The 10 Political Digital Trends I’m Watching for 2026
The only thing I can guarantee is change. The best election campaigns will evolve and pivot quickly.
When I was at Facebook, I had a list of survival tips for new people joining the company. The main thing I told everyone was that I could guarantee only one thing: things would change, often very quickly.
Digital campaigning in politics is the same. I’ll never forget how, at the beginning of the 2012 cycle, we didn’t have custom audiences (read: you couldn’t upload an email list and target those people with ads on Facebook). However, by Election Day, creating custom audiences had become one of the more popular tools used by campaigns. The digital staff would lament to us that they wish we’d given them more of a heads-up that the tool would be coming, so they could have planned for it, but that’s just how fast the tech was moving.
This perpetual need for quick adaptation is precisely what I’ve been tracking in the most recent elections, leading to some surprising success stories. Zohran Mamdani, the New York Mayor-elect, is undoubtedly the most fascinating candidate of the 2025 bunch. Most interestingly, he didn’t spend a ton of money to build up his social media following; instead, he had a killer social media strategy that grew his following to over seven million across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, according to Kyle Tharp. His media strategy has been one of innovation and hard work, both online and offline, and it’s clear that it has translated to success in the polls.
Beyond Mamdani, there’s been a lot of chatter across some of the political newsletters and outlets I follow. While we’re all processing the results from Election Day, I wanted to share 10 trends I’m watching as we go into 2026:
Change is the only guarantee. I wrote a piece for Campaigns and Elections’ (C&E) 20th anniversary magazine recently, where I said, “The campaigns that’ll succeed in the years to come won’t just be the ones with the best creative or the biggest ad budgets. They’ll be the ones that can evolve quickly, stay grounded in their principles, and build trust in an environment that’s constantly shifting.”
More platforms = more content. I’m borrowing this one from SKDK CEO Doug Thornell, who pointed out in a C&E panel that, with more platforms for people to consume information on, as well as content becoming more niche, campaigns will have to create more content to keep up. That will put a strain on even the most well-resourced of campaigns.
Politician YouTube Channels > Politician Websites. Politico wrote a great story this Fall about the YouTube election coming our way. This isn’t your 2008 version of it, though, when we had a snowman asking questions at the debate. Instead, with YouTube being the number one way people watch television, campaigns will put extra effort into building out their channels. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more reality-type shows from the campaigns, as well as plenty of video content from the candidates and their surrogates. Side note: While TikTok will still be a huge part of campaigning next year, I don’t think we’ll hear as much about it as we will YouTube.
AI video gloves are off. The need for more content will facilitate the use of AI, especially AI-generated video, by campaigns. I think they’ll use this mainly to attack their opponents, and we’ll see it more from campaign committees and Super PACs versus the campaigns themselves. This will open up all sorts of tricky questions about disclosure and the platforms’ ability to detect and label anything not done proactively.
Websites will go heavy on text - for the LLMs. With most people getting their news and information from video, campaigns will shift their website strategy to focus more on helping large language models (LLMs) find information about their candidate or issue. A smart campaign will not only create an LLM trained on everything their candidate has ever said, but also put all those transcripts on the web for Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and all the other AI platforms to find and index.
Substack is where pundits will live, with a cable side hustle. Substack has seen an influx of pundits and journalists in recent years, creating their own platforms to share their analysis and reporting. We’ll continue to see more of the pundits you’re used to seeing on television generate and distribute content this way, and cable will quickly become their side gig. Overall, I expect Substack to continue growing rapidly next year.
Who will the micro- and nano-influencers be? Big numbers may not be the name of the game anymore. Sure, people will talk about Joe Rogan or Alex Cooper, but for a midterm election where most candidates will struggle to break through, they’ll need to look to micro and nano influencers (those with fewer than 100,000 followers). Many brands are already starting to think this way, as those with smaller followings can still have a significant impact, depending on who their followers are.
Who will be the first campaign influencer? This astute observation comes from Amanda Elliott at Doomscroll. She recently asked which staffer, consultant, and/or volunteer will build their own following online that becomes an asset to their client/party. It will likely happen, but it will start outside of the campaign structure, and then this person will be brought in.
Targeted sharing, turbocharged. Back in 2012, the Obama campaign developed a tool called targeted sharing, which allowed people to log in with Facebook and connect with others in their area or with similar interests to get out the vote. The theory being that people will respond more favorably to someone with whom they share something in common. Back then, the technology was more challenging to execute, but in 2026, with the tools of AI, we may have better ways of identifying who will persuade someone, not just who can be persuaded. The Relational Republican Substack has a great piece on this.
More AI Platforms Will Allow Political Use: The Wildcard Prediction. I don’t think that the bans on political use by platforms like OpenAI and others are sustainable. The politicians will want to use their tools, and they’ll hold them off only so long. However, I could also see other tools get built so that the campaigns don’t need to use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Still, watch this space. These platforms can only hide from politics for so long.
I’m excited to see how the information landscape continues to evolve next year and how people become innovative in adapting to it. Election officials will play a crucial role in communicating the process to the public, a task they’ve been refining with each election cycle. The challenges—from deepfakes to foreign interference—will be real, but the campaigns that succeed will be the ones that view this shifting landscape as a massive opportunity.
What are your predictions for 2026? Where will you be turning to stay up to date on politics next year? Let me know in the comments!
Also, if you want to follow along here are the newsletters and outlets I read to keep on top of what’s happening:
Chaotic Era by Kyle Tharp
Doomscroll by
Campaign Trend by Eric Wilson
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