Tareq Alani is a product leader who operates at the intersection of media, technology, and civic engagement. He is a Co-Founder at Chorus AI, where he leads product and growth.

Chorus AI was designed to transform the way nonprofits and campaigns engage with media and content creation.

Before Chorus AI, Tareq co-founded and served as the Chief Product Officer of PushBlack, the largest non-profit media company for Black Americans. While there, he spearheaded reader revenue efforts, generating more than $5M between 2017 and 2022.

He also developed PushBlack’s groundbreaking voter engagement program, which in 2020 reached 70% of Black Americans online and generated 230M peer-to-peer voting messages, making it the largest digital voter turnout program of its kind.

Throughout the conversation, we covered:

• How he got into the field
• Why politics can’t just be transactional
• How Chorus AI is approaching AI as a tool to help progressive campaigns and organizations do more
• How they’re building their tech in a way that’s in line with their values
• What sets them apart from the more household names in AI
• The important of social listening and how AI can help organizations get more done with less
• Other AI tools he’s excited about
• What he thinks the future looks like for AI, and tech in general
• What the media looks like in an AI driven future
• And so much more!

For links and more, head to hellomergetag.com.

If you know me, you know I’m a HUGE NERD for newsletters and email. Over the years, they’ve become one of the primary ways I get my news.

Along with reading those Republican candidate emails (so you don’t have to), I also read dozens of digital marketing newsletters. Literally.

And loads more about politics.

I’m kind of obsessed with the medium.

Of all of the many newsletters that I read, one of the most unique in my inbox, is called YELLO.

It’s run by today’s guest, Hunter Schawrz, and it bills itself as “a newsletter about politics, art, branding and design.”

I’ve heard Hunter describe it as a newsletter about what politics looks like.

And I love that.

It covers obvious political design topics, like logo choices and merch.

But it dives waaaaay deeper, breaking down how font choices affect audiences, how the federal government is approaching the internet in 2024, how campaigns stage their rallies and so much more.

In a world where the media continues to fracture, reaching voters online keeps on getting harder.

Hunter’s joined us to talk about what that means for campaigns, and what campaigns and brands can do to break through our fractured media environment.

Find links to Hunter's channels, studies and resources mentioned, and a whole more at HelloMergeTag.com.

Dan Pfeiffer is a giant in the progressive messaging space.

Along with many impressive titles under his belt, he worked on the Obama campaign and served as senior advisor and White House Communications Director for President Obama.

He then went on to become an influencer for democracy (my term, don’t blame him). He’s a best selling author and a co-host of Pod Save America. He also hosts the podcast Pollercoaster, co-hosts Political Experts React on YouTube and writes the extremely influential newsletter Message Box.

Needless to say, Dan is a man with a ton of insight into messaging for Democratic campaigns.

The primary purpose of Message Box is creating campaign messaging style memos for everyday people.

Campaign staff and operatives write and receive these all the time. But Dan realized that we can no longer win elections simply relying on campaign staff and operatives.

If the Democratic party wants to win elections, at every level of government, we all have to be involved in the process.

So in Message Box, he shares talking points and context around the stories of the day, in a way that is useful and relatable not for full time Hill staffers, but for anyone who wants to be involved in the march toward progress.

Because, in his words, “This whole election comes down to narrowing the news chasm between what is happening and the voters.”

We covered:

• The importance of trusted messengers and the need to give them the training to help get the message out
• Having different strategies for the public internet vs the private internet
• Why campaigns need to learn to give up control, and relinquish that control to our supporters. They know the people they’re communicating with, we have to trust them to speak in a way they know will resonate.
• The brand of the Democrat Party, both what it is and what it could be
• What Democrats can learn from Trump’s nurturing of the MAGA media system
• The all-of-the-above approach to reaching your audience
• Spam PACs and what the Democratic Party can do about them
• What could have become of the Obama For America campaign infrastructure after President Obama won in 2008
• And so much more!

Find all links, more episodes and more at HelloMergeTag.com.

We checked in with Josh Nelson, CEO of Civic Shout, to talk about the rampant spam and scam currently overtaking Democratic fundraising.

We talked about how we got here, and how we can fix things.

He walked us through a fascinating timeline of digital fundraising, starting with Howard Dean's presidential campaign and their innovative digital work (which started with Meet Ups!). But which new generations of digital professionals "A/B tested... into some pretty unfortunate tactics." This all of course culminated in the world in which we currently live. You know, where we all want to throw out our phones and delete our email accounts.

It was a great and enlightening conversation with a lot of reasons for hope. Hope you enjoy!

“People are desperate to turn digital into television and at the same time, they are desperate to have social be the thing that saves them from the small-dollar apocalypse.”

Andy Barr is Managing Director at Uplift, an agency that provides creative, ad buying, data and software to Democratic campaigns, firms and organizations throughout the country.

Prior to founding Uplift in 2015, Andy was a political consultant, a comms director for a US senate race and a political reporter at Politico and The Hill.

Andy is hyper-focused on creative across platforms and I invited him on the pod to talk to us about the themes he’s seeing, both for his own clients and in general and so much more.

