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Welcome to the politics, guys, a place for bipartisan, rational, and civil debate on American politics and policy.

I'm Northern Kentucky University political scientist Michael

Barronowski. My guest today is Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist and former senior advisor to

Kamala Harris. Mr. Nellis is the founder and chief strategy officer at Authentic, a digital

marketing agency that's raised over a billion dollars and in 2024 had a 77% client win rate.

More recently, Mr. Nellis launched Quiller AI, a platform that's revolutionizing online fundraising

for the Democratic Party. Mike Nalds, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

So I thought we'd start with Authentic. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you ended up starting a political marketing agency and what exactly authentic does. Sure. So I've been in Democratic politics for two decades now. I dropped out of college to go work for Barack Obama in 2007 in the Iowa

caucus. And when I say work, it implies that I got a paycheck, but I was actually an unpaid

fellow. So I was basically an intern sleeping on a couch, I mean, just trying to be close to the

action. And I got into the online fundraising aspect of it when I finally

got my first job, first paying job, which was as a finance assistant on a Senate race back in

Nebraska where I grew up. And we were at an all staff meeting. My job was effectively to make

sure that the candidate was making their phone calls to rich donors. And I had to make sure that

he had his chew and his lunch and stuff like donors. And I had to make sure that he had his chew and his lunch

and stuff like that. And I absolutely hated the job. I was not well suited for it. And we were at

a staff meeting and somebody was like, hey, Barack Obama's raising a lot of money online with this

email program. Does anybody want to try to figure out how to do that. And I immediately, I was like 18. I like threw up my own hand. I was like, I'll figure it out. I got it. And we figured out.

And I forget exactly what we raised, but it was like a couple hundred thousand. And at the time,

...