What AI is (and isn't) doing to campaigns

For a while, it looked like AI was going to blow up campaign politics in 2024. Powerful new tools, new persuasion techniques, less policing of social-media platforms, all were leading up to a landscape transformed, maybe dangerously so. With less than three months before the 2024 Presidential Election, despite a handful of controversies and deepfake scares, it hasn’t quite panned out that way. The evolution of AI as a tool for political microtargeting means the field is slowly getting more sophisticated in what it can do. But its effects have been more subtle, less of a revolution and more of a nudge in the direction things were already heading. Sasha Issenberg, a POLITICO editor who wrote the definitive book on the early growth of data-driven politics said, “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.”