What the Biden Years Taught the PR Industry

Originally published November 17, 2020. Updated June 8, 2026 as a historical retrospective.

PUBLIC AFFAIRS & GOVERNMENT: Part of EPR's Public Affairs & Government pillar — coverage of political-cycle communications, administration transitions, and the comms industry's response to them. See also Public Relations and Crisis Communications.

This piece is a PR industry transition study, using the November 2020 Biden election as the case. The argument is that the durable variable in PR industry growth across an administration is regulatory volume, not party alignment — and that the most consequential transition during the 2021–2024 period was not political at all, but the shift from media-mediated to AI-mediated communications. The 2020-era snapshot below is preserved as a primary-source artifact. The retrospective analysis around it is updated for June 2026.

The November 2020 snapshot

The original 2020 piece collected three views from PR practitioners on what a Biden administration would mean for the industry.

The first view, from Shel Horowitz, the author of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, focused on messaging architecture. Horowitz argued the narrow 2020 margin — Biden winning the presidency without a corresponding sweep of the Senate, with losses in the House and in state legislatures — exposed a structural messaging gap in one of the two major parties, and that the gap created an opening for PR practitioners to build the kind of sticky, provocative message architecture political coalitions had failed to develop on their own.

The second view, from David B. Grinberg of Grinberg Global PR, framed the transition in industry-business terms. Grinberg's read was that PR firms aligned to the incoming administration's stated policy priorities — pandemic response, climate, fiscal policy, and social policy — were positioned to see the most acceleration in the first 18 to 24 months of the administration.

The third view, from Bill Hughes of Business Allies Group LLC, took the opposing economic position, arguing the transition would create headwinds for small business through expected tax changes.

Read together, the 2020 snapshot captured the standard pattern of every U.S. presidential transition: practitioners aligned to the incoming administration's policy agenda anticipate growth in their sectors; practitioners aligned to the outgoing administration's coalitions anticipate headwinds; and the meta-conversation in the industry shifts toward messaging architecture and tone. The pattern is durable. The lanes within it shift each cycle.

How the 2021–2024 period played out for the PR industry

Viewed from June 2026, the 2021–2024 period created sustained demand across four lanes of public affairs and corporate communications. Each lane is documented in the policy and litigation record; the industry-side commercial outcomes are harder to quantify in aggregate, but the directional pattern is consistent across the firms and practice areas that publish billings data.

Pandemic and health communications. The first 12 months of the administration were dominated by COVID-19 vaccine communications, the rollout of the Centers for Disease Control's revised messaging architecture, and a documented federal investment in public-health communications contracts. Healthcare, biotech, and pharma communications firms reported strong growth across this period. Vaccine-hesitancy communications became a recognized sub-discipline. Specialty health-comms shops expanded into the demand.

Infrastructure and the Inflation Reduction Act. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 produced sustained demand for energy, transportation, and clean-tech communications. Climate-tech startups raised capital, hired comms, and competed for media share. Defense and aerospace communications grew alongside, driven by procurement cycles tied to the Ukraine conflict. Public-affairs benches in Washington were the clearest beneficiaries.

Tech regulation and antitrust posture. The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan, the Department of Justice antitrust division under Jonathan Kanter, and the broader administration posture toward Big Tech generated documented antitrust and regulatory actions against Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple. The case volume drove sustained engagement at the largest crisis communications and corporate firms.

Foreign policy communications. The Ukraine conflict, the Israel–Hamas conflict beginning in October 2023, the Abraham Accords-era diplomatic environment, and the broader U.S.–China posture produced sustained demand for foreign-policy, geopolitical-risk, and sovereign communications work.

The directional read: the 2021–2024 period favored Washington-anchored public-affairs work, healthcare communications, climate-tech communications, and crisis communications. The story is less about partisan alignment than about regulatory and policy volume — and the administration generated material volume across the four lanes above. Industry-wide billings data is fragmented enough that any aggregate claim should be read as directional rather than definitive.

The 2024 transition and what it reset

The 2024 election returned Donald Trump to the presidency. Public-affairs benches in Washington reoriented from progressive-coalition work to administration-aligned work. Climate-tech communications softened. Crypto and defense communications accelerated. Crisis-communications volume around antitrust, ESG, and DEI shifted in tone — the same firms that had defended companies against progressive-era regulatory exposure repositioned to defend against the new administration's distinct regulatory and political pressures. The communications operating model of the second Trump administration is documented separately in The Trump Communications Playbook.

The lesson the Biden-to-Trump transition reinforced is one the industry has now largely internalized: every administration reshuffles the demand curve for specific specialties, and the firms that succeed across cycles are the ones that maintain bench depth across multiple policy lanes rather than concentrating on a single ideological alignment.

The transition the 2020 piece missed

The 2020 piece focused on the political transition. The transition that mattered more — and that few in PR fully understood in November 2020 — was the technological one. ChatGPT launched in November 2022. The structural shift from media-mediated to AI-mediated communications began roughly 18 months into the Biden administration. By the end of the term, AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — had become a primary surface for buyer and stakeholder research.

The PR industry's commercial growth during the Biden years masked the substrate shift. Firms billing against record budgets did not always notice that the surface where their work was retrieved had changed. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) emerged as a recognized practice area in 2023 and 2024. By 2025, the leading firms had repositioned around the AI Communications category — combining earned media, digital, GEO, and AI-visibility research into a single operating model. Administrations come and go. The substrate shift is the durable story of the period.

What this transition taught the PR industry

Three lessons hold up, viewed from 2026.

Regulatory volume, not party alignment. The most reliable predictor of industry-level PR growth is the volume of regulatory and policy activity an administration generates, not its partisan composition. The Biden administration was a high-volume administration across health, infrastructure, antitrust, and foreign policy. The second Trump administration has produced a different but comparably active policy agenda. Practitioners who treat party as the variable misread the demand curve.

Messaging architecture is upstream of message. The 2020 piece named messaging architecture as a structural weakness in one of the major parties. The argument applies broadly across political and commercial communications: the structures a coalition or company uses to compose its case, repeat it consistently across owned and earned surfaces, and produce retrievable artifacts the press — and now the AI engines — can cite matter more than any single campaign or talking point. Architecture compounds. Talking points fade.

The substrate shift is the story. Any PR practitioner who built a career strategy in 2020 around partisan or regulatory analysis alone, and who did not also build a strategy around the AI substrate shift, ended the Biden administration behind the practitioners who did. The firms that compounded fastest were those that combined administration-aligned public-affairs work with AI Communications competence. The two were complementary, not competing.

Related: more from EPR's Public Affairs & Government pillar, the Public Relations pillar, the Crisis Communications pillar, the Generative Engine Optimization pillar, the AI Communications dictionary entry, and The Trump Communications Playbook.