5 Digital Lessons From the 2026 Elections (So Far)
Plus: a new episode of our Influencer Impact podcast, how we pioneered comment analysis, and details on our virtual presentation, Nonprofits & Influencers 101, happening TODAY.
Hey all,
Hit my very first Netroots Nation this year, and it completely lived up to the hype!
Catching incredible speakers like Chris Rabb and Malcolm Kenyatta was a huge highlight, but the whole week felt like a giant reunion. It was so good bumping into so many old coworkers and partners. We capped off the conference on Friday night with a happy hour alongside our friends at VDX and VoteShift. Massive shoutout to our lovely cohosts for letting Ryan and me play Philly tour guide for the night!
We gathered for one last hurrah on Saturday at the Higher Ground Labs New Tools Showcase. Big thanks to HGL for inviting me on stage to show off our latest product, Val, our new AI agent that's changing the way organizations enter influencer marketing.
See you in Denver,
Val Cheney
Partner & VP, Influencer
People First
5 Digital Lessons From the 2026 Elections (So Far)
By Ryan Davis
We’re 138 days from Election Day, but the message from the primaries is already clear: the old digital playbook isn’t enough.
The campaigns breaking through right now aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets, the most polished ads, or the longest policy pages. They’re the ones that understand how people consume politics today: through entertainment, community, repetition, screenshots, creators, group chats, clipping accounts, and the weird language of the feed.
Here are five digital lessons from the 2026 elections so far.
1. Don’t Be Boring
This sounds obvious. It’s also the thing campaigns keep getting wrong.
A recent piece on why politics is so boring made the point through two very different examples: Spencer Pratt and Zohran Mamdani. They don’t have much in common politically or stylistically, but they both understood that attention online has its own language. People don’t stop scrolling for press releases. They stop for personality, conflict, humor, emotion, clear villains, and a message that feels like it belongs in the culture instead of outside of it.
That doesn’t mean every campaign needs to become a meme account. It does mean campaigns have to stop treating digital as a place to warehouse official content.
The best political digital work right now feels native to the platform. It gives supporters something to repeat, remix, clip, argue with, or share. Eric Wilson’s piece on Spencer Pratt’s LA mayoral campaign gets at this. Pratt’s campaign was optimized for attention because it was surprising, emotionally clear, and easy for supporters to participate in.
That matters. But it also comes with a caveat - attention isn’t the same thing as votes.
A campaign can dominate the conversation and still lose. A candidate can rack up views and still fail to persuade the people who actually live in the district, fill out a ballot, and turn it in on time. The lesson is not “be loud,” it’s be interesting enough to earn attention, then disciplined enough to turn that attention into opt-ins, volunteers, donors, persuasion, and actual votes.
2. Money Can’t Fix a Losing Message
One of the clearest lessons from 2026 so far is that campaigns can spend a lot of money very badly.
Cauldron’s breakdown of California’s big spenders, “The CA big spenders learn money has its limits,” is a useful reminder that volume is not the same thing as persuasion. Tom Steyer spent an extraordinary amount of money in his failed run for governor. Saikat Chakrabarti spent heavily in his congressional race. In both cases, the problem was not a lack of resources, it was that money alone couldn’t make enough voters say yes.
That should sound familiar to anyone who has worked in campaigns. Digital teams are often asked to solve a message problem with more impressions. More ads. More targeting. More creators. More emails. More texts. More everything.
But if the core message is not landing, more distribution just means more people seeing something that doesn’t persuade them.
This is also why the warning from Politico’s piece on data-driven campaigns needing a message with heart is relevant. Data can help you find voters. Digital can help you reach them. Money can help you scale. None of that replaces a reason to believe.
The campaigns that win online are usually not choosing between message and mechanics. They have both. They know what they are saying, who they are saying it to, and why the audience should care.
3. AI Is Infrastructure, Not Strategy
AI is everywhere in politics right now. Every conference has a panel. Every vendor has a pitch. Every campaign is told it needs an AI strategy.
But the most useful way to think about AI is less as a tentpole and more as infrastructure.
Lisa Schneegans makes that case in “The End of AI Campaigning.” The argument is not that AI is going away, it’s that AI is becoming ordinary. Just like campaigns no longer talk about having an “internet strategy,” the best campaigns should stop talking about “AI strategy” and start using AI as one of many tools to recruit volunteers, identify advocates, strengthen relationships, and, most importantly, move faster.
