Artificial intelligence has already transformed the workplace and reshaped the battlefield. Now it is coming for the ballot box — and it is arriving with hundreds of millions of dollars behind it.
The 2026 US midterm elections are shaping up to be the first in which AI plays a central, substantive role — not as a curiosity or a talking point, but as a financial force, a campaigning tool, a policy battleground, and a source of deepening public anxiety all at once. The technology is influencing how candidates raise money, how they communicate with voters, what issues dominate the conversation, and who wins and loses in districts from Manhattan to Texas.
“This is the first AI election from a substantive perspective,” said Beth Simone Noveck, director of the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. “It’s front and centre in the substance of the conversation.”
A wall of Silicon Valley money
The most visible sign of AI’s arrival in politics is financial. Technology companies and their backers have pledged $275 million toward federal and state races in the midterms, with $44.5 million already spent on federal primaries alone. If fully deployed, that would surpass the $133 million the cryptocurrency industry spent in 2024 — a campaign that helped unseat multiple Democratic incumbents including Senate Banking Committee chair Sherrod Brown.
Leading the charge is venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, who are among the primary funders of Leading the Future, a super PAC planning to spend at least $125 million backing candidates who favour a lighter regulatory touch on AI. The group opposes individual states setting their own AI rules, pushing instead for a softer federal standard.
On the other side, Public First Action — a political nonprofit that has received $20 million from AI company Anthropic — is funding candidates who support stricter oversight, including requirements for companies to disclose safety risks to regulators. The two organisations have effectively turned certain congressional races into proxy battles over the future of AI governance.
The most striking example played out in a House district in central Manhattan, where Democratic state assemblyman Alex Bores, a proponent of tougher AI safety legislation, became the target of over $8 million in opposition spending from Leading the Future’s Democratic arm. Public First Action countered with more than $15 million in support. Bores ultimately lost to fellow assemblyman Micah Lasher, who had previously worked as an aide to Michael Bloomberg — a $10 million contributor to his campaign.
What voters actually think
All that industry investment has run straight into a wall of public hostility that the money did not anticipate.
Seven in ten Americans now oppose new AI data centres, according to a recent Gallup survey, with energy consumption and water usage cited as the leading concerns. Electricity bills in some areas have surged by as much as 267% as the industry’s infrastructure buildout — projected at up to $725 billion in spending this year alone — drives up wholesale power prices. Younger voters increasingly connect AI with the disappearance of entry-level jobs. When former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt mentioned AI at a University of Arizona commencement ceremony, graduates booed.
“If you think about AI, everything feels like it’s out of people’s control, it’s in the hands of these tech titans,” said Sarah Kreps, a professor focused on technology and politics at Cornell University. “That’s creating backlash.”
That backlash is surfacing in campaign ads across the country. In New Jersey, a spot supporting Democratic Representative Rob Menendez frames him as standing up to corporations whose data centres are driving energy costs higher. In Virginia, Montana and Wyoming, similar messaging is finding traction in districts where AI infrastructure had not previously been a political issue at all.
Progressives have moved to capitalise on the sentiment. Senators Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a nationwide moratorium on new data centre construction in March. New York lawmakers approved a one-year statewide pause that would be the first of its kind in the US if signed by Governor Kathy Hochul. In Virginia, Compass Datacenters abandoned a years-long effort to build a 2,100-acre technology corridor in April, citing public resistance.
Deepfakes on the ballot
While the policy debate plays out, campaigns are simultaneously embracing AI as an operational tool — and confronting its darker possibilities.
Computer-generated videos have moved from novelty to standard feature in high-profile races across California, Texas and Kentucky. A viral animated series depicting long-shot Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt as a Batman-like superhero battling incumbent Mayor Karen Bass as a Joker villain drove a surge in donations to his campaign, demonstrating AI’s capacity to give underfunded outsiders a visibility they could not otherwise afford.
The risks are equally real. Illinois Democratic Representative Sean Casten was depicted in an AI-generated clip — circulated anonymously on Facebook using only his official congressional portrait — calling for jailing Trump supporters, defunding police and distributing fentanyl to homeless people. Meta agreed to label the post as AI-generated but declined to remove it.
“It would not surprise me to see in every competitive race AI-generated ads of the Democrat hanging out on Jeffrey Epstein’s island,” Casten said. “We need to be prepared for a lot of that.”
Thirty states now have rules governing deepfakes in campaign advertising, with most requiring disclosure of AI use and funding sources. Minnesota and Texas have gone further, prohibiting political deepfakes within a set number of days before an election. Outright bans remain constitutionally difficult under US free speech protections.
AI as a campaign issue — and a governing challenge
The tension at the heart of the 2026 midterms is that AI is simultaneously a tool campaigns want to use, a source of voter anger they need to manage, and a policy question that is splitting both parties along unexpected lines.
In Texas, Republican congressional candidate Jace Yarbrough published an op-ed praising AI investment and won his runoff with backing from Leading the Future. In Illinois, progressive state senator Robert Peters — who introduced legislation to regulate the industry — believes he was targeted by AI-backed spending precisely because of that bill. He went on to join 51 colleagues in voting for an AI safety measure requiring third-party audits of developers.
“This creates a chilling effect down-ballot,” Peters said. “This impacts how people at the state legislature or municipal level think about these policies because they see these rich billionaire corporate leaders flooding money into the political system and willing to lie to the public.”
Even some Republicans are breaking with the pro-AI consensus. Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Stacy Garrity has called for a moratorium on new data centres. Florida’s Byron Donalds, despite receiving a $5 million spending pledge from Leading the Future, said in June that he believes states rather than the federal government should lead on AI regulation.
Looking toward 2028
The midterms are, by most accounts, a preview of something larger. Fifty-five percent of US voters under 45 say they are likely to use AI chatbots to research candidates and elections, according to a survey by progressive think tank Data for Progress — a shift that is already prompting strategists to think about how to optimise for AI-generated responses in the same way they once optimised for search engines.
Goldman Sachs estimates AI is currently eliminating around 11,000 jobs per month across industries including marketing, customer service and technology, while data centre construction has added 212,000 jobs since 2022 and contributed to a 10.4% rise in business investment that helped lift first-quarter US growth to a 2% annualised rate.
Virginia Senator Mark Warner, who describes himself as pro-AI while calling for greater corporate accountability, put the broader stakes plainly.
“This is the warm-up round,” he said. “I’ll make a big wager this will be the defining issue of the presidential in 2028.”
