The Digital Divide That Cost Republicans Virginia with Eric Wilson, Center for Campaign Innovation | Hello Merge Tag Ep. 47

Does digital campaigning actually matter in elections?  According to a new study from the Center for Campaign Innovation, the answer is yes — and the consequences are real.

In this episode, Eric Wilson breaks down findings from a comprehensive analysis of the 2025 Virginia House of Delegates elections, where Democrats and Republicans ran vastly different digital programs — with very different results.

We talk about what the data shows, where each party is falling behind, which digital tactics actually move voters, and what tools campaigns still need to invest in, if they want to compete. If you work in politics, campaigns, or digital strategy, this is a must-catch conversation.

Listen to the full episode right here, or wherever you stream podcasts.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and has not been copy-edited. While it can serve as a helpful guide to our conversation, it may contain errors or omissions. For the most accurate representation, we recommend listening to (or watching) the full episode.

Josh Klemons: Eric Wilson is a political technologist focused on driving innovation and digital transformation on the right. He’s a veteran of numerous campaigns, including serving as Marco Rubio’s digital director during his 2016 presidential run. He’s the executive director of the Center for Campaign Innovation and the host of Campaign Trend, a great podcast about the business of politics. Eric and the center produce a ton of content on campaign best practices, and they recently released a report comparing how Democrats and Republicans approached the 2025 Virginia House of Delegates elections.

Josh Klemons: I invited him on the pod to break down their findings and to talk about what he sees actually working in digital and political tech right now. first of all, thank you so much for joining me. you hosted me on your podcast and I was super excited to have an opportunity to return the favor. I loved being on your pod and let’s dive into this report. just 30,000 foot view for folks who haven’t read it and it will of course be linked in the show notes.

Eric Wilson: I’m glad to be here.

Josh Klemons: Walk us through what the 30,000 foot view and then I’ve got lots of questions on it.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. …

Eric Wilson: as practitioners,…

Eric Wilson: we always like to know, does any of this matter, right? and…

Josh Klemons: That’s right.

Eric Wilson: that’s what we wanted to get and the Virginia House of Delegates race gives, in this case, it was like some uncontested seats there. but what we wanted to look at does any of this digital stuff matter from an objective point of view not I don’t really like your logo or that kind of stuff but what are some of the domains that we could say it’s a one or a zero some other scale. And so we looked at things like how fast does What CMS are you using? Do you send a confirmation email when someone signs up? Were you running Facebook ads at all?

Eric Wilson: And so we were able to then sort of compare this with the margin of victory AC across the board, Republicans and…

Eric Wilson: Democrats, and get it some pretty interesting patterns certainly. And when you add in even more data, you can start to see that some of this does matter and can help you win.

Josh Klemons: Yeah.

Josh Klemons: At what did the analysis tell you about the difference between digital campaigning on the right versus the left at this moment?

Eric Wilson: I mean, there definitely a much more standardized playbook, it seems like, as an outside observer from the right, on the Democrat side. and I’m very conscious of this of all my conversations that I have with my friends on the left, like the grass is always greener and so You think we have it all figured out, and the truth is probably somewhere in between.

Josh Klemons: Wild.

Eric Wilson: But I was impressed with how productized the down ballot campaigns were where they were all using professional CMS’s. they captured emails number one, which wasn’t always the case on our side. and then when you signed up for an email, you got a confirmation, you were added to an email program. There was clearly some sort of CRM attached to that. and again I think there are some groups that we could probably credit them better than I do where you would see just a random state house of delegate candidate with a headless CMS static website design.

Eric Wilson: It’s like what is going on here? it was like a $50,000 website that was probably given to them for free.

Josh Klemons: So yeah,…

Josh Klemons: I mean you talked about operational capacity.

Josh Klemons: What do you So okay take the Democratic side apart away obviously you can’t speak for that…

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Right.

Josh Klemons: but why do you think that Republicans are struggling there’s certainly no shortage of institutional money on the right y’all absolutely invest in infrastructure in so I think that if the left is going to complain about the right’s advantages I mean there’s many of them but the biggest one is that your billionaires get it and ours don’t.

Josh Klemons: I think, our wealthy donors are constantly investing two months before an election in a whole lot of TV ads and…

Josh Klemons: y’alls are building a massive bench to take over the courts or the down ballot state houses. So why isn’t this something that the right is more heavily invested in your opinion?

Eric Wilson: It’s an issue of service delivery model and…

Eric Wilson: and for that’s an extension of sort of business model, right? think about in digital agencies for campaigns,…

Josh Klemons: Right.

Eric Wilson: what are the two most profitable line items? It’s paid media getting commissions on that and fundraising getting commissions of that. That just does not exist on these down ballot campaigns. And so they’re not very conducive to the existing models we have for our digital agencies. You’re correct. We’ve got lots of intelligent people. I’m not telling anybody anything that they don’t already know. how do we get those services to the candidates, which is really where the gap is. And I think Democrats have an advantage through things like coordinated campaign. I think the products that you have things like Action Kit, Every Action, NGP Van, the whole Alphabet Soup there,…

Eric Wilson: of really good products that make it affordable to do this and of course, the fundraising for these down ballot candidates was just through the roof compared to…

Josh Klemons: staggering in comparison.

