It is 1845. You work for the Anti-Corn Law League led by Richard Cobden and John Bright; the campaign is rapidly mustering national support behind the free trade cause. A weekly magazine called the League is distributed nationwide, alongside pamphlets about the harm that protectionist measures were having on the working man. The cheap penny post – a recent invention – allowed the League’s propaganda to go directly to the homes of eligible voters. But if Cobden had had AI and a podcast, would it have taken him six months to get his campaign up and running?
The history of campaigning
The Anti-Corn Law League put their best feet on the ground in constituencies which were likely to swing in their favour. The League’s campaign machine resulted in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 by Sir Robert Peel.
For the first time in British political history, the campaign machine had been born. One which truly rattled the aristocratic, land-owning class who sought to benefit from the Corn Laws. The thing is, for the past 178 years, campaigning techniques have only improved marginally. Of course, printing gets cheaper, transport gets quicker and television lets people watch from home. But the real technological gains of the last two decades are incomparable.
Podcasting is the latest development that seeks to help candidates get their message out incredibly effectively. Without the rowdiness of the Commons or the hecklers at a conference you can sit down, have a glass of water and expect to have a chat. There is the possibility of slip ups which can be blown out of proportion, but the opportunity to connect intimately with so many voters at once is astonishing.
Podcasting in practice
In recent months Green Party leader Zack Polanski has set up a weekly podcast called Bold Politics. The guests he invites on tend to be on the left of British politics, and it is as much an opportunity for him to get his party’s messaging across as it is for the guests to talk about their ideas. Just look at the growth in the polls recently for the Greens. Membership (according to the Greens) has increased by 80% since Polanski was elected leader last month.
Podcasting is the perfect way to communicate on a more intimate level, and campaigns have recognised this. Kamala Harris spoke with Alex Cooper, Trump went on Rogan, Reeves went on the Rest is Politics and even Jacob Rees-Mogg had a crack on the Institute of Economic Affairs’ podcast. Each of them is well suited to the podcast they appeared on. This is no coincidence and hardly surprising. Accepting invitations should be a considered process as podcast audiences vary massively.
Podcasting is a remarkable tool for messaging. Ofcom found that in 2008 just 4% of adults listened to a podcast each week, and by 2025 that figure has risen to 22%. Furthermore, the types of podcast that dominate the 35-54 age group as well as the 55+ age group are in the ‘News and Current Affairs’ sections.
AI and campaigning
However, the podcast alone is not going to win you an election. The recent boom in video podcasting in the last couple of years has helped to spread clips of podcasts into short bite-sized chunks which are processed through social media algorithms on platforms like X, Instagram and TikTok. Whilst podcasting is the medium for creating the content and setting up the narrative, which is key for voter engagement, the real game-changer is AI, which is the multiplier that can nail the art of delivery.
AI is also not going to win you elections alone. But it will create a competitive edge for the parties that grasp it best. There are language-based models, generative content creation AI as well as operational AI that will make campaigns run more resourcefully, just as AI is already making the service industry far more efficient. The big wins come from marketing candidates through precise, data-driven persuasion tools.
Take this hypothetical for example. If you are campaigning and you go on a podcast where the housing crisis gets mentioned, you should have a few lines (that AI) has tested) about how your policy to change planning laws will encourage new home builds. When the podcast is available, you can use content-clipping AI tools such as Podscribe and Pictory which will slice up the podcast into several smaller clips. Then you polish up with some data-savvy optimisation which focuses on scanning tones and cues to see how different groups will react. Emotional analytical AI like IBM Watson NLP is leading this innovative drive.
AI used like this can vastly improve micro-targeted advertising by taking into account every factor under the sun. From that hypothetical, the clip could be cut up, tested, timed and delivered to voters in an area suffering from the housing crisis in a more compelling manner than any leaflet could.
Conclusions
To optimise the way communications can be perfected you can use what game theorists call ‘backwards induction’. You find your desired end goal and then you reason backwards to understand what the best decisions (or words) are to reach your goal. The desired voter reaction should be a feeling of hope, relatability and importantly trust. These emotional cues can be predicted through a combination of AI models which can then help candidates create an appropriate selection of soundbites to drop in their next podcast.
A random example of this backwards induction in practice could be when Sir Ed Davey said in an interview in 2022 that the Conservatives could “name their time and place, I will tear them apart on energy”. The end goal was to make readers feel like the Liberal Democrats are to be trusted on energy policy during an energy crisis. The idea was that he will provide an alternative energy solution which is bold and better than the current situation. The backward-inductive reasoning led him to formulate a quote and deploy it in an interview at the right moment. What AI and podcasting would do is apply the same principle but extrapolate several potential quotes of slight variation and test how they will be received by target voters. Then Sir Ed would practice the quote and bring it into the interview and once the content is there, the computers will do the rest.
Strategically engineering campaigns with AI will not substitute human persuasion. Instead, it will scale and direct it in a way that is far more efficient. Just as Cobden and Bright were embracing the resources at their disposal, modern candidates must do the same, otherwise, they risk being left behind.
