Anchor Change · AI Use by Campaigns Survey · May 2026 · n=68
How campaigns are using AI — right now
Senior-weighted sample: 82% director level or above, 56% consultants, roughly equal R/D split
87%
Use AI daily or several times a week
74%
Say AI will be essential to staying competitive
33%
Have no AI policy at all
Another 12% "in development"
59%
At least somewhat concerned about voter backlash
Tool adoption — partisan split
Claude leads overall, but the AI market is splitting by party
14 of 18 Grok users in this sample are Republican. Only 1 Democrat uses it. The AI market is already sorting by party.
What they're using it for
Still mostly a staff tool — voter-facing use is the exception
Image / video / audio
44%
Chatbots / auto responses
18%
Where AI is primarily deployed
Partisan use case breakdown
Republicans are generating. Democrats are governing.
All use cases by party — % using AI for each
📢 Content creation — biggest partisan gap
Image / video / audio
61%25%
📋 Research & monitoring — closer, but R still leads
Productivity / notes
77%71%
🗳️ Voter-facing — both low
AI policy status by party
Republican (n=31)
Formal 10% · Informal 32% · In dev 3% · None 52%
Democrat (n=28)
Formal 32% · Informal 29% · In dev 18% · None 21%
Democrats are 3x more likely to have a formal AI policy. Republicans are 2.5x more likely to have no policy at all.
Governance gap
Adoption has outrun accountability
AI policy — among daily users only (n=43)
Among daily users: only 27% have a formal policy. Another 27% have none at all.
Biggest concerns (select up to 2)
No internal expertise
30%
Disclosure behavior
Worried, but not disclosing
Disclosure — voter-facing AI users only (n=28)
Of voter-facing AI users: only 12% always disclose. 31% don't disclose or haven't decided.
How concerned are you about voter backlash?
What do you expect AI to do in the next 1–2 cycles?
Important, not decisive
15%
More risk than benefit
4%
Outlook by party
Democrats are more bullish on AI's long-term importance
Say AI will be essential to staying competitive in the next 1–2 election cycles
A 21-point gap — Democrats are producing less AI content but are significantly more convinced of its long-term importance to campaigns.
Beyond the big models
The full stack of a modern AI-forward campaign
Custom / internal tools
29%
29% use custom or internal AI tools built by their team or vendors — not off-the-shelf products. That group is almost entirely at the executive or director level and splits evenly across party lines.
Examples include: Perplexity (research/search), Midjourney / DALL·E (image generation), Whisper / Otter.ai (transcription), Opus Clip / Riverside (video).
Open ends — what practitioners say campaigns aren't thinking about yet
The frontier uses
Answer Engine Optimization — controlling what AI chatbots surface about your candidate when voters search
Democrat · digital comms
AI as content reviewer, not just creator — LLMs critiquing human-generated work to catch what humans miss
Democrat · digital comms · 20+ years experience
Narrative monitoring — identifying emerging narratives before they accelerate, not after
International · campaign management
Agentic media buying — AI placing ad buys autonomously, with human authorization before execution
Democrat · media planning · 20+ years experience
Adjusting messaging to match the reading level (Flesch Reading Ease) of the target electorate
Democrat · data / analytics
Building AI agents to automate previously manual data tasks across campaign operations
Republican · digital comms
Anchor Change survey · May 2026 · n=68 · Senior-weighted, consultant-heavy sample · Not nationally representative