Eric Wilson: where we were. Yeah. we may have elements of it,…

Josh Klemons: Let’s talk real quick about why yeah, I’m hung up on this idea y’all don’t have a coordinated campaign. Democrats Is that not a thing on the right? I guess maybe I didn’t even realize that y’all weren’t doing that.

Eric Wilson:

Eric Wilson: but we certainly don’t call it that.

Josh Klemons: Okay.

Eric Wilson: And I think this is one of again here’s the funny sort of sociological aspect of this is I always talk Republicans and Democrats are like Darwin’s finches. we’re on different islands and we’re growing different beaks and so the way you have I think the key is that the left has something to coordinate whether that’s labor groups abortion rights groups green groups those sort of exist all the time and you need to coordinate them. we’re made up of what’s called the Leave Us Alone Coalition which is we get together once every two years to try and…

Eric Wilson: stop something from happening. and so there’s not much to coordinate and so it’s a different culture, different bases that we’re talking to and so it’s a little bit more ad hoc than that.

Josh Klemons: interesting. I mean,…

Josh Klemons: obviously I’m sure the folks at CPAC wouldn’t fully agree with that assessment, but it’s a fair takeaway and…

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: an interesting way to think about it. the NRA also got a massive platform, but like they’re essentially saying we only care about this one thing, whereas you think the left’s special interest groups. I’m using this faciciously they’re willing to coordinate in a way that you think the Republican spe again quote unquote special interest groups are less interested in coordinating.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Right.

Josh Klemons: Okay.

Eric Wilson: And we see that a lot and I think that’s probably the big shift in culture and so our campaigns kind of respond differently to that.

Josh Klemons: You brought up fundraising. Yeah, let’s talk about it. so Democrats had 17 times more smaller small dollar donors compared from your study than Republicans.

Josh Klemons: Why do you think the GOP is struggling so dramatically in grassroots fundraising right now?

Eric Wilson: I mean,…

Eric Wilson: I keep reminding everyone that we’re about 14 years behind where the Democrats are in terms of their infrastructure and their sort of commitment to this. and similarly again it goes back to this cultural shift which is if you are a liberal or a progressive you support causes and you’re supporting causes all the time. whereas if you’re a conservative you really politics is not something that you want to deal with. It’s not something that you want to think about.  And so, we just don’t have that infrastructure there to scale and we’re slow to do it. And again, probably comes down to the business models around this where on the Republican side, it makes a lot of sense to build big lists and then rent them to people who have, great name ID and share the proceeds with that.

Eric Wilson: there aren’t tools for small dollar donor discovery you have on the left. So again, it’s a different culture, but at a certain point,…

Eric Wilson: we can’t just keep getting swamped. and in Virginia, it’s a little bit of a cheat because it is the wild west of campaign finance. So campaigns Yeah.

Josh Klemons: Yeah, there’s no caps,…

Josh Klemons: right? Yeah.

Eric Wilson: campaigns don’t really invest in it.

Josh Klemons: So, I mean, let’s be honest, on the left, we have burned a lot of trust with our donor base. no question about it. I mean, we send spam and scam and a lot of trash. that’s very wellnown. The right is I would argue worse. the whole idea that the checked boxes that you’re going to donate $10 now and then at the end of the month we’re going to pin you for $100 and then we’re going to do it again next month…

Josh Klemons: until you notice and cancel. So I will say from my side of the aisle we have a huge trust trust deficiency with the voters. I know a lot of folks were like I’m done donating. I don’t want to be added to all these lists. Do you think that that is an issue for the right or you genuinely think this is an infrastructure problem exclusively?

Eric Wilson: Yeah. …

Eric Wilson: this is something we’ve looked into and done a lot of research on and it sure seems like that the people who are complaining about those tactics aren’t the people who ever donated in the first place.  So it works on the people who are in that ecosystem and are donating. You talk to practitioners and they say, “Yeah, we’d stop doing it if it didn’t work.” and it continues to work. what that suggests to me is that there is a very firm ceiling, an upper limit of people who will respond to those sorts of tactics. and we used to say, we’ve got to go out and find more donors.” I don’t think that’s the case. I think we found them all.

Eric Wilson: What we’ve got to do is find out new ways to get people to want to donate.

Eric Wilson: So, models closer to Patreon and Substack than kind of direct mail put online. And so,…

Josh Klemons: Mhm. Yeah.

Eric Wilson: I again, no one’s eager to be the first mover in that because it’s unproven. and so, again, it’s sort of the same thing with negative ads, right? You hear it all the time. People say, ” I wish they wouldn’t campaign negatively all the time.” and then we pull it, we test it, and that’s the thing that moves you the best. So, it’s frustrating. we’d love to solve that problem, but it doesn’t seem like it actually is a problem for fundraising. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: So Act Blue obviously there are other platforms that Democrats use to fund raise, but I mean it’s AC blue and for a while it seemed like for y’all it was win Red, although I keep seeing new popup it seems like there’s a lot of frustration with Win Red or simply people can’t sit still so they just keep building.

Josh Klemons: Why do you think Winred hasn’t managed to close the market and just say “Nope, this is the platform we use on the right.

