Political campaigns across the United States are deploying AI-powered bots to hold personalized text message conversations with thousands of potential voters simultaneously.
These platforms train bots to sound like the candidates themselves, gathering data on voter concerns to shape future campaign messaging strategies.
Aaron Sheeks, the CEO of Akillion, an AI platform that allows users to run their own large language models, said many of his current clients are running for political office.
“Our goal is to put the microphone back in the hand of the voter,” said Sheeks. “We’re giving agencies and political campaigns the ability to have a trained AI employee that can go back and forth and answer questions on police reform or education or tax changes.”
Experts say Republicans have been adopting AI-driven campaign tools faster than Democrats, with GOP strategists describing the technology as a fundamental shift in how campaigns communicate with voters.
“My belief is that this is going to make campaigns more interactive, more responsive and more personalized,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican strategist and director of the Center for Campaign Innovation, a nonprofit that encourages conservative campaigns to adopt new technology.
Wilson noted that in almost all cases the first text message sent to voters is written and sent by a human, with the AI stepping in only once the recipient engages with the message.
Tom Carroll, the CEO of AI-powered text messaging platform Convos, said the era of the long political text message is over, with his platform guiding campaigns and their bots to introduce themselves briefly, then ask a question to initiate a conversation.
“What we’re offering is the greatest volunteer you’ve ever had,” said Carroll. “They’ll respond within 30 seconds, in any language, cutting directly to the question that the person is asking.”
Carroll said Convos launched last year and helped with 10 political campaigns, with a target of over 100 campaigns this cycle, having reached roughly half that number so far.
Marty Santalucia, a partner at Vector Political, a firm focused on generative AI texting, said bots excel at engaging voters, with some people talking to their agent for hours at a time.
“We’ve sent two and a half million text messages this year and had over 20,000 to 30,000 conversations,” said Santalucia. “We’re listening at a scale that campaigns have never listened at before.”
The political texting market expanded significantly in 2020 as candidates struggled to connect with voters at the grassroots level, according to Josh Justice, CEO of peer-to-peer texting platform Peerly.
Justice argued that live phone banks diminished as landlines disappeared, door-to-door canvassing fell out of favor, and social media relationships between candidates and voters became increasingly controlled by tech platforms rather than the campaigns themselves.
Despite the enthusiasm from some corners of the industry, Justice and others raised serious ethical concerns about using generative AI to communicate with voters without adequate disclosure.
“I don’t think it’s ethical to use generative A.I. to communicate with voters,” said Justice. “You can put a disclaimer on there, and that’s going to make it a lot better. But that defeats the purpose of what everybody started out doing.”
Several states are already moving to regulate the practice, with campaigns in North Dakota and California required to disclose to recipients if they are communicating with a virtual assistant in their first message.
Nathan Rifkin, co-CEO at Scale to Win, a tech company focused on grassroots organizing and fundraising for progressives, said the risks of generative AI in campaign messaging outweigh the potential benefits.
“Or you can lead AI chat bots to say some pretty horrific things,” said Rifkin. “If that’s in the voice of the candidate, that can lead to some bad ends.”
Santalucia acknowledged that the reluctance of campaigns to go public with their AI texting use reflects the unsettled state of public opinion, describing it as “very muddy in terms of where public perception is going to fall on this tool.”
A Pew Research Center survey found that Democrats are less confident than Republicans in the government’s ability to regulate AI effectively, a dynamic that tracks with the differing levels of enthusiasm for AI adoption between the two parties’ campaigns.
Wilson suggested the gap may reflect the fact that the two dominant political debates around AI, its environmental footprint and its impact on labor and unions, both cut against Democratic politics rather than Republican ones.
Jessica Alter, co-founder and chair of Tech for Campaigns, a political nonprofit helping Democrats adopt data and digital marketing techniques, said AI is better deployed finding new ways to reach voters than reviving channels that have already worn out their welcome.
“I think AI is not best used to, like, rescue channels that people already hate,” said Alter. “It’s best used to find new ways to do things and find new ways to reach people.”
