It’s strange to think back on 2008 as a time of political innocence, but in many ways, it was. I was part of the team that helped build Barack Obama’s groundbreaking digital campaign, a time when we were experimenting with tools that were brand new to the political arena. We were figuring out how to use social media and mobile technology to reach people where they were, to get them excited, and to get them to the polls in numbers we had never seen before. It felt like we were building the future. We were pioneers, laying down the tracks for how modern political communication would work. But nearly two decades later, I find myself looking at that future with a growing sense of dread. The feeling of boundless opportunity has been replaced by a nagging worry that we, on the Democratic side, are completely unprepared for what is about to hit us. The landscape we helped create has evolved into something far more dangerous, and the playbook we’re using to defend against it is woefully out of date.
The most terrifying thing about the next election cycle isn’t the massive, flashy viral lie that everyone sees and talks about. It’s the quiet, insidious falsehood that you will never encounter. We’ve entered the era of what I call “social media missiles.” These are short videos, hyper-targeted ads, and text messages designed with surgical precision to reach a very small, very specific group of voters. They are launched into the digital ecosystem and detonate within their intended audience before any journalist, fact-checker, or opposing campaign even knows they exist. By the time we detect them, the narrative has already taken root in the minds of the people who matter most, and the damage is done. We’ve spent the last twenty years perfecting the delivery mechanism, getting incredibly good at sending political messages with pinpoint accuracy. But we have completely fallen behind on the other end of the equation. We have no early warning system, no effective radar to detect these incoming attacks, and no rapid-fire mechanism to correct the falsehoods before they spread. We’ve built the ultimate political weapons, but we’ve neglected to build the defense.
For so long, our biggest fear was the sophisticated deepfake, the one that would show a candidate saying something they never said. But the reality is that misinformation doesn’t need to be clever to be effective. A recent attack on a Texas Democratic Senate candidate, James Talarico, is a perfect case in point. A political group spent a significant amount of money on a 15-second AI-generated ad that made him look like he was singing a bizarre parody song about transgender children. It was absurd, it was cheap to make, and it was devastating. In the past, political attacks were broadcast on television or printed in papers, making them easy for reporters and rival campaigns to see, dissect, and debunk. Social media shattered that system. Now, with AI, it costs next to nothing to create a thousand different variations of an ad and feed each one to a different micro-audience. This brings me to the core of the problem: this “micro-viral” misinformation doesn’t need to reach millions of people to be a success. It doesn’t need to trend on Twitter or be covered on CNN. It just needs to reach, say, 25,000 voters in a specific suburban district in a key swing state. If it reaches exactly the 25,000 people who are most likely to be persuaded by it, it has achieved its goal more effectively than a national ad campaign ever could. It’s not about mass influence anymore; it’s about targeted precision.
I have been fighting this battle for over a decade, particularly in the realm of political text messaging. After the 2010 election cycle, I petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to close loopholes that allowed political organizations to spam voters’ cell phones. We had some initial success, but the progress we made was rolled back by a Trump-era FCC and a subsequent Supreme Court ruling. Now, political organizations have the power to match cellphone numbers with voter files and commercial databases, giving them a direct line to millions of voters. They can send a misleading link or a doctored headline straight to a person’s pocket, bypassing all the traditional gatekeepers of information. I saw the horrifying consequences of this firsthand while working on the 2023 campaign to protect abortion rights in Ohio. The opposition poured over $5 million into TV ads, spreading absolutely false claims that the proposed amendment would affect transgender care and parental rights. The Ohio Capital Journal looked into it and found that the amendment didn’t even mention those topics. It was a fabrication, yet legal experts opposed to the amendment even admitted it. I reached out to national fact-checking organizations, desperate for help, and was told that they didn’t have a partner in Ohio. We have “fact-checking deserts” in this country, and those deserts are where misinformation thrives. As we head into the 2026 gubernatorial race, Ohio voters are already being bombarded by a $25 million ad blitz of misleading personal attacks, and the state’s fact-checking infrastructure is still almost nonexistent.
Holding politicians accountable is only half the battle; we also need to be smarter about our own operations. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, many Democratic and progressive organizations understandably became extremely cautious about how they used social media data. But in many cases, that caution morphed into a counterproductive disengagement from the very tools we need to be using. Meanwhile, we are still spending millions of dollars on social media influencers without having the first clue whether their followers actually include undecided voters in the states that matter. We treat follower counts and viral views as if they are a strategy. In 2008, we were building the distribution network, but we don’t control it anymore. Meta and the other platforms do. We can buy ads and build audiences, but the platform’s algorithms decide who ultimately sees our content. We need to invest in developing a serious, responsible form of social intelligence. We need to understand the digital currents, spot emerging narratives before they break, and understand who these influencers actually reach if we are going to use them effectively.
But all this intelligence is useless if we can’t act on it. We need to build a robust defense system that can quickly establish what is true in the public square. This means investing in independent fact-checking organizations that can operate quickly and have a presence in every state, so no region becomes a desert. We need to create systems to find these targeted ads and texts that will never appear in a reporter’s feed, and we need to figure out how to get the truth back in front of the same voters who were just bombarded with a lie. The strategy cannot just be to react to what’s in the news cycle. We need a proactive defense. In 2008, our mission was to build the missiles, to find new ways to reach voters. In 2026, that mission must change. We’ve already spent billions on building better weapons. Now we need to invest in the intelligence and the radar to see what’s coming and deploy the facts before the damage is done. We need to be just as innovative in our defense as we were in our offense. We built the future once, and we have to adapt again to protect it.