Eric Wilson: Yeah, so I would just point out that I think it has closed the market 7,000 campaigns on there.

Eric Wilson: There’s just really no other platform that comes to that level of scale.

Josh Klemons: Okay, sure.

Eric Wilson: and act blue kind of showed the way to solve this problem. The hard part is not payment processing, right? We all know that payment processing, taking credit cards and turning that into money is a solved problem.

Josh Klemons: Sure.

Eric Wilson: The challenge is the conduits, the split donations, the familiar user experience, the save payment profiles. That’s the hard part.  So what there you had so many act blue consolidated the market very early on. So when people came online they just went to act blue.  So we came to it much later had more sort of competition in the space and so what you’re seeing now a lot of things especially in these down ballot races the donation platform is chosen by the campaign treasurer or the compliance person not the digital marketing because that digital marketing person just doesn’t exist for the campaign and so there’s a little bit of push and pull there.

Eric Wilson: So that was interesting just to see how varied the different platforms were and it tracks pretty closely with when did a candidate decide to start running. So sort of be more senior campaigns are on more old legacy systems.

Josh Klemons: Interesting. yeah, let’s talk about technology as a proxy for generations or…

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.  Yeah.

Josh Klemons: I don’t know what professionalism I guess. So one of the wildest things that I read in there were some really big takeaways like we’re talking about this stuff, but if you have not read this report, I do highly recommend it. it’s a really cool way to nerd out on this stuff and really take a test case of a very set I’m obviously not I’m telling the listeners. so I want to talk about websites. So I work a ton of campaigns and almost none of them use Press. my website’s built in I I’m a WordPress user. But Squarespace is so easy. Wix is so easy but your data and obviously this is a limited target. I would love for you to recreate this for every congressional race in 24 or 26 because if this is true it’s a gamecher.

Josh Klemons: Essentially, the long and short of it that I took away was people who use WordPress are more likely to win elections than people who use Wix, who are more likely to win elections than people who use Squarespace. So, is it simply that the platform does the platform provide meaningful advantages or…

Josh Klemons: is this a causational versus correlation thing where more sophisticated campaigns who are going to run better campaigns are choosing WordPress over drag and drop sites in your opinion? Exactly.

Eric Wilson: Right. This is…

Eric Wilson: where we have to make very clear causation and correlation. and so we certainly see a correlation with a increased margin of victory for campaigns that had websites built on WordPress as opposed to Squarespace and Wix. Let’s sort of think about what could be the causal relationship there. And with Wix and…

Josh Klemons: Yep.

Eric Wilson: Squarespace, that you can put in a credit card, you get a website, it’s done in an afternoon.  WordPress, you need to have someone who knows what they’re doing because its You’ve got to set up your plugins. And so that seems to indicate that you have a little bit more professionalism around your campaign. You’ve probably hired a digital agency, which means you have the money to hire a digital agency. You’ve got the campaign experience. So, it sure seems like it is a proxy for all those things. but let’s look at Wix and Squarespace and why they might not be the best suited because they’re great if you’re open opening a bakery or a retail outlet, but they’re not focused on donations, issue pages, email capture, all of those sorts of things that we know are best practices for campaigns.

Eric Wilson: And so it really reveals that the candidate sort of thinking about the website as a task to cross off their list and…

Josh Klemons: So Democrats there are a lot every couple months I hear about one of companies or…

Eric Wilson: how can they get that done quickly and affordably versus no, this can be a real asset for my campaign. This is the part of my campaign that’s on 24/7 and thinking about search engine optimization, building for AI. Now, you really need to have a good website.

Josh Klemons: organizations even some of them I don’t even know are for profit but that are popping up to make very easy inexpensive fancy looking democratic websites drag and…

Eric Wilson: Mhm. Right.

Josh Klemons: drop but essentially taking the Squarespace model and applying it just to Democrats.

Josh Klemons: I don’t know if anything like that exists on the right. But I guess my big question to you is your takeaway that we should stop investing in those and simply be building on WordPress.

Josh Klemons: Would that be your takeaway based on this report?

Eric Wilson: No,…

Eric Wilson: I don’t think it would be because it’s all about the service delivery. and so if you are able to combine the best practices of a custom website with the ease and affordability of a drag and drop builder, then that’s kind of the ideal world. it’s just not something that there’s enough of a marketplace on the Republican side.

Eric Wilson: Again, that’s some of the work that I have to do to convince people that your website, yes, It matters and can make a difference.

Josh Klemons: Okay.

Josh Klemons: No, it’s really interesting. Like I said, I know of at least five or six on the left. and I don’t know of any on the right, but that’s not the world I live in. You’re telling me there’s none on the right now?

Eric Wilson: I mean, I guess my advice would be Democrats should move all of their websites to Wix and Squarespace. that would be my preferred outcome.

Josh Klemons: Okay, fair enough. So, okay, URL hygiene. This was another really fascinating piece. So, one of the first episodes I did of this podcast,…

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Right.

Josh Klemons: I hosted Candy Phelps, who’s a badass strategist, marketer, designer, web developer, and we talked specifically about SEO for campaigns. And one of the things she said to me that I think about this stuff all the time. Never occurred to me. don’t have your about slug just Have it be about d first name- last name because that’s what people are going to Google.

