In this candid conversation, Molly O’Shaughnessy, CEO of EMC Research and Julie Sweet, AAPC's Director of Advocacy & Industry Relations, explore how AI and advanced modeling are being used in political research today, where humans remain essential, and what consultants should understand before putting these tools to work. Drawing on real-world examples, including EMC's work developing California electoral personas, their conversation gets into what AI can reveal that traditional crosstabs may miss, and where its limitations become important.

Political professionals love to talk about "the Latino vote," but that phrase hides more than it reveals. Today's Latino electorate is younger, more varied, and harder to reach with a single message than ever before.

In this episode, Joshua Ulibarri (Partner, Lake Research Partners) and James Aldrete (President, Message, Audience and Presentation) discuss what that complexity means for campaigns: how polling methodologies are evolving to capture a more nuanced picture, how shifting media habits are changing where and how voters can actually be reached, and why one-size-fits-all engagement strategies are increasingly falling short. It's a candid, forward-looking conversation about what it will take for campaigns to genuinely understand and connect with Latino communities over the next election cycles.

A non-autonomous agent waits for a prompt. An autonomous one executes a chain of tasks on its own once triggered — and that distinction changes everything about how you deploy it.

In this episode, we’re joined by Sonia Van Meter, Managing Partner at Stanford Campaigns and Keyon Thomas, Co-Founder & CEO at PolitoDigital and Agape Intelligence who start with a plain-language breakdown of what agents actually are and aren’t, then dive into the opportunity landscape: 24/7 donor response, real-time opposition monitoring, automated press tracking, and the campaign functions that become possible at scale.