AI and the Future of American Politics
Two years ago, Americans anxious about the forthcoming 2024 presidential election were considering the malevolent force of an election influencer: artificial intelligence. Over the past several years, we have seen plenty of warning signs from elections worldwide demonstrating how AI can be used to propagate misinformation and alter the political landscape, whether by trolls on social media, foreign influencers, or even a street magician. AI is poised to play a more volatile role than ever before in America’s next federal election in 2026. We can already see how different groups of political actors are approaching AI. Professional campaigners are using AI to accelerate the traditional tactics of electioneering; organizers are using it to reinvent how movements are built; and citizens are using it both to express themselves and amplify their side’s messaging. Because there are so few rules, and so little prospect of regulatory action, around AI’s role in politics, there is no oversight of these activities, and no safeguards against the dramatic potential impacts for our democracy.
The Campaigners
Campaigners—messengers, ad buyers, fundraisers, and strategists—are focused on efficiency and optimization. To them, AI is a way to augment or even replace expensive humans who traditionally perform tasks like personalizing emails, texting donation solicitations, and deciding what platforms and audiences to target.
This is an incremental evolution of the computerization of campaigning that has been underway for decades. For example, the progressive campaign infrastructure group Tech for Campaigns claims it used AI in the 2024 cycle to reduce the time spent drafting fundraising solicitations by one-third. If AI is working well here, you won’t notice the difference between an annoying campaign solicitation written by a human staffer and an annoying one written by AI.
But AI is scaling these capabilities, which is likely to make them even more ubiquitous. This will make the biggest difference for challengers to incumbents in safe seats, who see AI as both a tacitly useful tool and an attention-grabbing way to get their race into the headlines. Jason Palmer, the little-known Democratic primary challenger to Joe Biden, successfully won the American Samoa primary while extensively leveraging AI avatars for campaigning.
Such tactics were sometimes deployed as publicity stunts in the 2024 cycle; they were firsts that got attention. Pennsylvania Democratic Congressional candidate Shamaine Daniels became the first to use a conversational AI robocaller in 2023. Two long-shot challengers to Rep. Don Beyer used an AI avatar to represent the incumbent in a live debate last October after he declined to participate. In 2026, voters who have seen years of the official White House X account posting deepfaked memes of Donald Trump will be desensitized to the use of AI in political communications.
Strategists are also turning to AI to interpret public opinion data and provide more fine-grained insight into the perspective of different voters. This might sound like AIs replacing people in opinion polls, but it is really a continuation of the evolution of political polling into a data-driven science over the last several decades.
A recent survey by the American Association of Political Consultants found that a majority of their members’ firms already use AI regularly in their work, and more than 40 percent believe it will “fundamentally transform” the future of their profession. If these emerging AI tools become popular in the midterms, it won’t just be a few candidates from the tightest national races texting you three times a day. It may also be the member of Congress in the safe district next to you, and your state representative, and your school board members.
The development and use of AI in campaigning is different depending on what side of the aisle you look at. On the Republican side, Push Digital Group is going “all in” on a new AI initiative, using the technology to create hundreds of ad variants for their clients automatically, as well as assisting with strategy, targeting, and data analysis. On the other side, the National Democratic Training Committee recently released a playbook for using AI. Quiller is building an AI-powered fundraising platform aimed at drastically reducing the time campaigns spend producing emails and texts. Progressive-aligned startups Chorus AI and BattlegroundAI are offering AI tools for automatically generating ads for use on social media and other digital platforms. DonorAtlas automates data collection on potential donors, and RivalMind AI focuses on political research and strategy, automating the production of candidate dossiers.
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