Josh Klemons: And there were a bunch of small things, but that was a big one. You actually found that campaigns where the candidates used their full name in the URL performed better than candidates who used only their last name, as in Eric for, Maryland or whatever. …

Josh Klemons: so let’s go back. Is this just another proxy for professionalism? Those folks we’re thinking about it because I mean it’s not unprofessional to say, Obama for America or whatever. I don’t know. What do you think is the cause here?

Eric Wilson: …

Eric Wilson: that one I don’t think is as clean a break on professionalism…

Eric Wilson: because there are some people who say, “Look, my last name is really hard to spell, so I’m just going to go with my first name.” And so,…

Josh Klemons: Right. Sure.

Eric Wilson: when I’m saying it out loud, it’s going to be easy to do. But how are most people encountering your campaign? they’re doing a Google search. They’re seeing your Facebook page and then they’re going to search that name or you’re in an article and then you rightclick in search in Google. and so it’s more of just a mindset shift of understanding, that user voter experience in this case of where are they going to encounter you? And it sure helps to have your full name in the URL because I believe it acrus to some search engine optimization benefits.

Eric Wilson: Certainly there are a few cases where the domain was just not professional where it’s kind of a silly name or a slogan and…

Josh Klemons: here. Yeah.

Eric Wilson: and that’s not what people are voting for when they go into the voting booth or filling out their ballot. they’re picking your name and so they need to be able to know what your name is and go from there.

Josh Klemons: No, it’s super interesting. Like I said, that was genuinely surprising to me just cuz …

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: Eric from Maryland, whatever if you’ve got a hard to spell last name, but yeah. No, it totally makes sense. you also

Eric Wilson: and so I mean I think you can still buy eric formary but your primary domain should be eric wilson for congress.com or if you can’t get just your name.com get it for your office or get it with your state but you need to have your full name in there because that’s going to help with search.

Eric Wilson: But if you need something that’s like a call to action out in the wild,…

Josh Klemons: S***.

Eric Wilson: Eric for Virginia, Eric for Maryland, whatever, that’ll work.

Josh Klemons: Yeah, I’m personally obsessed with vanity URLs. if you go to hello mermerag.com, there is no website there. It simply redirects you to josh.com/hellomerge tag because I don’t need a whole website for it. I need a landing page for it and…

Eric Wilson: Right. as an aside,…

Josh Klemons: I have that for a ton of different free digital tools. I do a bunch of things and they all have that.

Eric Wilson: while we’re nerding out about URLs here,…

Josh Klemons: That’s what this is all about.

Eric Wilson: I get really frustrated every time that there is a story about, the Josh Clemens campaign bought Eric Wilsonis loser.com. I can’t believe Eric Wilson didn’t buy that. It’s just like, okay, are we going to play this game? and the idea that some campaign’s supposed to buy hundreds of URLs to defend themselves against this tactic that somehow reporters fall for every single time. I wish we would grow up past that.

Josh Klemons: I 100% agree with the exception of some very basic ones like owning the.com to your name Allah Ted Cruz which somehow didn’t happen and…

Josh Klemons: Carly Fiorina not buying the.org I get it not buying a.org But you don’t have to buy every combination of everything cuz yes no matter how many URLs you buy if a hit a group wants to hit you they’re going to find something like carly is a monster.com is going to be available. and if that’s not they’re going to do something else. So you can’t protect yourself from that. But yeah I 100% agree it’s a very old school way of thinking about…

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Right.

Eric Wilson: It was the obvious one. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: how the internet works like that you should have secured every domain of all time.

Eric Wilson: And I just having dealt with this for a few candidates before is sometimes someone gets to their domain before they do through no fault of their own.

Josh Klemons: Right.

Eric Wilson: It’s just, some, Eric Wilson.com is owned by Eric Wilson, the Canadian mystery author. I’m sure if I decide to ever, run for office, he’d be willing to sell it to someone more than I could pay to do it against me. it’s just like one of those things.

Josh Klemons: Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally agree though. so you also found that desktop speed,…

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: specifically desktop speed more than mobile, which was actually interesting.

Josh Klemons: So, I know here in Madison there was an alder race that came down to something like six votes and one of the two candidates had a very, let’s say alder city council worthy website and one had a phenomenal website that looked good, acted good and…

Josh Klemons: the person who won by six votes had the better website and I think in that case it’s pretty hard to argue that that site didn’t probably win them that race. the idea that six people didn’t try to go to the crappy website and roll their eyes and then went to the other website and said damn this is a nice website like six people is not a lot of people…

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: but it decided a race.

Josh Klemons: So I am curious though you found that it seemed to matter more on desktop than mobile. why do you think that is? Folks are doing research at home before they vote.

Eric Wilson: I don’t really have a good guess about what that is, but I think it really speaks more towards the variance in performance on desktop was more pronounced than it was on mobile. and this is another one of the things where it’s just not a clean cut…

Eric Wilson: because Wix and Squarespace are really good at loading quickly and…

Josh Klemons: Yeah. Part of the beauty of them,…

Eric Wilson: fast and anyone who Yeah.

Josh Klemons: right? Right. Yeah.