That distinction matters because voters don’t care that your campaign used AI, in fact, most voters hate AI. They care whether your campaign feels human, trustworthy, relevant, and worth supporting.
The risk is that campaigns use AI to produce more slop: more generic copy, more uncanny videos, more low-quality content, and more fake-feeling political noise. The Financial Times’ piece on Trump’s AI “slopaganda” machine points to the darker version of this future: AI as a way to flood the zone with cheap synthetic content instead of building real trust.
The better use of AI is not replacing people, it’s helping campaigns find the right people faster, understand communities better, draft smarter, test faster, and support the human relationships that actually move politics.
4. Influencers Matter. “Celeb” Influencers? Not So Much.
The political influencer conversation over focuses on the biggest, loudest, most online personalities.
June 29 Update: Why Do All These Influencers Keep Losing Elections?
That makes sense if you don’t really know what is going on. Across the political spectrum, creators and political influencers often lean hardest toward the extremes. They are built for the feed, with loud opinions, constant conflict, intense audiences, and a strong financial incentive to keep attention high. Your algorithm is biased toward showing you the most online version of politics, not the most representative one.
That’s the tension at the center of Searchlight Institute’s piece, “How much do political influencers actually influence politics?” Two things are true at once: your feed isn’t real life, and online personalities matter.
The biggest political creators can drive conversation. They can pressure candidates. They can shape what reporters, staffers, activists, and highly engaged voters are talking about. They can make an issue feel urgent or make a candidate feel out of touch. In primaries especially, some of these creators have carved out real power as validators, critics, and gatekeepers.
But they aren’t magic persuasion machines. Many preach to their choirs to generate engagement and cash. Some are even part of explicitly branded creator networks literally named Chorus, which underlines the point: these are not neutral persuasion machines. They are media personalities operating inside their own ideological ecosystems/ecochambers. Searchlight’s polling shows that many of the biggest names in political media are unknown to the general public. Even the better-known right-wing figures are polarizing or downright unpopular. That should be a warning to campaigns trying to win general elections: the person dominating your timeline means nothing to the voters you actually need to reach.
This is where campaigns have to get more sophisticated. The future of influencer work isn’t chasing the largest political accounts. It’s building programs with trusted messengers who have real relationships with specific communities.
That means smaller creators. Local voices. Niche advocates. Parents. Teachers. Nurses. Veterans. Small business owners. Faith leaders. Campus organizers. Neighborhood figures. People whose audiences are smaller, but whose trust is deeper and more real.
And sometimes it is not even “influencers” in the traditional sense. It is the coffee shop everyone loves. The neighborhood restaurant. The local gym. The small business owner who knows half the district.
One local Pennsylvania campaign showed what this looks like in practice. The candidate went around the community interviewing business owners, regulars, and people in the neighborhood, then posted the videos as collabs with those businesses. That meant the content didn’t just reach the campaign’s followers, it reached everyone who followed the coffee shop, the restaurant, the store, or the community account.
That’s smart digital organizing, community distribution.
A celebrity influencer might get you a flash of attention. A microinfluencer can make your message feel normal, relevant, and believable. A trusted local business can make your campaign feel like it already belongs around the neighborhood.
Persuasion rarely looks like one viral post changing someone’s mind overnight. It looks like repeated exposure from people and places a voter already trusts. It looks like a creator explaining an issue in the language of their own community. It looks like a real person saying, “This is why I care,” in a way a campaign ad never could.
In 2026, the best influencer programs are not about reach or follower count, they’re about trust, fit, and repetition.
Campaigns should still pay attention to the big new media voices. They matter in the conversation. But if the goal is actually winning votes, the smart investment is farther down the long tail: real people, real communities, real trust. (People First runs the best creator campaigns in politics, schedule a call with us to learn more.)
5. Clipping and Anonymous Amplifier Accounts Are the Real Force
The 2026 cycle is also showing how much political communication now happens through accounts that do not look like campaigns at all.
Kyle Tharp’s Chaotic Era piece, “Everyone’s running anonymous political accounts now,” is a sharp look at this trend. Operatives and organizations are using anonymous or semi-anonymous (side-quests) social brands to push opposition research, boost preferred candidates, aggregate news, and shape narratives without the content appearing to come directly from a campaign or PAC.
This matters because these accounts can move fast. They can make something feel organic. They can get screenshots and clips into the feeds of reporters, strategists, activists, and high-information voters before a campaign puts out an official statement.
