Top Public Affairs Firms: How to Choose in 2026

Something has changed in how organizations find a public affairs firm. The Public Affairs Council reported last year that 89% of government affairs teams are exploring AI to speed up their work, citing a 2025 FiscalNote survey, and named the tools they reach for by name: ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity and Claude. Meanwhile, with 2026 being a midterm year, advocacy firms are shifting from volume to value in terms of how they mobilize. Put those together and what you get is heads of government affairs and communications who need a firm for a legislative push relying on AI to generate recommendations.

Here’s one of the big problems with that: those tools don’t evaluate firms, they repeat whatever the web says about firms, and the web is full of self-promotional, SEO-oriented "top public affairs firms" lists published by public affairs firms that put themselves at number one and don’t disclose what they’re really doing. The same Public Affairs Council piece is blunt about the risk: these systems hallucinate, and every output needs verifying. So we’re going to do this differently. This is our list, we’re on it, and we hope it helps how we’re showing up in traditional and AI search. But we’re also showing you our criteria and the receipts so you can decide for yourself if this list is credible.

What is public affairs, and how is it different from PR?

Public affairs is communications work aimed at a decision. Not awareness, not reputation in the abstract, but a specific outcome that a specific body has to vote on, approve, or sign. A bill through a state legislature. A rezoning approval from a city council. A permit, a license, a regulation, a budget line.

That objective changes the toolkit. As our own Tom Corsillo has written, traditional PR "often focuses on earned media and organic social media" in service of "broad visibility and reputation enhancement," while a public affairs campaign is "designed with a clear, measurable objective in mind, such as winning passage of legislation" and reaches for a wide range of tools including advertising, direct mail, canvassing, public demonstrations, and public opinion polling to get there.

The practical test: if you can succeed by being better known (or known more favorably), you need PR. If you can only succeed by changing the mind of someone with a vote, you need public affairs. Most organizations that call us think they need the first and discover they need the second.

How we built this list

Let’s just get this out of the way: Marino is publishing this list. Marino is on this list. We put ourselves first.

We ranked on four criteria, in this order:

Does the firm win decisions, with names and dates? Not client logos, but actual outcomes. A council vote, a signed bill, an approved permit.

Can it run the whole campaign in-house? A public affairs fight needs earned media, paid media, creative production, direct mail, canvassing and digital in the same room on the same day, because the other side is not waiting for your subcontractor.

Does it have people who have sat on the government side of the table? Former budget directors, agency communications chiefs, and legislative staffers know what public officials can and cannot say, and how fast decision makers can actually move.

Is it actually a public affairs shop? Many of the other lists you see are filled with lobbyists and pure PR agencies – not true public affairs firms.

The honest limitation of any list like this, ours included: we compete with most of these firms. We have characterized each one by what it publicly says it does and what it is demonstrably strong at. Where we say a strength is narrow, we mean the firm is built for a particular fight, not that it’s bad at its job. Several of these are excellent firms, and for some assignments the right answer is one of them and not us. We’ve tried to say which.

Top public affairs firms in 2026

Here are ten firms, ranked against the criteria above. Every one of them is a serious operator we’ve crossed paths with and in some cases worked with as part of the same team. What separates them is the shape of the fight they are built for.

1. Marino

Strongest when the decision is local, the opposition is organized, and you need every channel at once. Marino was built on public affairs, with its roots in New York City government and economic development. No other agency knows the New York Tri-State region better. And with offices in New York and Los Angeles, and senior executives in Denver and Philadelphia, the agency’s reach is national.

Marino’s record is specific. Campaigns led by Tom Corsillo, who heads the practice, have won approval for billions in economic development and consequential state legislation on health care, labor and consumer protections, and voting rights.

On the government side of the table, Freeman Klopott spent nearly eight years in New York State government, including three as communications director for the Division of the Budget, where he ran messaging for a $200 billion-plus state budget, led the grassroots strategy that helped secure billions in federal pandemic support, and worked with the Governor's team to advance the Gateway Tunnel project alongside Amtrak, New Jersey and federal officials. He was also the first communications director at the state's Office of Cannabis Management. Jordan Isenstadt came from state government too, having served as press officer to two governors and communications director to a state senator.