Eric Wilson: And so there’s certainly some sort of flaw of if it takes 12 minutes for your website to load that’s bad. but marginal improvement probably not something we picked up. But the variance was more significant on desktop than it was on mobile.

Josh Klemons: Interesting. For sure.

Eric Wilson: And that there are a number of factors that could go into that, but again it’s worth thinking about and we know it’s something that Google looks at for ranking so again it sort of all wraps into that Yeah.

Josh Klemons: So I want to pivot now to email and you already mentioned this, but let’s just lay it out. Every Democrat in a competitive district collected emails and nearly a quarter of Republicans didn’t. What the hell? what’s going on?

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: Don’t they subscribe to your newsletter? why would 25% of Republicans in competitive districts? We’re not talking about districts that were going to be blowouts one way or the other. what’s going on that no question here about Democrats.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. I Yeah.

Josh Klemons: What’s going on with your party? why aren’t they collecting emails?

Eric Wilson: I don’t have good excuses for them. but if I might, sort of empathize, it has to do with, just lack of understanding of the fundamentals or…

Eric Wilson: or overlooking it. again what’s crazy about this research is some of these decisions get made before you even launch and…

Josh Klemons: Yeah, I’m early.

Josh Klemons: Really? Yeah.

Eric Wilson: and don’t get revisited. And so I think that’s one of the big problems with digital campaigning and our website is we think, okay, we’ve checked that off the list. we’re ready to launch and I don’t need to revisit that ever again in my campaign.

Josh Klemons: Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Wilson: And that’s not the case. it’s sort of like, hey, I’m never going to take the trash out at my campaign office. no one does that. and so, I think there’s a little bit of that going on of just sort of saying, “Hey, I’m not thinking about this. I didn’t know that I even needed to capture emails or I have my email list in a separate place and I just uploaded the county party list and the delegate list that I get from everyone.” and again, it’s that mindset shift of are you trying to build an audience, a community rallying supporters or…

Eric Wilson: interrupt people, spam them, send talk at them rather than with them.

Josh Klemons: Yeah. No,…

Josh Klemons: super interesting. And I mean on that same front SPF and DKIM, it sounds like there was more issues on the Republican side of getting that stuff set up correctly.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah,…

Josh Klemons: Is that same kind of story just lack of institutional knowledge of like that this matters or they just like too many other things going on lack of resources? is there an easy answer there?

Eric Wilson: I mean if email’s not an important channel to you,…

Eric Wilson: you’re not going to focus on it.

Josh Klemons: Why bother?

Eric Wilson: And again some of this is productized really well on the left right where it sure looks like you guys have SPFDKM built in.

Josh Klemons: I don’t know. Yeah, less so.

Josh Klemons: I mean, maybe for some, but I know plenty of dems who are using Mailchimp and they’re having to figure this out on their own for But certainly if you’re using some of the bigger democratic platforms. Yes.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Wilson: And so again I think it’s just kind of a cultural thing where if you look at Democratic campaigns…

Josh Klemons: Right. Right.

Eric Wilson: where not a vast majority but a significant amount of your fundraising is coming through online. you want to make sure your emails are getting delivered and so there’s a clear incentive there. Whereas these Republican candidates were lucky if they got maybe a hundred donations online over the course of a campaign. they’re focused on something else.

Josh Klemons: Why bother? Yeah. Right.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. yard signs.

Josh Klemons: I recently interviewed Miles Bruner who worked at a Republican digital fundraising firm. He publicly quit your party. So not trying to hide that from anybody. but I asked him about the very prevalent talking point from the right that Google makes it harder for Republicans to get through inboxes than Democrats.

Josh Klemons: He absolutely called BS on that. He said that’s not true. It’s that folks are lazy. They’re not trying. his firm didn’t have any problems with deliverability because they were doing things correctly. whereas many of his competitors weren’t.

Josh Klemons: I want to know, do you agree with that assessment or do you think that Google is actually like making it harder for Republicans to get through inboxes than Democrats? Sure.

Eric Wilson: So let me paint sort of two plausible scenarios here for you and… your listeners.  One is if we believe that implicit bias exists, which I think a lot of people do, Google is a place where 98% of the employees donations go to Democrats.  So it could be possible that there is an implicit bias that makes it way somewhere into the algorithm for email placement and it could be as innocuous on things like, talking about abortion versus pro-choice or right to bear arms versus, gun control. those sorts of things could show up in some algorithmic filtering. So I think that’s number one.

Eric Wilson:

Eric Wilson: Number two is again this goes back to kind of the productization of the industry on the left.

Josh Klemons: Mhm.

Eric Wilson: So most of your campaigns are sending from one or two ESPs, right? Again we can name them. on our side, every campaign is making the decision of do I do Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Salesforce, name, pick any. It’s a very diffuse market.  And so what you end up having is domain and IP address reputation kind of spread all over the place in the way that if you’re a Democrat, you’re benefiting from having really good domain and IP reputation because you’re sending on the same as the DNC or the presidential campaign and things like that.

Eric Wilson: So, I think there’s a little bit of discrepancy there.

Eric Wilson: I don’t believe that there’s anyone at Google putting their thumb on the scale. but I think there are some subtle ways where it might happen. And certainly we saw some issues when red domain specifically being harmed. But I would agree, it’s a lot easier for us to make that case when we’re doing everything right from our authentication and in and things like that.

