Imagining Two Possible Futures of AI In Political Campaigning
The American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC) recently polled campaigners across the partisan spectrum about artificial intelligence. One result stood out: opinions on AI’s long-term impact sharply diverge.
Fifty four percent (54%) of respondents predicted that AI’s future impact on political campaigns and consulting will be as a useful tool, but not fundamentally change the industry. Forty one percent (41%) said that the technology would fundamentally transform the industry.
Let’s imagine the two possible futures. The first, where AI is yet another useful tool in the campaigner’s arsenal, similar to social media or P2P texting, but doesn’t upend the basic outline of the professional campaign industry. The second, where AI fundamentally changes the political consulting industry making it practically unrecognizable to today.
AI Useful Tool
We already have early glimpses of what AI as useful tool in campaigning. It’s a combination of time saving and more efficiency. Incremental improvements.
With AI, campaigners can write TV ad scripts, polling questionnaires, blog posts, email copy, policy papers, and more faster than ever before. Quality still hinges on strong prompts and careful human editing, but the time savings are real.
State laws and platform rules limit synthetic media in politics, yet mainstream tools—Canva, Adobe, and others—now bake generative AI into everyday workflows, letting staff create graphics, voice-overs, and short videos faster.
When it comes to voter modeling, targeting, and data analysis, AI can bring the capabilities of much more talented data scientists within reach for campaigns down the ballot. We can expect that savvy entrepreneurs will continue to use AI to productize expertise that was previously too expensive for down ballot campaigns.
In short, AI behaves like a well-trained intern: it accelerates tasks we already perform without changing the underlying structure.
Candidates will still run marketing efforts to brand themselves among voters, get voters to change their minds about issues, and turnout their voters at election time. Radio, TV, and the internet each followed a similar trajectory of incremental steps along the same road.
AI as Fundamentally Transformative
But what if this is only the first wave? Unlike previous media and technology shifts, AI can reason, create, and iterate in ways that rival, or even surpass, humans. We’ll see the early transformation as described above, but it won’t stop there.
Imagine a campaign that exists primarily as an AI agent. It encompasses the candidate’s biography, issue positions, personal beliefs, and communication style. The campaign AI continuously ingests new polling, media coverage, voter contact data, and public sentiment. It personalizes every interaction to each voter’s needs and preferences.
Voters, in turn, might chat with the candidate through a smart speaker in a “kitchen-table” conversation. They could watch an entirely AI-generated town hall where voters and AI posse specific questions. Voters could browse a hyper-personalized website designed instantly by the AI.
Some voters might want to outsource the whole process to their own AI agent that knows where they stand on key issues, review the candidates’ proposals, request an absentee ballot, and provide a list of suggestions for the voter.
In this scenario, the skills campaigners need will shift from message crafting and field organizing to agent training, data stewardship, and AI ethics.
What Tips the Scale?
Historically, campaigns wait to adopt technology when voters are ready. For example, QR codes were invented in the 1990s, but only with the advent of smartphones did users have the ability to scan them. Still, it wasn’t until the COVID pandemic when we saw adoption reach critical mass where campaigns began incorporating QR codes.
We can observe similar trend lines in the proliferation of campaign websites and home internet growth or smartphone adoption and social media campaigning.
The same gatekeeper – user adoption – applies to AI. If voters recoil from AI-driven interactions, candidates will succeed by emphasizing human authenticity. Instead of criticizing political consultants and poll-tested talking points, we’ll hear aspiring candidates distinguish themselves from AI-driven politicians.
If, instead, society embraces radical personalization powered by AI, campaigns will become infinitely composable, meeting each individual voter in whatever medium, format, or style they prefer.