2. Mercury Public Affairs

Strongest when you need bipartisan government relations in many states at once. Mercury runs 15 offices — including most of the state capitals that matter, from Albany and Trenton to Sacramento and Tallahassee — with roughly 150 practitioners serving around 550 clients, and its bench spans both parties. For a multi-state regulatory or legislative campaign, that footprint is very hard to replicate.

3. BerlinRosen

Strongest when your campaign runs through progressive coalitions, labor, or the New York political press. Few firms have deeper relationships across New York advocacy organizations and city politics, and the shop, which is large and commands extensive resources, is genuinely good at building a coalition quickly and getting it covered.

4. Avoq (formerly Subject Matter and Kivvit)

Strongest when the campaign should be argued from research. Avoq describes itself as a strategic communications, government relations and advertising firm "powered by intelligence and creativity," and it means the intelligence part — the firm publishes its own survey research on how policy audiences consume information. Offices in Washington, Chicago, New York, New Jersey and Miami.

5. Tusk Strategies

Strongest when a challenger company needs to beat a regulatory incumbent. Tusk is built for "complex multi-jurisdictional regulatory campaigns" and, in its own words, works best "when winning is the only option." Real depth in crypto and advanced tech (e.g. AI, prediction markets), and a genuine 50-state campaign capability.

6. SKDK

Strongest when you need campaign-grade paid media and rapid response at national scale. SKDK's people come out of Democratic presidential and Senate campaigns, and the advertising and war-room reflexes are the real product.

7. BGR Group

Strongest when the decision-maker is a federal agency or a member of Congress. BGR is a Washington lobbying and regulatory firm with the access that implies, and if your problem is federal legislation or a rulemaking, it belongs on your list ahead of us.

8. Marathon Strategies

Strongest when you need research, opposition analysis and corporate reputation defense in one place. Marathon has built a real niche producing its own studies and reports that generate coverage and give clients an evidence base to argue from.

9. Risa Heller Communications

Strongest when a person or a company is in acute crisis in the New York press. A small, senior team with a good feel for New York media, and the right call when the problem is a story landing tomorrow.

10. Rubenstein

Strongest when you need long-standing New York media relationships across real estate and civic institutions. One of the city's legacy shops, with a real estate practice and a reach into New York outlets built over decades.

Political PR firms, government relations firms, and public affairs agencies are not the same thing

These three terms get used interchangeably and they describe different businesses. Getting the category right saves you a wasted search.

Government relations firms — often called lobbying firms — sell direct access to and advocacy before officials. The deliverable is a meeting, a bill amendment, an appropriation. Most are registered lobbyists and their value is relationships inside the building.

Political PR firms work on and around campaigns: candidates, ballot measures, party committees, and the corporate clients who need campaign-style speed. The deliverable is persuasion at scale, usually through paid and earned media, on a fixed deadline.

Public affairs agencies sit across both and add the public. The deliverable is a decision won, which usually requires showing the decision-maker that the public is with you through coalition building, community engagement, polling, direct mail, canvassing, and earned media, coordinated to a vote or decision.

Most organizations need some combination, which is the argument for a firm that can do more than one of these without a subcontract. It is the same case we make for integrated strategy generally: campaigns lose when the channels are run by different companies with different incentives.

What a public affairs campaign actually looks like

Here are two of ours, because the criteria above are only worth something with evidence attached.

FixRx — from an obscure issue to the nation's toughest PBM law. The Pharmacists Society of the State of New York represents 2,500 independent pharmacies and was up against secretive but tremendously powerful prescription drug middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers: three Fortune 25 corporations that control roughly 90 percent of prescriptions filled in the United States, operating almost entirely out of public view. Marino conceived FixRx in 2018 to make the issue understandable and digestible. A brand, a website, an animated explainer, billboards outside the Capitol during session, statewide media briefings, surveys of pharmacists, patient stories, rallies in Albany with hundreds of pharmacists in lab coats handing legislative demands to lawmakers in orange pill bottles, and press events for three straight years from Yonkers to Syracuse to Utica to Buffalo. 210 media placements in 2021 alone. A State Senate investigation opened in 2019. Legislation banning a practice called spread pricing in Medicaid managed care passed that year. The package we named the Pharmacy Rescue Package passed in 2020 and was vetoed under eleventh-hour lobbying pressure — so we put 200 pharmacists outside the Governor's State of the State address two weeks later, and a new PBM bill appeared in his priorities. In 2021 the Legislature passed it unanimously and the Governor signed it. New York then established the first Pharmacy Benefits Bureau in the country. In 2025, State lawmakers introduced a new bill we named the Patient Access to Pharmacy Act, which will ban abusive PBM practices related to commercial insurance. After a year-long campaign, the Legislature overwhelmingly passed the law, which now awaits Governor Hochul’s signature. But the legacy of FixRx is that pharmacy advocates in other states are still running our playbook to advance critical protections for patients, taxpayers, and independent pharmacies.