Josh Klemons: which this study shows that you’re not doing everything right.

Josh Klemons: I will also just flag I’ve worked I work dozens of campaigns a cycle usually and the vast majority of those folks are using Mailchimp the small I know we have an infrastructure but most folks can’t afford that infrastructure. So just for you to know the vast majority of the clients that I work with that are down ballot races are not using the sort of NGP vans of the world they’re using Mailchimp. So in a lot of times there is a democratization of what plat less of a factor than you might think but yeah also fair enough.

Eric Wilson: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: So on that front, just based on these findings, do you think that email is still the backbone of grassroots fundraising or…

Josh Klemons: are we nearing an inflection point? And I guess it’s hard to answer when some of these you had competitive Republican districts where the candidate only brought in, I believe, 48 grassroots donors, which trust me, I’ve worked tiny down ballot races where 48 would be fine, but these were not tiny races.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Democrat and…

Eric Wilson: you sneeze,…

Josh Klemons: Do you think that are Republicans going to stop investing in email or…

Eric Wilson: you get 48 donors.

Josh Klemons: they don’t like what do you think the future looks like for your party on email? I’m really curious about that.

Eric Wilson: We can’t stop investing in email. that’s number one. Again, it’s sort of the universal app. So, as social media and media all get more fragmented, the email address continues to be kind of the unifying factor.  What that means is we can’t be doing this sort of interruptive non-permissionbased sort of marketing where we talk at people and we’ve got to look more like Substack, Patreon, creator kind of economy and so I don’t think we’re going to stop investing in it, but what we are seeing are people approaching it differently of can email be

Eric Wilson: it’s really hard for these down ballot campaigns to raise money online. So, it might be the case that email for them is not about fundraising, but it is for activation and mobilization and relational organizing. In which case, again, we go back to that service delivery. How is it getting delivered to the campaigns? Because right now, email really is the domain for fundraising.

Josh Klemons: Yeah.

Josh Klemons: So let’s talk about meta ads. so my favorite part of this report bar none was that it absolutely corroborated the things that I constantly talk about when it comes to metads. I always tell folks I’m not a fan of I mean literally though I will be doing something on this because there was a specific line in there that I wrote it down the second I saw it. So I tell people all the time I’m like I don’t really Met as a company. I think that they’ve done a lot of harm in the world but damn if they can’t win elections.

Eric Wilson: Yeah, I’m glad I could do that for you. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: I truly genuinely believe that. I haven’t seen the studies to back it up, but I’ve won a ton of elections running a playbook and I talk about it. I’m very public about it. It’s on my blog. I don’t hide it. and in a lot of ways the digital programs backbone for me is or…

Josh Klemons: meta ads that are not asking for money, not asking for leads, but simply raising name ID, like talking directly to people. And this study absolutely found that So, every single competitive Democrat ran ads, and not every Republican did. But more importantly, the Democrats who did ran more ads, tested more variations, and had much higher reach, which implies that they were doing a better job of targeting, I would argue. But I obviously have no inside knowledge on that. So, what’s your response to the disparity between the two parties approach to Facebook in the year 2025 when this is all so there’s nothing new about this obviously at this point?

Eric Wilson: Mhm. Yeah.

Eric Wilson: So again, this all gets wrapped around the service delivery model and what are Facebook ads So on our side, a lot of people view Facebook as direct response and getting donations and getting emails. that’s not a good ROI for small campaigns that struggle with online fundraising. So, they just kind of abandon Facebook ads.

Josh Klemons: Yep.

Eric Wilson: But our data are pretty clear. Our post-election polling shows that, the place to reach voters is meta, whether that’s Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. And so, you got to be there,  I mean its just so I think that we need to be open to the fact that it is a good place to advertise. it is going to be different creative than maybe our streaming ads which again is a trap that a lot of campaigns fall into where they think of digital as just an extension of the TV and sort of overlook that social layer. The other thing that’s happening there is it really points to the impact of algorithms on campaigning.

Eric Wilson: So, why does the variance in creative matter? you’re giving the algorithm things to compare performance to and it likes that and…

Eric Wilson: and You’re going to get better outcomes. And if you’re just throwing up one Facebook ad and putting a lot of money behind it, and I know that you’re wasting money and limiting reach.

Josh Klemons: Lighting it on fire.

Josh Klemons: Absolutely. Yeah.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: No, I mean I laugh because the way you talk about Democrats sometimes feels like you think that they’re all pulling from the same pot.

Josh Klemons: And let me tell you, as somebody who’s worked with over a hundred Democratic campaigns the last 10 years, every one of them is trying to figure this s*** out as they go.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Mhm.

Josh Klemons: So I was actually blown away by how well the fact that some were doing it right in Virginia doesn’t surprise me. for sure there’s enough infra there’s enough ecosystem out there. The fact that essentially all of them were following the playbook was impressive to me because I see a lot of pretty well-intentioned and…

Josh Klemons: pretty well sourced races where I’m like so you’re not running Facebook ads you want to start three weeks before election day. That’s not really what this is.

