The Case For Campaign Ai Politico Benton Org

For a while, it looked like AI was going to blow up campaign politics in 2024. Powerful new tools, new persuasion techniques, less policing of social-media platforms, all were leading up to a landscape transformed, maybe dangerously so. With less than three months before the 2024 Presidential Election, despite a handful of controversies and deepfake scares, it hasn’t quite panned out that way. The evolution of AI as a tool for political microtargeting means the field is slowly getting more sophisticated in what it can do. But its effects have been more subtle, less of a revolution and more of a nudge in the direction things were already heading. Sasha Issenberg, a POLITICO editor who wrote the definitive book on the early growth of data-driven politics said, “There’s nothing conceptually new about this.

About 20 years ago, the availability of consumer data, changes in database architecture and advances in statistical modeling made it possible for campaigns for the first time to have predictive insights about individual voters,... Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 1041 Ridge Rd, Unit 214 Wilmette, IL 60091 © 1994-2025 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved. For Immediate Release: Dec.1, 2025Media Contact: Jen Sheehan, jen@nyguild.org; 610-573-0740 On the heels of a groundbreaking arbitration win at POLITICO, NewsGuild-CWA members launch a national campaign and a week of action on AI.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Unionized journalists across the country have become increasingly concerned about artificial intelligence, especially how the evolving technology is eroding the public’s trust in the news. “News, Not Slop” – a reference to the term for low-quality, surface-level digital content generated by AI – is a new NewsGuild-CWA campaign, launching today, to raise awareness about AI and its consequences and... The NewsGuild-CWA represents 27,000 members across North America at major media companies including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Business Insider, POLITICO, ProPublica and more. Central to the campaign is TNG-CWA’s Demands for Ethical AI in Journalism which outlines the demands of unionized journalists to protect their jobs and the quality of their work. The rapacious energy needs of data centers finally seem to have taken a political toll.

In recent elections, candidates in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere ran—and won—on voters’ frustration with rising utility bills caused partly by America’s enormous AI buildout. This could have consequences for tech companies expanding in the U.S., which still need to build giant centers for their AI ambitions, but now find themselves on the wrong end of a political issue. But it also impacts America on the global stage. A nation where tech infrastructure is suddenly a bogeyman could find itself at a disadvantage—especially as global rivals race to fill the infrastructural gaps and expand their own AI economies. Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 1041 Ridge Rd, Unit 214 Wilmette, IL 60091 © 1994-2025 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

All Rights Reserved. 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... 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...

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... 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. The use of artificial intelligence in political campaigns and messaging is ramping up. Already in this 2024 presidential race is AI being used to create fake robocalls and news stories and to generate campaign speeches and fundraising emails. The use of AI in political messaging has raised several alarms among experts, as there are currently no federal rules when it comes to using AI generated content in political material.

Peter Loge is the director of the GW School of Media and Public Affairs. Loge has nearly 30 years of experience in politics and communications, including a presidential appointment at the Food and Drug Administration and senior positions for Sen. Edward Kennedy and three members of the U.S. House of Representatives. He currently leads the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at the GW School of Media and Public Affairs and continues to advise advocates and organizations. Loge is an expert in communications and political strategy.

Loge says AI is being used in a number of ways for political campaigns right now and the use of this emerging technology can ultimately undermine public trust. “Campaigns are using artificial intelligence to predict where voters are, what they care about and how to reach them but they’re also writing fundraising emails, generating first drafts of scripts, first drafts of speeches... “There’s a lot of ethical concerns with AI in campaigns. The basic rule of thumb is, there aren’t AI ethics that different from everybody else’s ethics. You have a set of ethics. In a campaign, you should aim to persuade and inform, not deceive and divide.

That’s true with AI, with mail, with televions, with speeches,” Loge explains. “A lot of the questions we’re asking about AI are the same questions we’ve asked about rhetoric and persuasion for thousands of years.”

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