Innovation QNS — a $2 billion rezoning approved 46 to 1. In 2019, organized opposition drove Amazon out of Long Island City. The next year, Silverstein Properties, Kaufman Astoria Studios and BedRock Real Estate Partners proposed the largest private affordable housing initiative in Queens history a few subway stops away, and the local City Council Member announced her opposition at the outset. In New York, that historically has ended a rezoning. Marino ran a five-phase campaign: quiet relationship-building before anything was public; a public unveiling that established the benefits narrative first; a paid and organic education program that reached close to 100 percent awareness of core messages in the district; data work to identify and model supporters; and then activation — more than 4,000 grassroots letters of support, testimonial videos, rallies, multilingual mail, and hearing testimony. All of it in seven languages, begun long before the formal review process. The strategy also built a backstop: persuade the Council Speaker to let members override their colleague if we couldn’t convince the local member. In November 2022 the Council approved it 46 to 1.

Neither of those was won by a press release. Both were won by running six channels at once for years against a vastly better-funded opponent.

What Communications Teams Should Do Now

• Ask any firm you are considering for a decision it won, with the date and the vote count. Client logos and "raised awareness" are not outcomes in this business.

• Check who on the team has worked inside government, and where. Someone who has run messaging for a state budget or an agency knows what a public body can say and how long an approval really takes, and that knowledge cannot be improvised.

• Find out what the firm subcontracts. Ask specifically who produces video, who buys media, who writes and prints the mail, and who runs the canvass. Every handoff is a delay you will pay for in a fight that moves daily.

• Match the firm to the jurisdiction, not the brand. A Washington lobbying shop and a New York land use shop are different businesses; hiring the wrong one is the most common and most expensive mistake in this category.

• Search your own firm's name in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude before your next pitch, and read what comes back. Prospects are doing this. If the answer is wrong or empty, that is a fixable content problem, not a mystery.

• Treat every AI-generated shortlist as a draft that needs a human check. The Public Affairs Council's own guidance on these tools is that they state wrong things confidently — the leverage is real, and so is the supervision requirement.

Beyond the Comms Team: What Brands Should Do

Public affairs shows up differently depending on what you build, sell or serve. Four sectors where the decision-maker is closer than most teams expect.

Real Estate and Development

In New York, nearly anything at scale requires a discretionary approval, which means your project has a constituency and an opposition before you break ground. The work starts earlier than most developers plan for. On Innovation QNS, engagement began years before the formal public review process and ran in seven languages — because a community that first hears about a project at a hearing typically has already decided against it.

Concretely: identify the local elected officials, community board members and civic groups on your site's map before you file anything. Leave room to incorporate stakeholder input into the plan. Know the answers to the hard questions. Track who has spoken for and against you by name. And plan for a paid program — mail, digital, community papers — because earned media alone does not move people.

Non-Profit and Mission-Driven

Many non-profits fight two public affairs battles at once: for the policy they exist to advance, and for the funding that lets them advance it. The lever is usually a legislative or budget decision, and the credibility comes from the people you serve rather than from your executive team.

Concretely: turn your program data into a policy argument once a year and put your chief executive behind it — that is what our work with the Community Preservation Corporation has been built on, positioning its CEO in the national housing conversation and producing a housing policy podcast that brings government officials, developers and advocates into the same room. As we have written about nonprofit public relations, the mission is the message, but only if someone has done the work of making it legible to a policy maker.

Food and Beverage

Food companies discover public affairs through regulation: labeling rules, packaging and recycling mandates, ingredient restrictions, delivery-fee caps, licensing, and the local permitting that comes with a facility or a flagship. It arrives as a compliance problem and turns out to be a communications problem.

