.

Lucy Ritzmann is a progressive digital strategist and a founding member of Courier’s national newsroom. She’s a former co‑author of FWIW, their must-read weekly email for us political digital nerds. I first met her collaborating on The FYP — a weekly Courier email covering political TikTok, specifically focused on how the two presidential campaigns were approaching one of the most important and complex platforms in politics.

Lucy is currently in law school at Georgetown, but when she’s not buried in casebooks, she’s writing a great Substack newsletter called The Group Chat Correspondent.

I invited her on the pod to talk about the current state of independent progressive media, what trends she’s following at the moment and a whole lot more.

We covered:

• Why Substack is more than just a newsletter platform — and how it’s becoming a community infrastructure tool
• “It’s what Bluesky was supposed to be” — building in a space without trolls
• How Lucy is growing The Group Chat Correspondent — what’s working and what’s not
• What success actually looks like for an independent progressive media outlet
• The 2026 landscape for progressive independent media
• Who’s crushing it right now in progressive digital
• Why campaigns need to build relationships with creators and media early — not weeks before Election Day
• The role Twitch could (and maybe should) be playing in campaigns
• Why politics and culture aren’t separate — but rather one interwoven tapestry
• The biggest stories of the day that people aren’t paying attention to
• What the future of traditional media looks like
• The state of Kamala HQ — and where we go from here
• Why every department on a campaign needs a digital deputy at the table

Sadly something happened with my mic and my audio's not great. Fortunately, Lucy sounds amazing :)

Find links, transcript, more episodes and more at HelloMergeTag.com.

“One media company is now carrying ICE’s public image almost entirely on its shoulders…"

After analyzing 12 billion views across 90,019 videos posted in December and January, Drew Eldredge‑Martin of Ground Truth AI found that Fox News accounts for 70% of ALL views on YouTube tied to positive narratives about ICE — without Fox, the pro‑ICE narrative would nearly collapse.

In this episode of Hello Merge Tag, Drew breaks down what his narrative analysis reveals about who’s shaping the conversation, what content is actually driving attention, and what it means for campaigns in 2026.

We covered:

🔹 Why Fox News is driving both positive and negative ICE content

🔹 What types of videos are rising to the top of YouTube

🔹 The growing role of AI‑generated content in narrative shaping

🔹 Who the heck Benjamin is — and why he’s outperforming CNN on this topic

🔹 What sentiment data leading into Election Day tells us about the big 2025 campaigns

🔹 Why campaign teams need to pay even more attention to user‑generated content

🔹 And why you shouldn’t be sleeping on YouTube

If you want to understand how digital narratives actually map to influence — and what that means for politics, brands, and public opinion — this episode is a must‑catch.

🎧 FULL EPISODE, along with transcript, links, video version and more available at HelloMergeTag.com.

Does digital campaigning actually matter in elections?

According to a new study from the Center for Campaign Innovation, the answer is yes — and the consequences are real.

In this episode, Eric Wilson breaks down findings from a comprehensive analysis of the 2025 Virginia House of Delegates elections, where Democrats and Republicans ran vastly different digital programs — with very different results.

We talk about what the data shows, where each party is falling behind, which digital tactics actually move voters, and what tools campaigns still need to invest in if they want to compete.

We talk about what the data shows, where each party is falling behind, which digital tactics actually move voters, and what tools campaigns still need to invest in, if they want to compete. If you work in politics, campaigns, or digital strategy, this is a must-catch conversation.

Find links, the full transcript, and more at HelloMergeTag.com.