Washington-based campaign manager James Booth joined Michael Koziol, Sydney editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, in the Newsroom last week to answer student questions on the current campaign for the May 21 Australian federal election.

Booth has led more than 50 campaign polling and analytics programs, served on three Australian Labor Party campaign teams and spent six years at the Democratic Party consulting firm BlueLabs in Washington, DC. He also served as director of Paid Media Analytics on the Biden presidential campaign. He is currently Chief Analytics Officer at London-based startup Datapraxis, leading polling programs for national campaigns across Europe.

Koziol joined the Herald in 2014 and has covered breaking news, federal politics, immigration, education and communications, including three years in the federal Parliament House bureau. He won a Walkley Award with Jennifer Duke for a series of stories on alleged government interference in senior editorial staffing at the ABC. In 2020 and 2021 he was deputy editor of The Sun-Herald. He is currently covering his third election.