University of Kwazulu-Natal

What Ai Is Doing To Campaigns Politico

Bonisiwe Shabane
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what ai is doing to campaigns politico

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. A conversation with a chatbot can shift people's political views—but the most persuasive models also spread the most misinformation. In 2024, a Democratic congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, Shamaine Daniels, used an AI chatbot named Ashley to call voters and carry on conversations with them. “Hello. My name is Ashley, and I’m an artificial intelligence volunteer for Shamaine Daniels’s run for Congress,” the calls began.

Daniels didn’t ultimately win. But maybe those calls helped her cause: New research reveals that AI chatbots can shift voters’ opinions in a single conversation—and they’re surprisingly good at it. A multi-university team of researchers has found that chatting with a politically biased AI model was more effective than political advertisements at nudging both Democrats and Republicans to support presidential candidates of the opposing... The chatbots swayed opinions by citing facts and evidence, but they were not always accurate—in fact, the researchers found, the most persuasive models said the most untrue things. The findings, detailed in a pair of studies published in the journals Nature and Science, are the latest in an emerging body of research demonstrating the persuasive power of LLMs. They raise profound questions about how generative AI could reshape elections.

“One conversation with an LLM has a pretty meaningful effect on salient election choices,” says Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University who worked on the Nature study. LLMs can persuade people more effectively than political advertisements because they generate much more information in real time and strategically deploy it in conversations, he says. AI Chatbots Are Shockingly Good at Political Persuasion Chatbots can measurably sway voters’ choices, new research shows. The findings raise urgent questions about AI’s role in future elections By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Claire Cameron

Stickers sit on a table during in-person absentee voting on November 01, 2024 in Little Chute, Wisconsin. Election day is Tuesday November 5. Forget door knocks and phone banks—chatbots could be the future of persuasive political campaigns. It was September 2024, and an undecided voter was explaining to an AI chatbot why they were leaning toward supporting Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election. “I don’t know much about Harris,” the voter admitted. “...

However, with Trump, he is associated with a lot of bad things. So, I do not feel he is trustworthy right now.” The last decade taught us painful lessons about how social media can reshape democracy: misinformation spreads faster than truth, online communities harden into echo chambers, and political divisions deepen as polarization grows. Now, another wave of technology is transforming how voters learn about elections—only faster, at scale, and with far less visibility. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, among others, are becoming the new vessels (and sometimes, arbiters) of political information. Our research suggests their influence is already rippling through our democracy.

LLMs are being adopted at a pace that makes social media uptake look slow. At the same time, traffic to traditional news and search sites has declined. As the 2026 midterms near, more than half of Americans now have access to AI, which can be used to gather information about candidates, issues, and elections. Meanwhile, researchers and firms are exploring the use of AI to simulate polling results or to understand how to synthesize voter opinions. These models may appear neutral—politically unbiased, and merely summarizing facts from different sources found in their training data or on the internet. At the same time, they operate as black boxes, designed and trained in ways users can’t see.

Researchers are actively trying to unravel the question of whose opinions LLMs reflect. Given their immense power, prevalence, and ability to “personalize” information, these models have the potential to shape what voters believe about candidates, issues, and elections as a whole. And we don’t yet know the extent of that influence. Content made with generative artificial intelligence has been used in American politics. Generative AI has increased the efficiency with which political candidates were able to raise money by analyzing donor data and identifying possible donors and target audiences.[1][clarification needed] A Democratic consultant working for Dean Phillips has admitted to using AI to generate a robocall which used Joe Biden's voice to discourage voter participation.[2]

In April 2023, the Republican National Committee released an attack ad made entirely with AI-generated images depicting a dystopian future under Joe Biden's re-election.[3] In August 2024, The Atlantic noted that AI slop was becoming associated with the political right in the United States, who were using it for shitposting and engagement farming on social media, with the... 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.

As the 2024 U.S. elections gain momentum, political campaigns and advertising agencies are turning to a new ally, artificial intelligence, to disseminate their messages. This emerging technology presents both risks and potential benefits for the political advertising industry. AI-powered tools can generate new text, images, video, and speech from a single prompt to weave into campaign messages. Political campaigns are already using these tools to create messages for ads and fundraising solicitations. AI software can even compose campaign emails.

Generative AI is poised to redefine modern campaigning, although the exact nature of its influence remains uncertain. However, despite calls for regulation or moratoria in Congress, the Federal Election Commission, and even the political consultants’ trade association, national lawmakers have yet to address the new technology. New AI software products are inexpensive, require almost no training to use, and can generate seemingly limitless content. These tools can support personalized advertising at scale, reducing the need for large digital teams and leveling the playing field for campaigns that lack substantial resources. Yet AI also introduces a novel set of challenges, from a tendency to generate bland and repetitive text to the risk of misleading audiences and amplifying ongoing election misinformation issues. This essay examines ways in which AI — and specifically large language models that generate text — can enhance campaigns’ voter outreach efforts, the cautions that campaigns must exercise when embracing new AI tools,...

We focus primarily on considerations that could influence the decision-making of campaigns themselves. Other essays in this series delve into broader threats to democracy associated with AI use, like the disturbing trend of AI-generated deepfakes in campaigns and AI as a tool for voter suppression, along with... Here, we take a campaign’s-eye view of some of the strengths and weaknesses of generative AI in political advertising and the likely course that the market will take. Throughout history, political campaigns have evolved in tandem with new media platforms, from the rise of radio broadcasting in the 1920s to the proliferation of the internet and social media in the 21st century. In recent years, data analytics and microtargeting tools have become the bedrock of modern campaigning. Campaigns now rely on large data sets that offer detailed insights into citizens’ behaviors, interests, and whereabouts in order to advance their key goals, such as voter mobilization and fundraising.

Yet using this wealth of data to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time demands considerable labor and expertise, as well as precision tools. And this data-driven targeting is not perfect: campaigns sometimes end up delivering the wrong message or targeting the wrong person. AI has the potential to make data-driven tools even more powerful and accessible. From a campaign perspective, AI’s ability to synthesize information about a target audience and generate a persuasive message tailored to that audience’s interests holds great promise for microtargeting efforts. Free AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Bard, are each capable of producing relevant, comprehensive, and sophisticated marketing copy for a target audience. What’s more, such tools can accomplish this task on a massive scale.

AI can fine-tune messages for a diverse array of voter groups and their subgroups, and it can execute these refinements hundreds if not thousands of times daily.

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