Josh Klemons: So, it was both interesting to me that they were doing it and gratifying because again like that is my playbook, but also I just want to make sure that a lot of we are scrapping this s* together too every single day. and I know that as somebody who does it I work with a ton of down ballot races. I would love to know I already asked you this but let’s just go back to it on that same front this idea that the left has an ecosystem and an infrastructure and the right doesn’t. So, are you the primary infrastructure for the right?

Eric Wilson: Right. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: Walk I don’t know your side of the aisle at all when it comes to this. I get your emails. I read them.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: I listen to your podcast. I learn from you and I hope we can learn from each other. What’s going on the right? again, there’s plenty of money being invested. talking TPUSA has any democratic organization. The Federalist Society has literally more money than they know what to do with. There is money on the right. Why are they not investing in digital?

Eric Wilson: Yeah.

Josh Klemons: Do they not believe in it or it’s just I mean I’m reframing a question we already talked about but I think it’s important one  Absolutely.

Eric Wilson: Some of it’s generational, right, of we’re lagging a little bit and the Trump realignment has forced us to go back and say, “Okay, how do we look at it?” And that’s why you see Turning Point doing what I think are some innovative things and going after different audiences. part of it again, it’s this culture.  So, most people are not talking or thinking about politics all the time. And whereas you have on the left a very activist culture where you care about issues very passionately and there are things for you to do regarding those issues. So, I’m a avid bird watcher.

Eric Wilson: I belong to the Ottabon Society and I get their text message alerts which all come from the left’s text act.

Josh Klemons: right?  Mhm.

Eric Wilson: There is something for me to do as a fan of birds or fringe to birds 365 days a year. that’s not necessarily the case if you are a hey I just want to run my business and have lower taxes or I’m homeschooling my kids and want to be left alone. and so you start to see how the coalition shapes some of that. and then let’s just take one more step, which is, the total addressable market of who you can serve if you’re creating technology for conservative campaigns is a lot smaller than if, hey, I do texting services for both Democratic campaigns and labor unions. And then you start to and so that’s why the ecosystem becomes a little bit easier to build.

Eric Wilson: And again we have this sort of thing where it’s perfectly okay to use you’re a nonprofit organization caring about the environment.

Eric Wilson: You can use the same tech stack as a Democrat running for Senate. That isn’t the case for Republicans.

Josh Klemons: Yep. Interesting.

Josh Klemons: If there was one tool,…

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Mobilize.

Josh Klemons: platform, organization, whatever on the left that you could snap your fingers and recreate on the right, what would it Mobilize. Interesting.

Eric Wilson: Again that may reveal some of my ignorance of its role but I really believe in the idea of technology that follows the supporter rather than the campaign.

Eric Wilson: And so we see this with mobilize where you sign up for a Kla Harris rally. and then you find out about all the different events that are happening by Democrats and progressive groups.

Josh Klemons: Yeah, super interesting.

Josh Klemons: …

Josh Klemons: I have so many questions and we’ve been jumping around, but this has been really interesting to me.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: any other So what’s one things you would like to see Republicans change immediately if they want to be competitive in 2026

Eric Wilson: I mean, it starts with investing in you websites, but it’s even more basic than that. Put yourself in the shoes of your voter. What is that process of how do I learn about your campaign and how do I decide where I go in that and what’s the journey when I finally tune in to the campaign we released polling earlier this week that shows that this kind of cord never disengaged voter is really going to be the key to 2026 and…

Josh Klemons: Yeah.

Eric Wilson: and some of these people don’t even tune in until election day and so what are they finding about your campa  campaign on election day when they finally decide that they’re going to go vote. if you’ve got a bad website, you don’t have any automated emails, you don’t have tools to help them them answer their questions, you don’t have an issues page on your website, yeah, you probably didn’t earn their vote, no matter how hard you worked before that because the sale, as it were, it’s happening right then. So, it’s really that focusing on empathy for the voter and what their experience is.

Eric Wilson: But I think, we’re going to continue to watch this. We’ve done some additional follow-on analysis that hasn’t been released where,…

Eric Wilson: where we kind of control for money partisanship in the district, that kind of stuff. and it sure looks like in these competitive races, stacking digital best practices together is worth about 1% of margin. and in these tight races, you can’t afford to leave that on the table.

Josh Klemons: people spend millions on field for that 1%.

Josh Klemons: So if you could simply improve your tech stack early in the program.

Eric Wilson: Right.

Josh Klemons: I mean and I mean a lot of things you’re talking about there’s a cost to them and there’s knowledge you have to have somebody who knows how to do it. So it’s not free but we are not talking about massive financial investments to make some of these changes that you’re talking about. So yeah it’s pretty staggering. Yep.

Eric Wilson: It’s resource allocation, So, you think about, these candidates running for House of Delegates in Virginia,…

Eric Wilson: they’re driving all over the place to events. they’re prioritizing that over maybe spending an hour working on their website or email or something like that. and…

Josh Klemons: Yeah, absolutely.

Eric Wilson: again it’s just when you’re of a certain age and you believe that the real world is the only thing that’s there.

Josh Klemons: Yeah. If you’re looking for recommendations for other things to incorporate in the study,…

Eric Wilson: I can see how you prioritize the real world stuff over digital.

