Joshua Karp is a Dem operative I’ve long admired.
A longtime comms guy on campaigns, this cycle his digital agency, Liftoff, worked on some of the races that won Democrats the Senate and a few governors’ mansions.
I hope you enjoy his insights on shaping the bubbles that millennials and reporters inhabit, why his firm counseled Senator-elect Annie Andrews not to publicize how close her race was, and insights from Liftoff’s work for Senators-elect Andrews and Troy Jackson, Governors-elect Amy Acton and David Crowley, and Congressman Shomari Figures.
THIS IS ON BACKGROUND:
Four short questions, four quick answers featuring the wisdom of veteran Dem operative and Liftoff founder and partner Joshua Karp.
What’s the biggest shift in messaging or communications you saw this cycle that you think is here to stay? How did it play out in a race you advised on?
The line between earned media and social media has been vaporized. There’s no “comms strategy” and “digital strategy” anymore. As people build statewide and presidential campaigns in 2027, key is to view your external communication holistically and understand the entire information bubbles your various audiences — reporters, grassroots donors, voters — are living inside.
The concept of information bubbles isn’t a particularly new one, but 2026 was a breakout cycle for campaigns that treated them seriously, from Jon Ossoff’s clipping strategy to Abdul’s choreographed TikTok dances. By shaping the bubbles that reporters and activists inhabit, these meaningfully moved votes.
A smart campaign hits the core message from all angles — congrats, the oppo you pitched landed! But now the real work begins: the candidate needs to amplify the oppo in a speech, and that speech needs to be clipped and distributed.
But to truly learn the lesson, though, we’re all going to have to change our mindset. Democratic staffers have trudged through a decade in which the majority of candidates were generationally out of sync with how voters consume information. Everyone from Gen-Z to Boomers love vertical video, but most Boomers stink at making it, to name just one example. I think the single biggest reason why 2026 was a breakout year for smart, integrated comms strategies is that we had a remarkable crop of Millennial candidates (and a few savvy Gen-Xers) who are actually native to the grammar of the modern information ecosystem. To capitalize on this, we’re going to have to unlearn all the self-imposed rules and restrictions we invented to coddle past generations of candidates.
This was the first midterm in which linear television competed directly for influence with viral narratives down the ballot. Look at how the Ohio governor’s campaign ended. In the closing weeks, Vivek Ramaswamy ran that disgusting ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother. After it leaked, he put $1 million behind it, which is pocket change in a race where more than $140 million was spent against Amy. A typical $1 million ad buy barely registers with a statewide electorate. But more than 80% of Ohioans knew about Vivek’s ad, and what’s more, they also knew the truth about it, even though our response had only just launched. People were learning this in real time, from social feeds, from local news, from clips in their family group chat.
Blue tsunami aside, who did something this cycle that really moved the needle and that others should be paying attention to?
I am obsessed with the idea of attention as the fundamental currency of our time. In 2026, good comms isn’t only about getting attention, it’s about managing attention.
Comms in the pre-algorithm era was mostly the business of shining the brightest spotlight possible on your candidate’s good qualities and your opponents flaws. Now there are dozens of spotlights, and even the friendly ones often have incentives completely opposed to your goals. The sincere efforts of your allies can cause irreparable damage.
Consider Annie Andrews’s remarkable 4-point win in South Carolina, which my business partner at Liftoff, Zack Carroll, helped lead. Over the summer they started breaking grassroots fundraising records, and they never announced it. In September the internal polling got close, and they stayed quiet. In early October, she got a poll back showing her ahead of Darline Graham.
Any of these stories would have gone viral. All of them would have helped raise money. Reporters and political influencers alike would have given it a ton of attention. But we advised Team Andrews to sit on all their good news, because while it would have raised more money, a public lead would have woken up national Republicans and pulled their money into South Carolina too early. You have to manage the attention on the race — a lesson we learned the hard way in on the 2020 Senate race in South Carolina.
But this wasn’t a monolithic don’t-be-interesting strategy. You can’t raise grassroots digital money without getting your name out there, and grassroots donors loved Annie from the very start. Annie was constantly creating content — she’s amazing at it — and the campaign had a strong national comms strategy that emphasized Substackers and other influencers. In the debates she landed serious punches that aired on local broadcast news and a lot of Twitter feeds.
But the Andrews Team built their path to victory in total silence. She went on the air in August without fanfare, and Darline Graham took weeks to respond. By the time the Republicans woke up, Annie Andrews was already the frontrunner.
Is there a race or candidate that folks in D.C. are overlooking but should be paying attention to?
The unexpected wins are rightly getting their flowers, so let me shout out a win everyone knows about but that’s still underrated: Jon Ossoff won by 18 points in a state Trump carried by two points just 24 months ago. That’s a 20-point swing, and it’s even more impressive when you recall his first victory was by a single point, and Rev. Warnock’s 2022 reelection over Hershel Walker was also just by one point. This was a flawless campaign that should be studied in textbooks.
The comms on this race was phenomenal, but the most important part of its success was the campaigns’ relentless emphasis on execution. They simply refused to take any shortcuts. Everyone makes a big deal out of Ossoff’s clipping, but as an example of what a masterclass in execution is, it’s worth unpacking: live clipping an event requires a two dozen things to all go right simultaneously, from the event’s WiFi to the streaming software to the approval process. It’s not the work of one scrappy staffer, it takes an entire campaign that is bought in, top to bottom, on the importance of dominating the information ecosystem.
What do you want to shout from the rooftops?
Florida has a massive comms problem among Democrats, and it’s well earned. But it’s time to take Florida seriously and stop writing off the country’s third largest state. I’m a recovering Florida Man, so I’ve heard all the comments… “It’s so expensive” … “Florida always breaks your heart” … “The waves never reach Florida” … “For the price of one race in Florida we can invest in two other states.”
But if we can win in Texas, Ohio, Kansas, and South Carolina, of course we can win in Florida. Texas and Ohio are big, expensive states too.
Last Tuesday, David Jolly came within 1% — just 108,000 votes — and Angie Nixon lost her Senate race by three points. Congressional races are even more frustrating: Democrats came within two points of defeating five Republican incumbents. Let me repeat that: Democrats came within two points of defeating five Republican incumbents in Florida. There’s a ton of opportunity for Democrats in Florida, especially in the post-Trump era.
All of this was more or less predictable. The 2018 midterms were also incredibly close in Florida, and we picked up two Congressional seats. It was widely reported all year that South Florida Hispanics were fleeing Trump, but still people are shocked that they swung toward Democrats by nearly 20% this year. The problem is that while many states have champions among the Democratic activist and donor class, Florida only has haters.
So Florida needs a rebrand. Maybe we just rename it, the way Blackwater realized their brand was, ahem, toxic, and so they renamed themselves “Xe” to seem less scary. (yes, they really did this). Or maybe we just need local champions to stand up and preach the gospel that the country’s third-largest state is worth investing in.