It also overlaps with the rise of clipping. Taylor Lorenz noted that Spencer Pratt was running paid clipping campaigns, with creators being offered money to cut and distribute content. This isn’t just some entertainment-industry tactic, it’s a vital political tactic too.
There’re real strategic reasons campaigns are drawn to this. Clipping extends the life of a moment. Anonymous pages can help content travel farther than it would from a dull official campaign account. Supporter-run accounts can create the feeling of momentum.
But campaigns can also run into a trust problem. If voters can’t tell who is behind the content they are seeing, campaigns may win a news cycle while damaging the broader information environment. And if every race becomes a shadow war of clipping pages, anonymous brands, and undisclosed amplifiers, the campaigns that are transparent, human, and trusted may have an even bigger advantage over time.
Digital Sits at the Big Kids Table
The strongest digital campaigns in 2026 are not treating online work as a department that posts the real campaign’s message after the fact.
Digital is where the message is tested. It’s where narratives start and where supporters organize, creators interpret, opponents attack, reporters discover, and voters decide whether a campaign feels alive or dead on arrival.
The lesson from 2026 so far is not that every campaign needs to chase every trend. It’s that campaigns need to understand the environment they are operating in.
Politics is not getting less online. Voters aren’t going back to consuming campaigns through press releases and 30-second TV ads. The campaigns that adapt will have a real advantage and the campaigns that keep treating digital like an afterthought are going to keep wondering why nobody is listening.
🎧 New Episode - Influencer Impact: The Podcast
This month on Influencer Impact: The Podcast, Nicole sat down with Tiffany Rivers, VP of Emerging Media + Influencer Marketing at Media Cause, to talk about where the influencer industry is headed.
From navigating constant change to building programs that create lasting impact, Tiffany shared what teams need to know in today’s digital climate.
Listen above or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Comment Analysis As Influencer Measurement
By Magdalena Muszyńska
Most influencer programs track the basics: reach and impressions at the top of the funnel, clicks and revenue at the bottom. That data matters, but it leaves a gap. It tells you what happened, not why audiences actually moved from awareness toward buying. At People First, we fill that gap by going into the comments.
Comment sections are where real audience reactions live. Using natural language processing led by experienced human analysts we analyze those raw (often nuanced) responses to surface what people are actually thinking: the questions they’re asking, the concerns they’re raising, and how they feel about what they just watched or read.
From that analysis, we produce:
Keyword and theme mapping — visual breakdowns of what topics are dominating the conversation. For a food ingredient transparency campaign, you might see “seed oils,” “artificial dyes,” and “label reading” rising to the top telling you which specific concerns are cutting through and driving the most discussion.
Sentiment scoring — a clear read on whether reactions skew positive, negative, or mixed. A score might show that 80% of comments on a video about ultra-processed foods are supportive, but that skepticism spikes specifically around government oversight, a useful signal for how to frame the regulatory argument without alienating your audience.
Intent signals — comments that indicate someone is moving toward action, not just scrolling past. Think “I just checked my pantry and threw out half of it” or “where do I find the list of banned ingredients?”, language that standard engagement metrics would count the same as any other comment.
Cultural and language coverage — our system handles slang, emojis, and regional expressions, not just formal text. A comment like “they’ve known about this forever and just don’t care abt us time to read every label” gets read accurately, not filtered out or misclassified.
Audience demographics — who’s actually engaging with the content (age, location, gender, profession), compared to who’s just seeing it. A video might reach a broad general health audience, but the people actively commenting and asking questions could be predominantly parents of young children, a meaningful difference for how you target your next wave of content and advocacy.
The point isn’t more data for its own sake. It’s knowing whether your creators are genuinely moving people and having the specifics to act on when they’re not.
Influencer budgets are under more scrutiny than ever. Brands need to justify spend, and “we got 2 million impressions” no longer cuts it. Comment analysis bridges the gap between vanity metrics and real business outcomes giving you the evidence to defend what’s working, cut what isn’t, and make smarter decisions about who you partner with next.
Today @ 2PM ET: Influencer 101 For Non-Profits
Don’t miss the People First team today at the Center for Digital Strategy’s Digital Strategy Summit.
We’ll be talking influencer marketing 101 for nonprofits, including full creative programs, best practices, UGC, paid media, and more.
We’ll also be showing off Val, your friendly influencer agent, which recently came out of beta and is now available to help nonprofits run creator campaigns starting at just $299.
Register for free here.
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