Veteran Republican pollster Micah Roberts, partner at Public Opinion Strategies, takes listeners inside the high-stakes world of public opinion polling. He explains how pollsters turn relatively small samples into meaningful insights, how the industry has evolved from landline calls to voter files and text-based surveys, and why reaching a representative audience is now more difficult and expensive.

Roberts also explores how social media can rapidly reshape public opinion, how researchers detect bots and unreliable respondents, and what listeners should examine before trusting a headline-making statistic. Looking ahead to the U.S. midterm elections, the conversation considers declining institutional trust, economic concerns, ideological shifts, and what polling must do to remain credible in an era of AI, misinformation, and political division.

AI is transforming how public affairs professionals research issues, analyze audiences, create content, and respond to events. But as the technology becomes faster and more accessible, human judgment matters more than ever.

In this special solo episode, host Neil Hughes revisits insights from recent conversations with Jordan Lieberman, Matt Kenney, Curt Mercadante, and Jonathan Grella. He explores why AI should remain the assistant rather than the architect, how smaller organizations can access increasingly sophisticated capabilities, why owning your audience matters, and how speed must be balanced with trust, authenticity, and restraint.

Because when everyone can produce more content and target audiences more precisely, the real advantage is knowing what to say, who needs to hear it, and when saying less will be more persuasive.

Jonathan Grella joins the show to discuss why public affairs is fundamentally a business of persuasion rather than just communication. He explains how pattern recognition and 30 years of cross-industry experience inform his strategy, and why he's embracing AI as an 'influence multiplier' to scale impact without sacrificing authenticity.