Why We Are Building Campaign Brain

"Leveraging technological developments, we believe we can expand the policy table by removing financial and knowledge barriers for local, progressive candidates"

Equitable access to elected offices at the grassroots level is increasingly imperative to the strength of our democracy. In our current system, those with limited resources — disproportionately from historically marginalized communities — are at a massive disadvantage compared to well-resourced candidates for positions such as city council, school board and mayor.

At the grassroots, local level today, school boards and city councils across the United States are dangerously altering curricula, banning books, withdrawing LGBTQ+ rights, denying religious freedom, and determining expenditure of $1 trillion in government spending annually. Further, local elections are uncontested 79% of the time, and routinely experience turnout below 20%, with 75% of millennials indicating they do not have enough information about candidates to be an informed voter.

Running a winning campaign requires complex knowledge of when and how to file for office, how and who to raise money from, and which voters to talk to through which channels. These complex problems mean that those with money can afford to boot-strap their way into office, further calcifying the impacts of deep-seated systemic prejudice. In a world with artificial intelligence and the newfound ability to scale data science, one-on-one support, and content generation, the disproportionate knowledge barriers that limit access to political office facing marginalized communities make no sense.

With Campaign Brain, I believe we can decrease the number of uncontested elections, increase turnout for local elections, and massively increase representation in government of underrepresented groups. 

Specifically, Campaign Brain intends to be an artificially intelligent campaign manager for local candidates, providing daily action items to candidates to help them engage the electorate more efficiently, effectively, and completely. Using a next-best action approach to provide daily support, scheduling, and guidance to candidates, Campaign Brain executes data science to help target critical voters, optimizes social media through generative AI, and will use natural language processing to optimize effectiveness of donor and voter engagement — all tasks formerly reserved for the largest campaigns that we can now democratize access to.

Leveraging technological developments, we believe we can expand the policy table by removing financial and knowledge barriers for local political candidates. With more than an estimated 500,000 elected local officials across the USA, and turnout of local elections declining by an average of 20% in recent decades, strengthening grassroots candidates is imperative to building a governing system that works for all. 

In Texas, my job was to travel the state and support thousands of local candidates in their home communities. With new advances in artificial intelligence, we can scale support and strive for equitable representation for millions of Americans. 

As the late Rep. John Lewis used to say, ‘Get in good trouble, necessary trouble’.

At Campaign Brain, we aim to do exactly that: apply technological innovation to disrupt the campaign industry from the grassroots level by evening the playing field for all and supporting the progressive movement.

We’re working on democratizing artificial intelligence for progressive political campaigns. To learn more about how artificial intelligence can help your campaign, visit us at campaignbrain.ai.