The Campaign Strategist

Someone with 1,500 followers who reliably gets 250 people engaging is a person who can move 250 people — and a door knocker isn't reaching that many in an hour. Narrative strategist Ritti Singh explains how New York's tenant movement built a surround sound communications machine, and what any advocacy organization can take from it.

Ritti led communications for Housing Justice for All and the New York State Tenant Bloc, including the Freeze the Rent campaign in New York City's 2025 mayoral race. She talks with Pete Altman about why debunking the right's squatter narrative failed, why message discipline has to start in your own internal meetings, how "tenants are the majority" turned a policy demand into an identity, and her four-step framework: map, seed, echo, invite.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
00:25 Introducing Ritti Singh
01:54 Communications is organizing
05:07 How the right runs surround sound
08:05 The squatter story: when debunking fails
12:35 Message discipline starts inside
14:25 Tenants are the majority
17:15 From wonk-speak to plain language
20:17 Mapping where people actually get information
23:02 Seeding content: WhatsApp forwards and trusted messengers
23:55 Making the ask
28:50 The $2.5 million moment
32:56 Where to start: map, seed, echo, invite
39:42 What you only learn by doing it
44:50 Authenticity vs. message discipline
50:26 Why comms and organizing can't be separate departments
52:56 Career advice

LINKS
Full episode and show notes: https://thecampaignstrategist.substack.com/p/ritti-singh-surround-sound-communications
Ritti's essay, Surround Sound Communications: https://convergencemag.com/articles/surround-sound-communications-how-to-build-a-narrative-machine/
Pete's essay "The System We Haven't Built" which cites Ritti and others: https://thecampaignstrategist.substack.com/p/the-system-we-havent-built?r=49slwa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCampaignStrategist

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Will Robinson has made ads for Democrats for forty years. He opens this conversation by calling his own profession parasitic.

We start with what artificial intelligence has done to political communication since late 2025. Voters searching for a candidate increasingly get a synthesized paragraph instead of a list of links, and only about one percent click through to a source. Will searched himself and found out he is a Republican state representative from Florida. His conclusion: thirty years of message discipline now points the wrong way. The rule was never repeat the attack, but if the denial is not published somewhere a machine can read it, the denial does not exist.

From there: why the Democratic Party cannot adapt, and what Blockbuster and Sears have to do with it. Why broadcast is down to nineteen percent of video viewing while campaigns still spend like it is 2004. Why a college-educated woman from Bryn Mawr, one from Ohio State and one from Liberty are three different audiences, not one demographic. Why a story beats a bag full of facts. And what he would build with one hundred million dollars, which is not ads.

Will Robinson is co-founder of the New Media Firm and writes Will Robinson's Newsletter on Substack.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
00:20 Introduction
02:17 AI has changed politics, and it does not know what is true
06:23 Why never repeat the attack is now backwards
10:10 The two questions every campaign should start with
13:18 The innovator's dilemma, from Blockbuster to the Democratic Party
17:12 Consultants, profit, and the case for programmatic
20:50 Why campaign managers cannot push back
23:36 Audience-first: Bryn Mawr, Ohio State, Liberty
26:51 Culture crushes credentials
29:00 Why a story beats a bag full of facts
34:08 Two hospitals close, and a woman sobbing at the pharmacy
37:20 What Abdul El-Sayed's win actually shows
41:06 The fire hose of falsehood
45:59 If I had one hundred million dollars, I would train
50:01 Leadership, Tip O'Neill, and what is going on on the ground
55:41 We cannot rent attention, we cannot rent allegiances
58:48 Career advice: you have not lost enough elections

LINKS
Will Robinson's Newsletter: https://willrobinson.substack.com
The post on the two questions: https://willrobinson.substack.com/p/im-a-media-consultant-who-tells-clients
The Rob Stein conversation: https://willrobinson.substack.com/p/a-legacy-of-strategy-what-rob-stein
The New Media Firm: https://thenewmediafirm.com
GAIN Power: https://www.gainpower.org
This episode: https://thecampaignstrategist.substack.com/p/will-robinson-consultants-are-parasites

The Campaign Strategist is produced by Prismatic Strategies. Hosted by Pete Altman. Music by Andrea Perry and Pete Altman.

