We are nearly one year out from the 2026 midterm elections, and it’s far too early to predict the outcomes. But it’s a safe bet that artificial intelligence technologies will once again be a major storyline.
The widespread fear that AI would be used to manipulate the 2024 U.S. election seems rather quaint in a year where the president posts AI-generated images of himself as the pope on official White House accounts. But AI is a lot more than an information manipulator. It’s also emerging as a politicized issue. Political first-movers are adopting the technology, and that’s opening a gap across party lines.
We expect this gap to widen, resulting in AI being predominantly used by one political side in the 2026 elections. To the extent that AI’s promise to automate and improve the effectiveness of political tasks like personalized messaging, persuasion, and campaign strategy is even partially realized, this could generate a systematic advantage.
Right now, Republicans look poised to exploit the technology in the 2026 midterms. The Trump White House has aggressively adopted AI-generated memes in its online messaging strategy. The administration has also used executive orders and federal buying power to influence the development and encoded values of AI technologies away from “woke” ideology. Going further, Trump ally Elon Musk has shaped his own AI company’s Grok models in his own ideological image. These actions appear to be part of a larger, ongoing Big Tech industry realignment towards the political will, and perhaps also the values, of the Republican party.
Democrats, as the party out of power, are in a largely reactive posture on AI. A large bloc of Congressional Democrats responded to Trump administration actions in April by arguing against their adoption of AI in government. Their letter to the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget provided detailed criticisms and questions about DOGE’s behaviors and called for a halt to DOGE’s use of AI, but also said that they “support implementation of AI technologies in a manner that complies with existing” laws. It was a perfectly reasonable, if nuanced, position, and illustrates how the actions of one party can dictate the political positioning of the opposing party.
These shifts are driven more by political dynamics than by ideology. Big Tech CEOs’ deference to the Trump administration seems largely an effort to curry favor, while Silicon Valley continues to be represented by tech-forward Democrat Ro Khanna. And a June Pew Research poll shows nearly identical levels of concern by Democrats and Republicans about the increasing use of AI in America.
There are, arguably, natural positions each party would be expected to take on AI. An April House subcommittee hearing on AI trends in innovation and competition revealed much about that equilibrium. Following the lead of the Trump administration, Republicans cast doubt on any regulation of the AI industry. Democrats, meanwhile, emphasized consumer protection and resisting a concentration of corporate power. Notwithstanding the fluctuating dominance of the corporate wing of the Democratic party and the volatile populism of Trump, this reflects the parties’ historical positions on technology.
While Republicans focus on cozying up to tech plutocrats and removing the barriers around their business models, Democrats could revive the 2020 messaging of candidates like Andrew Yang and Elizabeth Warren. They could paint an alternative vision of the future where Big Tech companies’ profits and billionaires’ wealth are taxed and redistributed to young people facing an affordability crisis for housing, healthcare, and other essentials.
Moreover, Democrats could use the technology to demonstrably show a commitment to participatory democracy. They could use AI-driven collaborative policymaking tools like Decidim, Pol.Is, and Go Vocal to collect voter input on a massive scale and align their platform to the public interest.
It’s surprising how little these kinds of sensemaking tools are being adopted by candidates and parties today. Instead of using AI to capture and learn from constituent input, candidates more often seem to think of AI as just another broadcast technology—good only for getting their likeness and message in front of people. A case in point: British Member of Parliament Mark Sewards, presumably acting in good faith, recently attracted scorn after releasing a vacuous AI avatar of himself to his constituents.
Where the political polarization of AI goes next will probably depend on unpredictable future events and how partisans opportunistically seize on them. A recent European political controversy over AI illustrates how this can happen.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, a member of the country’s Moderate party, acknowledged in an August interview that he uses AI tools to get a “second opinion” on policy issues. The attacks from political opponents were scathing. Kristersson had earlier this year advocated for the EU to pause its trailblazing new law regulating AI and pulled an AI tool from his campaign website after it was abused to generate images of him appearing to solicit an endorsement from Hitler. Although arguably much more consequential, neither of those stories grabbed global headlines in the way the Prime Minister’s admission that he himself uses tools like ChatGPT did.
Age dynamics may govern how AI’s impacts on the midterms unfold. One of the prevailing trends that swung the 2024 election to Trump seems to have been the rightward migration of young voters, particularly white men. So far, YouGov’s political tracking poll does not suggest a huge shift in young voters’ Congressional voting intent since the 2022 midterms.
Embracing—or distancing themselves from—AI might be one way the parties seek to wrest control of this young voting bloc. While the Pew poll revealed that large fractions of Americans of all ages are generally concerned about AI, younger Americans are much more likely to say they regularly interact with, and hear a lot about, AI, and are comfortable with the level of control they have over AI in their lives. A Democratic party desperate to regain relevance for and approval from young voters might turn to AI as both a tool and a topic for engaging them.
Voters and politicians alike should recognize that AI is no longer just an outside influence on elections. It’s not an uncontrollable natural disaster raining deepfakes down on a sheltering electorate. It’s more like a fire: a force that political actors can harness and manipulate for both mechanical and symbolic purposes.
A party willing to intervene in the world of corporate AI and shape the future of the technology should recognize the legitimate fears and opportunities it presents, and offer solutions that both address and leverage AI.
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