The Next Political Misinformation Crisis Won’t Go Viral
Catalyst Campaigns founder Scott Goodstein writes in USA TODAY about the new misinformation battlefield heading into the 2026 elections.
Political campaigns have spent billions developing increasingly sophisticated ways to target voters. Today, campaigns can combine voter files, commercial data, social media, influencers, programmatic advertising and peer-to-peer texting to deliver messages to incredibly precise audiences.
But that innovation has a dangerous flip side.
In his new USA TODAY opinion piece, Goodstein argues that some of the most consequential misinformation in 2026 may never go viral. A misleading video, AI-generated message or targeted rumor may only need to reach a few thousand persuadable voters in the right district — while remaining virtually invisible to campaigns, journalists and fact-checkers.
“An attack reaching 25,000 persuadable voters in the right district may be more valuable than one reaching millions nationally.”
Goodstein calls this “micro-viral misinformation” — content that succeeds not by reaching everyone, but by reaching exactly the voters it was designed to influence.
The challenge is compounded by political text messaging, AI-generated content, targeted advertising and influencers whose messages can move through narrowly defined audiences before anyone outside those communities knows they exist.
Campaigns need to invest more seriously in social intelligence: understanding what voters are actually seeing, spotting emerging narratives, understanding who political influencers really reach, and developing ways to get accurate information back in front of the same voters who received misinformation.
“We’ve spent billions building better political missiles. Now we need intelligence and radar to see what’s coming.”
In 2026, simply reaching voters is no longer enough. We also need to understand what is reaching them.
Click here to read the full column at USA TODAY →
Learn more about political text messaging problems here ->