Josh Klemons: you should do one for age generation of candidate matter. That would be really interesting to me because you alluded to …

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: if you’re older and you think the world is only in real life, look, because I imagine on both sides of the aisle. I mean, this is definitely not a partisan thing on both sides of the aisle. I think the younger folks coming in approach the internet very differently,…

Eric Wilson: Yeah. I try and…

Josh Klemons: the older folks. And I wonder how that applies.

Eric Wilson: focus on stuff that people can change.

Eric Wilson: You can change your website. You can change your URL. I don’t know. go out giving Botox to people.

Josh Klemons: Your party can change…

Josh Klemons: parties can change who they nominate though.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: Parties can use different factors to decide on nominations and stuff. I mean, our party is definitely grappling with older candidates that don’t want to retire.

Josh Klemons: So, that is I mean, literally, we have an entire Senate race in Massachusetts. That’s only based on the question age of candidate at this point,…

Eric Wilson: Right. Okay.

Josh Klemons: but yeah. No, fair enough. but I mean you’ve pretty much answered this, but do you think you study campaigns across the country year in and year out? is this Virginia finding does this apply do you think nationally both did this well sum up the general state of the left and the right on digital or do you think that it’s too soon to say if Virginia was a good microcosm of the country?

Eric Wilson: No, it certainly feels like a good microcosm. We were just fortunate to be able to collect the data in an organized way and it’s an off year. People are paying attention. and so it was kind of a perfect storm for us to be able to get this data.

Eric Wilson: that’s now something that we’re going to track much more closely. But, it’s over several cycles I want to be able to systematically say,…

Josh Klemons: Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Wilson: okay, here’s what matters, what we can measure, and here’s what it looks like on the other end. And this was a really good case study to do that. Yes, there are some quirks specific to Virginia, but I think that the takeaways apply right across the country.

Josh Klemons: No, super interesting. I’m excited to see follow-ups and obviously the longer you do it the easier it is to say causation versus correlation for some of this.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: So I’ll be really curious.

Eric Wilson: What I need is I need some campaigns to just say, “Hey, we’re not going to have a website.” To really get the control version.

Josh Klemons: Yeah. Feel free to let your side of the aisle test that out for sure.

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: My folks will be using Wix and Squarespace and yours can just avoid websites altogether.

Josh Klemons: for folks listening, digital directors, candidates, organizers, what’s one thing you would want them to take away from this report?

Eric Wilson: It’s that what you do matters and it does have an impact. it makes a difference in close races. So, this is one of the most frustrating things as a campaigner is we just don’t control the environment and so, when we look at this data, I can look at incumbency, fundraising, and partisanship, and that is kind of the nexus of where most of the outcome is being determined.  there is about a one to two% span where the campaign matters.

Eric Wilson: And so what’s really frustrating, especially in a year like this, if you’re a Republican, you can work really hard. Jason Miaris, for example, ran an excellent campaign, outraised his opponent, had the right sort of candidate profile.

Josh Klemons: Yeah.

Eric Wilson: But couldn’t outrun the bad environment. And so I would say, you got to work like it all depends on you, but sometimes it doesn’t. Yeah. Yeah,…

Josh Klemons: Are there any campaigns running digital programs you’re particularly excited about at the moment, left or right? Just from a tactician perspective. Yep.

Eric Wilson: I think we’re still a little bit early. one of the things that I really like that we’re seeing on my side are these war room accounts on X it kind of reflects kind of the Trump campaign’s effect on our side where we’re shaping the narrative and that sort of thing has happened. again, I think that shiny object stuff is fun to watch, but it really is like who’s putting up PF, DKM, Demar, who’s sending email automations,…

Eric Wilson: that kind of thing. it’s not too exciting.

Josh Klemons: you’re more interested in the nuts and…

Eric Wilson: It’s Yeah.

Josh Klemons: bolts than the sexy glossy stuff. that’s interesting in and of itself. appreciate it.

Eric Wilson: Right. they can visit campaigntrend.com…

Josh Klemons: How can folks keep in touch with you moving forward about Republican email and…

Eric Wilson: where they can sign up for our newsletter and see episodes of our podcast including the conversation you and I had a few years back and…

Josh Klemons: there was some really interesting stuff in there who was doing it well back then during this was the Republican presidential primary email program and there were some good practices and some very very bad practices and we talked about them

Eric Wilson: it turned out it didn’t matter right I mean yeah.

Josh Klemons: did not.

Eric Wilson: So anyways, yeah, the campaign.com is the place to find me. I’m active on X and LinkedIn if people want to connect there.

Josh Klemons: I’ll have links to all that, including the report itself. and thanks so much. I really appreciate you …

Eric Wilson: Thanks Josh.

Josh Klemons: crossing the line and coming and chatting with me. This was fun. And I hope folks, like I said, I learned a lot from this report. It was quite illuminating on some things. So yeah, I hope folks take a couple. It’s an easy read. you don’t need a master’s degree to read this thing.

Eric Wilson:

Eric Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Klemons: …

Josh Klemons: it’s written for people not lawyers. yeah,…

Eric Wilson: Campaign Cowboys.

Eric Wilson: Okay.

Josh Klemons: So yeah, definitely worth 20 minutes to peruse through it. And thanks again so much. I really appreciate your time.

Eric Wilson: I appreciate It was good chatting with Good stuff.