Michael - tell us a little bit about what you do on the Trailmapper team and also how you got interested in politics in the first place.
Well, I’m the content manager at Trailmapper, I do the copywriting for all of the candidates and clients on our platform. I create blog posts for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook.
I got started, well, I started following politics my sophomore year of high school when Ron Paul was running for president and became a big fan very quickly. And to this day I consider myself to be a Ron Paul Republican. But I didn't get involved with campaign work until about 2019. I signed up to volunteer for Thomas Massie's primary campaign and made phone calls for him and then later became the New York State campaign manager for Libertarian candidate in 2020.
That's pretty awesome. What what made you interested in getting involved and getting off the sidelines?
When Thomas Massie had his first primary challenger in like a decade - for a serious one anyway - I decided to do what I could. And, you know, not being in Kentucky, all I could really do was make phone calls. And it was kind of fun getting to know Kentucky voters every day.
So you work at Trailmapper now as the head of copywriting and development. What's your favorite part about working with the Trailmapper team?
I like being involved in a ton of campaigns at once it makes election night more fun.
You know PredictIt? That betting website?
I am very familiar.
I put some money there in 2022 and made some money off our clients wins and that was fun!
Well, that's pretty cool. Is that what you do in your free time? You gamble....
That's some of the idea in my free time. Other than that, I'm a movie nerd. So I spend a lot of time doing that and spend an unhealthy amount of time following world news and recently started writing a foreign policy essays.
Really? Say a little bit more about that.
I wrote my first article for the National Interest, I think a month ago, and I'm working on my second one now.
What's what's the most gripping piece you read you consumed recently? Could be a movie, blog, book, podcast, whatever.
Hmm. I mean, one thing I've seen recently, honestly, The Last of US on HBO was awesome.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone, who's planning on running for office or running for office, what would it be?
This is a bit of a biased answer since I do copywriting, but one piece of advice I'd give is for candidates to put some effort when they're making email copies, separate themselves from other candidates because the odds are their platform is, if not exactly the same, very similar to a million other candidates say something unique about yourself to stand out and it's also a good idea to do some AB testing and have multiple versions of the same copies.
Some people might like a super lengthy and informative email copy, others might see a five paragraph campaign email and immediately delete it.
So it's a good idea to have a concise version as well, that is, maybe a couple of sentences that most people respond to.
What's your favorite quote?
This is very basic, but “That government is best, which governs least”... Thoreau quote
That's an excellent one. An excellent one.
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