How to Best Prepare for 2026

Written By Catherine Godwin

By: Tara Brosnan

I know, I know. There are elections happening in 2025! They are important! We agree! But for those of you who aren’t in the trenches of GOTV already…we are officially one year out from 2026 GOTV! 

I’ve personally lost count of how many GOTVs I’ve lived through, but I haven’t forgotten the most important lesson I’ve learned: plan ahead, plan ahead, plan ahead! I can think of many GOTVs where my data department could have benefitted from having a data warehouse like PAD.

Why PAD? PAD makes comprehensive reporting possible by connecting to all of your various data sources. Access to PAD means having access to all that Google Cloud has to offer, without having to worry about spending your entire budget on one query, or accidentally opening your data up to security vulnerabilities. Best of all: the pricing is structured to fit budgets large and small!

Why CTA? CTA is staffed by the dream team: engineers who have worked everywhere from scrappy startups to Fortune 500 companies; product managers who started out as campaign volunteers; staff who have worked at quite literally every level of the ballot - from local and municipal races to presidential campaigns. The literal former Interim CTO of the DNC. 

We have the engineering chops to solve the hard problems, and the political knowledge to bring your ideas to fruition ahead of important election dates.

So, what have CTA partners been doing to prepare for midterms? They have been hard at work! Both Priorities USA and CIRCLE migrated to PAD and updated their techstack ahead of the 2026 crunch.

Priorities USA

  • As one of their first priority tasks in the off year, Priorities USA completed a migration from Redshift to CTA PAD and Google Cloud. Through an initiative called Flock, Priorities’ analytics and engineering teams were seeking a cloud solution that would give  them full control over their data orchestration. The team chose this stack for its stability, power, and responsiveness, core priorities heading into an election year!

  • Since migrating to PAD, Priorities has been able to not only recreate their complex workflows with full autonomy and fewer blockers, but save money and time while doing it. These strategic investments ensure Priorities is building the reliable, forward-looking infrastructure the progressive movement needs to succeed in 2026 and beyond. 

CIRCLE

  • The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), part of Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life, migrated to CTA PAD in 2024/2025. One of CIRCLE’s research projects is a major longitudinal national project on electoral engagement, which requires a massive data collection effort, significant analytical capacity to work with data across languages, and connections to the voter file and other supplementary information. 

  • With CTA PAD, CIRCLE was able to resolve these challenges. CTA partnered with CIRCLE to assist with a major data migration of all of their historical data. Next, CTA and CIRCLE set up a data warehousing and analytics solution in PAD for the project, giving CIRCLE a place to store data and perform analytics on it in SQL and R, as well as connections in and out to supplementary data. Access to these tools helped CIRCLE have their most efficient project cycle yet and has enabled them to spend more time on their analysis, instead of on figuring out how to move data around or where to store it.  

What can you do?

  • Centralize your data

    • Migrating your existing data infrastructure, or setting up brand new infrastructure, can be daunting. Let CTA make it less painful - our engineers build and maintain a plethora of data connections that make it easy to centralize your data into CTA PAD, leveraging Google Cloud infrastructure. From voter files to voter contact tools to digital ads - CTA supports data pipelines for the progressive movement’s most-used tools.

  • Prepare your data team

    • Planning the next year out as a team will help align your team’s goals and create shared buy-in. What are the big boulders of work, and when do they need to be in place? What kinds of audits need to be done now in order for streamlined workflow creation? Does this match our capacity? Do we need to staff up, or make decisions on what work to cut? Better to do this now than be surprised in October of 2027!

  • Build comprehensive reports

    • Building a single dashboard for measuring your impact across tools is never easy, but with CTA PAD it is possible! With all of your data in PAD, you can leverage your SQL skills to standardize your data for reporting. From there, use Looker Studio to build an interactive dashboard for stakeholders to easily see the latest metrics. SQL not for you? Connect your data in BigQuery directly to Google Sheets!

  • Pilot! Test! Iterate!

    • Now is the time to try out some ideas! So much testing and progress can be made in the next 6 months - with plenty of time to assess and set up your systems before the summer push!

  • Reach out to CTA to talk through ideas and possibilities!

Catherine Godwin
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