Politics has always been a game of competitive storytelling. Successful leaders — and successful demagogues — instinctively know how to sell voters narratives: hopeful visions of the future, apocalyptic warnings, enemies to fear, identities to embrace.

That has only become truer in the Information Age, as politics is increasingly consumed through memes, podcasts, 30-second clips and, most recently, AI-generated videos competing for every second of our attention.

These days, the people who break through are not necessarily those with the most experience, but those who best understand narrative momentum.…