On a recent afternoon, Alex Bond was standing outside his home in York, Pa., ticking off the political issues of greatest concern to him. After gas prices and taxes, he named data centers — the massive warehouses that consume enormous amounts of energy to make artificial intelligence function.
“A.I. is terrible,” said Mr. Bond, a 29-year-old account manager at a company that provides ankle monitors. “And it’s probably going to kill us all.”
He was speaking with a pair of political canvassers, sent to Pennsylvania’s competitive 10th Congressional District at the recommendation of Janelle Stelson, the Democratic candidate, as part of an old-fashioned door-knocking operation.
What Mr. Bond didn’t realize was that his comments would soon be processed inside one of those very A.I. data centers.
After their chat ended, one of the canvassers, who was volunteering with Swing Left, a Democratic political group, recapped what Mr. Bond said into a phone app. That memo was then analyzed by an A.I. tool alongside hundreds of other memos from similar door-knocks happening around the district. The A.I. tool synthesized what voters like Mr. Bond were saying, feeding reports that the campaign could use to tailor its messages and turn persuadable voters like him into supporters.
“Everything a person is saying is a data point,” said Violet Kopp, one of the canvassers and Swing Left’s organizing program manager for the East Coast.
Republican and Democratic candidates and strategists who were once wary of A.I. tools or overwhelmed by them are now rushing to give their campaigns an A.I. upgrade. Those who do so could reap the rewards in the midterm elections in November and, ultimately, in the 2028 presidential campaign. Those who don’t could fall far behind.
But this seismic shift in how politicians run for office is also being met by pushback on multiple fronts, including from voters and campaign staffers who feel distrustful of A.I. and fearful about its potential to wipe out jobs, devour energy and harm the planet.
Polls show that Democrats are more leery of A.I. tools than Republicans, and progressive strategists have wrestled with how to deploy the tools in their campaigns without rattling volunteers or unionized staffers who are worried about losing their jobs. Republican strategists have said they get fewer complaints from staffers, though conservative voters still tend to feel concerned about A.I.
Political candidates are caught in the middle, more eager than ever to reap the benefits of A.I. while staying out of the political muck over its many costs.
“It’s a political liability,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican strategist and the director of the Center for Campaign Innovation, a nonprofit focused on encouraging conservative campaigns to adopt new technology. “If voters don’t like A.I., they don’t want to know that their candidate’s campaign is using A.I. to do stuff like draft emails or create press releases or edit videos. So you’re just not going to see people bragging about it. But it is happening.”
A.I.-generated videos and images are the public face of this overhaul. Spencer Pratt, a Republican who ran for mayor of Los Angeles in this month’s primary, boosted his profile with help from A.I.-generated content that mocked his opponents and created dystopian images of Los Angeles. He ultimately lost his bid.
Behind the scenes, though, campaign managers and consultants have rapidly embedded A.I. into nearly every tool to analyze voter data, craft campaign materials and write custom messages to micro-segments of the electorate.
A new survey, published by the technology and politics newsletter Anchor Change, showed that 87 percent of campaigners and strategists are using A.I. daily as part of their work. The tools are the focus of monthly conference calls by one progressive nonprofit, drawing hundreds of attendees who swap tips on using A.I. to improve campaign operations or write targeted messages.
Opposition researchers are likewise tapping A.I. to sift through campaign finance data and uncover potentially damaging story lines. American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic-aligned group, has used A.I. to help investigate about 250 Republican candidates and politicians, and credits the technology for helping it dig into 17 Republicans in the House who are in relatively safe districts. “A.I. is surfacing flags to humans, who vet the projects, expand on them, and get them out the door,” said Pat Dennis, the president of American Bridge.
A.I. is a top priority for Kate Gage, the executive director of the Higher Ground Institute, a progressive incubator that pushes progressive groups to adopt new technology.
“Basically my whole life right now is figuring out how to get campaigns to identify what the use cases are,” she said.
Ms. Gage’s group plays host to hundreds of strategists each month during digital “A.I. open mics,” where they swap tips on how to overhaul old-fashioned campaign strategies with an A.I. twist. That burst of interest has fed an online database featuring nearly 100 distinct A.I. tools for writing campaign messages or managing voter data. One idea describes turning a policy brief into a week’s worth of social media posts using ChatGPT and other A.I. tools.
Ms. Gage said the tools have revolutionized political organizing, giving campaigns the ability to conduct more sophisticated research more quickly. “We’ve had a lot of unstructured information and data, but we haven’t been able to analyze it.”
Her work is part of an outreach campaign to encourage candidates, strategists and party officials to use A.I. in ways that will transform campaigns. The midterms are the best testing grounds, A.I. advocates say, letting campaigns create the upgrades that will ultimately get the next president elected.
The campaign for Saikat Chakrabarti, who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in California’s 11th Congressional District, replaced nearly all the tools it would normally have paid for — from canvassing apps to phone banking software — with its own versions using A.I. tools coded by just three staffers.
The push hasn’t always gone smoothly. One progressive group said it has fielded angry emails over how A.I. is intruding into campaigns.
Those concerns could slow the adoption of A.I. among Democratic campaigns while Republican campaigns rush forward, giving one party an edge in razor-thin contests.
“I think it’s a strategic error on their part,” said Mr. Wilson, the director of the Center for Campaign Innovation. “Whereas Republicans are saying, ‘OK, how can we use this to help us win and give us an advantage?’”
Like Ms. Gage, Mr. Wilson trains political operatives on how to adopt A.I.
The Republican Party has rushed to embed A.I. into nearly everything, Mr. Wilson said, tending to rely more on private companies backed by significant funding rather than the nonprofit model preferred by Democrats.
The parties have also taken different approaches to the technology itself. In a blog post about A.I. ethics, Mr. Wilson wrote that creating A.I.-generated videos of an opponent is acceptable so long as they reflect what the candidate actually said. By contrast, a course on A.I. offered by the National Democratic Training Committee said campaigners should never create such content because it “undermines democratic discourse and voter trust.”
Mr. Wilson acknowledged that the push to include A.I. has made some strategists uncomfortable, but said that the technology was too valuable to ignore.
“I’ll be giving a talk, and someone will say, you know, what about the morality of it?” he said. “And that’s a fine debate to have, but we’re trying to win elections.”
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