In a competitive election, going big is not the only way to get a point across.
A short, visceral text message directed at a small group of voters in a battleground state can be more influential (and harder to correct if the content is untrue) than a slickly produced attack ad airing nationwide, elections experts said. And now, this practice — known as microtargeting — is cheaper and easier to pull off, from content creation to distribution, thanks to artificial intelligence.
Politicians are already using A.I.-powered apps to sift through government census data, commodity prices and voting data from local communities to learn about constituents’ education and employment, according to political experts. The technology can quickly produce videos that go viral, voter outreach texts and personalized ads delivered with exacting aim, and multiple companies now offer A.I. voter targeting services.
Those are messaging “missiles,” said Scott Goodstein, who helped run online operations for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. In today’s information environment, precise, small-scale communiqués can be especially powerful, he said.
“I no longer have to stand in a church parking lot with a flier saying ‘Vote Wednesday,’ when I can literally send out a digital message to a matched voter file saying ‘Vote Wednesday’ or ‘The vote is off’ or ‘Reply to this and your vote will count’,” said Mr. Goodstein, the chief executive of Catalyst Campaigns, a strategic communications firm.
Mr. Obama’s team turned data analytics into a pillar of success for his 2008 presidential campaign. Since then, the practice has remained little changed, according to elections experts. Before A.I. began reshaping how campaigns could be executed, research was mixed on whether microtargeting translated into an increase in actual votes. In 2023, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that political ads were difficult to microtarget at scale and that the strategy was “clearly not mind control.”
A.I., however, changes the game, many elections experts believe. These days, public trust is eroding, fact-checkers are spread thin and voters have had their sense of reality knocked off-kilter, making them susceptible to customized appeals. A huge variety of personal data is also available for purchase.
Elections experts say that the technology can profile voters and analyze and patterns in online behavior, helping campaigns build more sophisticated models about constituent preferences that can be used to test various messaging in real time.
Political microtargeting is effective and can be automated with off-the-shelf tools, according to researchers from the University of Bristol in Britain in 2024. The report found that out of every 100,000 people exposed to tailored political messages, 2,490 could be expected to be persuaded — a notable portion, considering that elections are often decided by thin margins.
Advertisers are also increasingly turning to A.I. when deciding where and when to place ads or generate them. Candidates and political action groups, mostly tied to Republicans, have spent more than $137 million on A.I. ads this year.
Campaigns are tapping A.I. agents that can hold ongoing conversations with constituents over text messages, then analyze the discussions and create a “listening and learning loop that we haven’t really seen before,” said Julie Sweet, the director of advocacy and industry relations at the American Association of Political Consultants, a bipartisan trade group.
A.I.-enabled microtargeting is an opportunity for political players to speak to communities that have been difficult to reach and overlooked, Ms. Sweet said. One platform promises an A.I. agent that serves multilingual messaging to voters concerned about health care, education or economic policy, while collecting their issue priorities and volunteer interest.
“More of these tools are becoming available to the campaigns and they’re less expensive to run than your traditional data and analytics, which means it’s more accessible to more people,” Ms. Sweet said. “It allows campaigns to hear from voters in a much deeper way than a traditional poll, where it’s harder to segment down into different communities.”
Eventually, campaign managers might be able to hit a button and reach 20 million people with 20 million different messages, , according to campaign strategists and political advisers who spoke at a September event at the Harvard Kennedy School.
A.I. is “able to hyper-personalize and microtarget in ways that are many levels above what we were already doing, and now the persuasiveness is on a different scale, too,” said Jevin West, a professor studying misinformation, generative A.I. and collective discourse at the University of Washington, who co-founded the nonpartisan Center for an Informed Public.
Though there are hopes that microtargeting can enable more inclusive campaigning in underserved communities, some misinformation researchers worry that it could be used to deceive or intimidate vulnerable voters. With just $20 in A.I. tools, a Princeton University researcher in August announced that he had reconstructed the exact ballot cast by specific voters in Georgia’s primary in May — information that could easily be exploited for microtargeting by de-anonymizing individuals’ political choices.
Research published this year in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that vote-suppressing ads microtargeted largely to nonwhite people in battleground states in 2016 might have kept 4.7 million people from the polls. The messages, many of them paid for by Russian influence operatives, included suggestions that boycotting the election would send a strong message to politicians.
Hypergranular messaging is difficult to track because the audience is so specific, according to a report last year from the International Panel on the Information Environment, a research group.
For example, on his Truth Social platform in October, President Trump shared a fake endorsement from Denzel Washington, including a fabricated quote claiming that the Oscar-winning actor was “a steadfast supporter.” Election experts said that if voters were microtargeted with similar falsehoods, many people would not bother to fact-check. Regulators and watchdog groups would also be none the wiser.
Some advocacy groups have warned that existing laws overseeing political advertising are outdated. One 35-year-old law, for example, was designed to regulate prerecorded calls and mass robotexts rather than live, adaptive A.I. conversations.
“In the modern era, online microtargeting has opened a new frontier for deception and voter suppression efforts, multiplying their possible scale and allowing potential campaigns to unfold more secretively,” said Mekela Panditharatne, senior counsel with Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights and democracy group. She added that the tactic could also worsen polarization by exposing voters to messages that confirm their beliefs.
Microtargeting “poses a real problem for democratic accountability because those messages aren’t being vetted in the broader public square,” she said.
Foreign influence operatives have also shown interest in the practice, circulating content about down-ballot candidates and local issues.
Graphika, a threat analysis company, found one effort involving 176 accounts on Facebook, Instagram and X posing as South Dakotans this year. Those accounts, which pretended to be farmers and retirees, criticized a resolution from state legislators to sue China over damages related to the Covid-19 pandemic. They also attacked several state representatives online.
In theory, microtargeting could help foreign agents craft more relevant and engaging material that could be distributed surreptitiously in private forums and text campaigns, said Bret Schafer, a senior director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international nonprofit.
While evidence about those strategies are limited, “by design, those campaigns are focused more on reaching specific voters and are less interested in achieving virality,” Mr. Schafer added.
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