Throughout the conversation, we delved into the importance of platform agnostic content, what’s changing in the industry, how we should be thinking about audience segmentation and reach (versus how we’re currently thinking about) and a whole lot more.

Our interview took place before the California Senate Primary, but as a Californian focused on digital advertising, Andy had an interesting perspective that he shared that is applicable to other campaigns moving forward.

He spoke at length about the importance of data, and respecting the nuance of what digital can and cannot do, and judging it accordingly.

We also talked about Scan, Uplift’s tool for tracking ad spending across Google, Meta and Snap.

Find links and all episodes at HelloMergeTag.com.

“We deployed a competitive search strategy to disrupt pathways to misinformation and lead people to our fact-based narratives instead.”

Britt Bischoff is a reformed corporate digital strategist, analyst, click baiter, and algorithm chaser.

Over her career, she’s led digital strategy and data-informed campaigns for national brands, social causes, and progressive campaigns as a proponent for change in the digital space for the progressive world.

She now serves as the Strategic Growth Advisor at Red Wine & Blue. Her work is in the intersection of data, narrative strategies, and digital impact.

Over the course of her career, she's worked alongside, and learned from, master search experts and Google’s Web Quality & Spam Team, honing her skills in combating spam and misinformation.

This past year, she put everything she has learned to good use as she worked to develop a strategy to help dispel misinformation in the campaign to protect Ohioan’s right to choose with Issue 1.

Britt led a comprehensive campaign to help remove and combat misinformation on Google Search.

They took on a blog post from an elected official that was spreading rampant disinformation and was rapidly gaining prominence through the featured snippet from Google organic search. Their intervention prevented an estimated 460K+ search exposures.

Britt walked us through how they approached this complicated and important campaign and how they fought back… and ultimately won!... guaranteeing Ohioans the right to choose.

We talked about data voids, nudging tactics, the power (and therefore the danger) of search snippets, intentional misinformation, the role of bad government actors and a whole lot more.

This is scary stuff. But the good news — Britt and her team's efforts were successful! And they created a path forward for others looking to combat misinformation through search in the future.

Find links, resources and more at HelloMergeTag.com.

Congressman Mark Pocan represents Wisconsin’s second district.

He’s a small business owner, a labor union member and a surprisingly good magician!

Along with serving on the Appropriations Committee, he’s served as co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and serves as chair of the Equality Caucus and co-chair of the Labor Caucus. To say his politics are righteous is an understatement.

While he is never one to shy away from a fight with Republicans at any level of government, or from those who put the needs of corporate profits over those of working families, I invited him on the podcast to talk about one very specific, and public, fight he’s currently involved in: and that’s his fight with AIPAC.

He held nothing back. He shared that he sees what they are doing in Democratic primaries as a "Trojan Horse" way for them to "circumvent democracy" and talked about their "insidious" path to undermine the Democratic process.

He expressed great concern that if AIPAC's current methods are successful, that we will see groups like the NRA following in their path.

Along with AIPAC, we spoke about:

• TikTok and whether it's actually a national security issue
• The "full-blown cult" that the Republican party has become
• Why he's so comfortable getting attacked by powerful enemies
• The best ways to keep in touch with elected officials (and why you should reach out to them, even about issues on which you agree)
• Magic Mondays

And a whole lot more!

Listen now at HelloMergeTag.com or wherever you stream podcasts.

Connect with Congressman Pocan:

• Website
• Congressional Twitter
• Campaign Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram
• TikTok

“Where the memes are and where the conversation is, is constantly evolving.”

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Nancy Leeds is a veteran political operative with over 18 years of experience in the field. She has worked on Democratic campaigns all over, from Minnesota to California to Arkansas, as well as with several politically oriented non-profits. 

She is also the author of Campaign Sick, a job serve and blog about best practices in electoral politics and campaign management. 

Nancy recently launched CampaignSick Consulting, a management consulting and recruitment practice specifically focused on the progressive ecosystem. 

Nancy rose to some campaign Internet fame during the 2012 election cycle when she started her Tumblr. It began as a knockoff of a then popular Feminist Ryan Gosling meme and evolved from there.

She was, in many ways, the Organizer Memes of the cycle.

If you missed it, I recently hosted Organizer Memes on the podcast. “Nancy walked so I could run” is what they had to say about Campaign Sick.

Nancy used her meme fame to launch a more serious blog, sharing advice and tips for organizers and campaign operatives. In the years that followed, she also became a trainer and launched her jobserve.

Throughout our conversation, we spoke about:

• How the internet has changed since Nancy launched Campaign Sick
• The rise and fall of different social platforms 
• How campaign culture has changed, and what it’s meant for the new generation of campaign staff and their comfort level as they’ve become more open to discuss what’s happening behind the scenes on their campaigns
• How campaigns have taken off the gloves and become willing to hit other campaigns - even within their own party
• The importance of candidates keeping it authentic, at risk of looking “like a dork.”
• Where downballot campaigns should be spending time online
• What’s happening with Tumblr

And a whole lot more!

Listen today at HelloMergeTag.com or wherever you stream podcasts.

Find all links referenced and additional resources at HelloMergeTag.com.