The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.

Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12 week subscription in print and online.

Plus we'll give you a £20 £20,000 Amazon gift voucher, absolutely free.

Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America,

a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one,

because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined by the political technologist, Eric Wilson,

and we're going to be talking about the role of technology in the 2024 election.

Eric, you are a technologist.

Could you just explain firstly what that is? I believe you do most of your work for the Republican Party. That's right. I'm a conservative and work for Republicans in this country and

conservatives across the world. My role is to make sure that candidates on our side have the most

effective tools and technology to get

their messages out. So the way I say it to people is I don't have many opinions about what you say,

but I've got a lot of opinions about how you say it and what you use to say it with.

Right. And I mean, obviously, television advertising is still big business in American politics. We see it currently with Nikki Haley and Donald Trump in the primaries, bombarding TV networks with huge amounts of television advertising. But that is not as powerful as it used to be. I wonder, do you think it is still useful, powerful?

Would you advise political campaigns to use it?

Well, I certainly advise people to use it.

And it remains the most expensive line item for campaigns in the United States.

There's no other medium that reaches as many people as quickly and at once as TV advertising.

Of course, that has diminished as we've had the proliferation of cable news channels.

...