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The tactics most campaigns were built on are quietly breaking, and the reason isn't messaging — it's trust. Host Pete Altman talks with Amanda Brink, executive director of The Empower Project, whose recent essay "The Rules of Engagement Have Changed" argues that real persuasion now happens in the group chats, DMs, and comment sections where people decide who to believe. Amanda makes the case that we're organizing in an environment where credibility travels through people rather than institutions: "I really feel like trust scales through people now. It no longer scales through institutions, which also makes me sad, but I think that is the reality that we are living in." She walks through what friend-to-friend organizing looks like at scale — 47,000 community mobilizers in 2024, three million names, nine million conversations — and why the app is never the answer: "In the same way you can't build a house with just a hammer, a tool is not enough." She's also blunt about why the left is behind, from status quo bias to a movement that is "literally letting the perfect be the enemy of the good." For anyone rethinking how their organization reaches people in 2026, this is a practical conversation about building power instead of perfecting copy.
LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE
The Empower Project: https://empowerproject.us/
Amanda Brink on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brinkamandal/
Amanda's bio: https://empowerproject.us/amanda-brink
Amanda's essay, "The Rules of Engagement Have Changed": https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rules-engagement-have-changed-amanda-brink-krfgc/
Marquette Law School Poll on trust, July 2026: https://law.marquette.edu/poll/2026/07/07/marquette-law-school-poll-finds-a-steady-decline-by-age-in-trust-in-other-people/
Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don't, and Why, by Steve Martin and Joseph Marks — the trusted-messenger research Amanda cites
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"If you're not focused on democracy and holding the line there, anything else you're doing is just busy work." That's movement strategist Dana Johnson, and it's the spirit of this whole conversation — clear-eyed about the moment, and unwilling to retreat from it.
Dana is the founder of Strategic Movement Collective and the former Senior Director of Strategy and Federal Policy at WE ACT for Environmental Justice. In this episode she walks through how she actually designs a campaign — from the first "big sky" objective all the way down to the question she keeps returning to: what's missing from this conversation, and who's missing from it? She shares the moment at WE ACT when she realized an emissions-modeling fight was incomplete until they hired someone who could take it down to the level of regions, states, and communities.
From there we go somewhere harder: how the advocacy toolkit has changed under real pressure, why she thinks the movement "missed the mark" on solidarity, and what the people of Minneapolis taught the rest of us about building organizing infrastructure that outlasts a single fight. We close on what it would actually take to rebuild — not the way things were, but for the next fifty years.
What you'll take away: a working method for designing a campaign from objective to messenger to gap; why solidarity is a strategic commitment and not a sentiment; how organizing infrastructure gets built in one fight and repurposed in the next; and a "both/and" frame for rebuilding institutions instead of just restoring them.
Dana Johnson is a movement strategist and founder of Strategic Movement Collective. She previously served as Senior Director of Strategy and Federal Policy at WE ACT for Environmental Justice and sits on the board of Green 2.0.
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More from Dana — https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-g-johnson/, Strategic Movement Collective
Green 2.0 - https://greentwopointzero.org/
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If you've ever used "narrative," "messaging," and "communication strategy" as if they meant the same thing, this episode sorts that out fast. Host Pete Altman sits down with Francesca Koe — a communications and advocacy strategist with more than two decades helping movements grow power and win change, now a Program Director with Narrative Initiative — who has led integrated campaigns across climate, oceans, energy, and social justice. Francesca breaks down the layered structure of narrative using a Jaws-and-sharks example that sticks, explains why rigor and resonance are an "and" rather than a trade-off, and makes the case that trusted institutions are having to rethink who gets to be the messenger. She also argues that the work belongs to everyone, not just consultants: as she puts it, "guess who narrative practitioners are? Everyone, we all are." For anyone trying to talk about hard things in a way that actually lands, there's a lot here on landscaping narratives, building local capacity, and meeting people where they are.
Keywords/tags: narrative change, political messaging, communication strategy, advocacy strategy, progressive messaging, narrative initiative, movement building, climate communication, health equity, deep narratives, meta-narrative, framing, asset framing, building power, community organizing, ocean conservation, kelp restoration, The Campaign Strategist, Pete Altman, Francesca Koe
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