AI for Political Campaigns
Instructor information
Dr. José Marichal (he/him/his)
Professor of Political Science
Contact: marichal@callutheran.edu
Course Description: Rise of the APO
When Joe Rospars wrangled Howard Dean's blog in 2003, the boundary-pushing question was whether the Internet deserved a seat at the campaign table. Twenty years later, a new generation of operatives is asking something far more disorienting: which parts of the campaign still need a human at all?
They don't call themselves OPOs (Online Political Operatives) anymore. The emerging shorthand is APO: AI Political Operative. While the first generation fought for a blog, the APOs are fighting for the right to rewire how campaigns think, persuade, and respond—in real time, at scale, powered by machines.
This course profiles this new class of strategist. We will move beyond the "internet as a tool" paradigm to "AI as a force multiplier." We will learn to use the tools they use—from Large Language Models for messaging to synthetic media for ad production—while critically examining the ethical abyss they are walking into.
Course Archetypes & Roles
We will structure the course around the four emerging roles in the APO ecosystem:
- The Prompt Architect: Obsessed with "on-voice" drafting and maintaining the candidate's rhetorical signature.
- The Audience Engineer: Finds "persuadable clusters" using predictive models and behavioral patterns.
- The Synthetic Media Producer: Generates localized video, imagery, and ad variants at industrial scale.
- The Intelligence Analyst: Runs the early warning system, tracking narratives and deploying rapid response.
Core Texts
Key texts that anchor our theoretical and practical work:
Course Assignments
Total Points: 100
- Roleplay Portfolio (40 Points): You will choose one of the four APO archetypes and build a portfolio of work (e.g., a Prompt Library, a Synthetic Ad Reel, or a Narrative Tracking Dashboard).
- Reflective Ethics Logs (30 Points): Weekly logs documenting the "lines you wouldn't cross" as you experiment with these tools.
- Final Campaign Simulation (30 Points): A full-scale simulation where teams run a "shadow campaign" using only AI tools against a human opposition.
Schedule
Unit 1: The New Campaign Machine (History & Context)
From the "Dean Scream" to Deepfakes. How we got here and who the APOs are.
We trace the lineage from the "Netroots" to the "Prompt Engineers."
They are technically fluent, often politically uncredentialed, and obsessed with scale. We examine the culture clash with traditional consultants.
Unit 2: The Content Engine (Message & Production)
Focus: The Prompt Architect and Synthetic Media Producer.
Topic: Building a repository of speeches and op-eds to train a style guide.
Tool: Claude / GPT-4o for style mimicry.
Use Case: Message Testing. Running AI-simulated voter panels to stress-test frames before real focus groups.
Use Case: Ad Production. Generating dozens of creative variants from one brief. Automatic A/B testing.
Use Case: Localization. Culturally adapted multilingual content, not just translation. Using ElevenLabs for voice cloning (and the ethics thereof).
Unit 3: The Data Machine (Audience & Money)
Focus: The Audience Engineer.
Use Case: Hyper-Personalization. Tuning fundraising appeals to individual donor behavior and geography. Moving beyond demographics to "persuadable clusters."
- Sasha Issenberg, "The Victory Lab" - Randomized control trials in politics.
- PNAS, "Foreign Election Interference and Digital Voter Suppression" - Weaponization of microtargeting.
Integrating commercial data and social signals. Why the 2012 "Cave" looks like the Stone Age.
Unit 4: Intelligence & Defense
Focus: The Intelligence Analyst.
Use Case: Opposition Research. Document-ingestion AI that cross-references votes, disclosures, and local press to find the needle in the haystack.
- Huang et al., "A Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation" - RAG for Opp Research.
- "Awesome-OSINT Curated List" (GitHub)
Use Case: Rapid Response. Near-real-time narrative monitoring. Drafting responses within minutes of an attack surfacing.
Use Case: Debate Sims. AI simulates opponent arguments trained on their full public record.
Unit 5: The Field (Boots on the Ground / Bots in the Cloud)
Where digital meets physical.
Use Case: Volunteer Activation. AI SMS agents onboard and guide volunteers without human staff intervention.
Use Case: Voter Contact. Canvassing scripts personalized by door, in real time, on a phone.
Unit 6: The Ethics of "The Room"
The APO Dilemma: Influence without Authority.
Disclosures, deepfakes, and the "Black Mirror" scenario. Managing a compliance apparatus that didn't exist for OPOs.
"Every week there's something technically possible we decide not to do." Building internal ethics guidelines in the absence of law.