Political pundits thought that artificial intelligence technology might change the landscape of campaigns forever, starting with this election cycle.
Some of the projections were that AI would lead to groundbreaking new ways to reach potential voters, while some worried about the dangers that the emerging technology would present.
But, with only a little less than three months until Election Day, it’s apparent that many of those thoughts, and fears, haven’t panned out in a way that many believed they would.
AI has played a role in the political landscape this cycle, but its effects haven’t been as dramatic as many thought they might. Most campaigns have used AI in “ground-level” practices of persuasion, as a recent Politico report highlighted.
There are many AI firms that are involved in helping campaigns unearth insights that are driven by AI data. Using some machine learning techniques such as clustering and neural networks, the companies help campaigns make some sense out of the literally millions of voter profiles there are in the country.
Alexander Jones, who works at Resonate as a senior survey analyst, explained one of 10 different voter segments his AI marketing firm has created:
“Cyber Crusaders … socially conservative, but fiscally liberal. This is a male dominated group, often in white collar jobs. They are majority-minority and majority-millennial and very religious.
“This is the persuasion target going into Election Day. They are high turnout and deeply divided. They get their name Cyber Crusaders due to their religiosity, as well as being the most trusting of online ads both on Facebook and YouTube.”
Voter profiles, of course, are nothing new. Monikers such as “soccer moms” have been used to describe large swaths of the voting population for years.
It’s just that today, AI is helping campaigns adapt to the ever-evolving spectrum of voters.
Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns” and an editor at Politico, explained it this way:
“There’s nothing conceptually new about this. About 20 years ago, the availability of consumer data, changes in database architecture and advances in statistical modeling made it possible for campaigns for the first time to have predictive insights about individual voters, as opposed to treating them as parts of large demographic categories or geographic zones.”
The field, though, is getting much more sophisticated, and it’s thanks to machine learning, not large language models such as ChatGPT that everyone tends to think about when someone mentions AI.
AI-powered technology is allowing firms such as Resonate to help political campaigns of all types collect and scour through millions of voter profiles that have thousands of data points each.
What this means, according to Issenberg, is that this type of analysis is more attainable to political campaigns. As she explained:
“A type of profiling that might have been available to a Senate campaign could become available to a city council candidate. If [AI] allows non-technologically skilled campaign staffers to fully use micro-targeted data, that’s a big deal on campaigns.”
