Everyone's worried about AI deepfakes in politics. Becki Wright says that's not the real story.

Becki, founder of Proximity and a former candidate and campaign manager, joins Eric Wilson to talk about what AI is actually doing in campaigns right now — mostly quiet, mostly mundane, and mostly happening on downballot races that can't afford a full-time staff. She breaks down the three failure modes of off-the-shelf AI tools (the sycophancy problem, the averaging effect, and hallucination), why voters are growing more suspicious of anything that smells AI-generated, and why the campaigns that get burned by AI are usually the ones that let it replace judgment instead of amplifying it.

Her bottom line: let AI handle scale and speed. Keep the human in the loop for everything else.

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Every pollster knows the problem: for every hundred voters you ask to take a poll, only one or two actually respond. So what if AI could just answer the questions for them? It's a seductive idea — and Ben Leff has put it to the test.

Ben is co-founder and CEO of Verasight, a survey research firm founded by academics and trusted by leading institutions and media organizations. He and his colleagues G. Elliott Morris and Peter Enns recently published a series of papers asking the question the industry is buzzing about: can AI digital twins replace human survey respondents? Their verdict, after rigorous real-world testing, is a firm — for now.

In this conversation with host Eric Wilson, Ben breaks down exactly what synthetic sampling is, how Verasight built and stress-tested it, and where it consistently fell apart. Ben sees a narrow lane where synthetic data could earn a legitimate spot in the toolkit — as a directional pre-screen, a quick and cheap starting point before committing to a full sample. But for anything requiring precision in close races, the humans still have to show up.

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AI adoption in political consulting is accelerating — but is the industry keeping up, or splitting in two? Eric Wilson sits down with Julie Sweet, Director of Advocacy and Industry Relations at the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC), to dig into the findings of AAPC's March 2026 member survey on AI use across the profession. They unpack what real integration looks like versus chatbot-level tinkering, why larger firms are pulling ahead on agentic tools, and what that gap means for smaller consultancies heading into 2028.

Then the conversation shifts to the AAPC Foundation's Disclaimer Effect Study — the first empirical research on how AI disclosures in political advertising actually affect voter trust. The results are striking: slapping an AI disclaimer on an ad, even a traditionally produced one, reliably tanks credibility. And the voters least familiar with the technology are the least helped by the disclaimers designed to protect them.

With 30 states now operating under a patchwork of AI disclosure laws — and two already enjoined on First Amendment grounds — Sweet and Wilson make the case for data-backed policy over reactive regulation, and look ahead to a future where agentic systems aren't just assisting campaigns, they may be running parts of them.

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