"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.