Concretely: map the regulatory calendar in your top three states the way you map your retail calendar. Keep your ingredient, sourcing and nutrition claims current and identical everywhere they appear, because a regulator and a reporter will both check. And if you are opening anything with a physical footprint, treat the community around it as a stakeholder before you secure the permit, not after.

Cannabis and Newly Regulated Industries

In a market the government just created, the regulator is the most important audience you have, and the rules are still being written while you operate. Marino's cannabis practice has launched dozens of licensed adult-use dispensaries in New York and New Jersey and represented the trade and advocacy side of the same market, including the Cannabis Association of New York and the National Cannabis Industry Association.

Concretely: join and fund the trade association, because in a new market the association's voice reaches the regulator more reliably than yours. Separate your consumer marketing from your policy voice so a compliance issue in one does not damage the other. And as we have argued about building a cannabis brand, the licensed operator's central message is the thing the illicit market cannot claim — that you are legal, tested and accountable.

FAQ: Choosing a Public Affairs Firm

What are the best public affairs firms in New York?

The New York public affairs field is led by a small set of firms with genuine records winning local approvals and state legislation: Marino, Mercury Public Affairs, Tusk Strategies, and Marathon Strategies, among others. Marino is a New York-based strategic communications and integrated marketing agency whose public affairs practice has won approval for consequential legislation on health care, labor and business protections, and voting rights – and advanced billions of dollars in economic development. The right choice depends on whether your fight is a local land use approval, a state legislative push, or a reputation problem in the press — those are three different capabilities.

What are the best PR firms for public policy?

For public policy work specifically, look for firms that combine three things: people who have worked inside government, a demonstrated record of enacted legislation or won approvals, and the ability to run paid media, creative and grassroots programs in-house. Marino, Mercury Public Affairs, Avoq, SKDK and BGR Group all qualify on different levels — Marino and Mercury for state and local legislative campaigns, BGR for federal, SKDK for national paid advocacy, Avoq for research-led issue campaigns. A firm that only offers media relations is not equipped for policy work, because policy decisions are rarely changed by coverage alone.

Are political PR firms the same as public affairs firms?

No. Political PR firms work on campaigns — candidates, ballot measures, party committees — and are built for persuasion at scale against a fixed election date. Public affairs firms work on decisions made by governing bodies: rezonings, legislation, permits, licenses. The skills overlap heavily and many firms do both, but the deliverable differs. A political shop is optimized for an election day; a public affairs shop is optimized for a council vote, a legislative session, or a multi-year approval process.

Can AI assistants be trusted to recommend a public affairs firm?

Not without checking. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude assemble answers from what the web says, and much of what the web says about "top public affairs firms" comes from lists that agencies publish about themselves without disclosing it. The Public Affairs Council also warns that these systems hallucinate — they state wrong things confidently. Use them to build a first draft of a shortlist, then verify every claim against the firm's actual record: named clients, dated outcomes, and references you can call.

What should I ask a public affairs firm before hiring them?

Four questions. What decision did you win most recently, and what was the vote? What parts of this campaign would you subcontract? Have you worked in this specific jurisdiction, and with these specific decision-makers? And who is actually doing the daily work — the people in this room, or someone I have not met? The answers separate firms that run campaigns from firms that write plans. Our own guide to choosing a public affairs firm in New York goes deeper on what to look for.

The Bottom Line

Every list like this one is an argument, including ours. The difference is whether the argument is visible. We told you who publishes this, that we put ourselves first, and what we ranked on. Check the claims. Ask the four questions. Call the references.

And notice what the exercise reveals about the tools now writing everyone's first draft. They are useful and they are not accountable. The leverage is real, the supervision is the job, and that is as true for a shortlist as it is for a campaign. If that is the way you think about this, our AI and digital marketing newsletter is where we work through it every month.

Marino is a New York-based strategic communications agency. We design, build, and operate multi-channel campaigns for brands in real estate, proptech, non-profit, food & beverage, cannabis, higher education, and mission-driven work. Our public affairs practice has won approval for roughly 10,000 homes and billions of dollars in economic development, and enactment of state legislation from health care to voting rights. Let's talk.