Are Democrats Ready for Our First Truly AI Election?

"Every day that we are not adopting this stuff, the other side is moving faster. And I think ultimately that's going to translate into votes." — Jack Welty

This is the first election cycle where what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok say about candidates could actually shape how voters decide. And as Jack Welty sees it, our side isn't ready.

Jack served as Deputy Chief Analytics Officer on the Harris for President campaign and led paid digital analytics for Biden-Harris in 2020. He co-authored a paper on practical AI adoption for campaigns and is the co-creator of Caucus AI, a tool that monitors what AI chatbots are telling voters about candidates across more than 1,100 races.

He joined me on this episode of Hello Merge Tag to talk about something I don't think our side is taking seriously enough.

The conversation covered a lot of ground. But the through line was this: Democrats are falling behind Republicans on AI adoption, and the gap isn't closing. The American Association of Political Consultants found that 44% of Republican consultants use AI daily. Only 28% of Democrats do.

A few things that stuck with me:

The biggest wins from AI aren't the sexy stuff. Jack's argument is that the most underrated use of AI on campaigns is automating the boring, high-volume work that eats up staff hours. On the Harris campaign, his team fed thousands of post-shift volunteer feedback surveys into a language model and got back structured reports by date, state, and issue type. What would have required an engineer and custom code 18 months ago, he says you could now do by dragging a folder into Claude.

AI is a management challenge, not a technical one. This reframe is the most useful thing I took away from the conversation. You don't need to know how to code. You need to know how to delegate, review, and give feedback. The analogy Jack uses — treating AI like an eager but inexperienced junior staffer — is exactly right. You wouldn't hand an intern a blank page and say "write me a report, see you at five." You'd give them examples, context, and check in along the way. Same deal here.

Which chatbot a voter uses quietly determines which media ecosystem they're in. Caucus AI tracks what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok tell voters about candidates. The responses are broadly factual — nobody's telling voters who to pull the lever for. But the sources each model cites are very different. Grok cites social media. ChatGPT leans heavily on its national media partnerships — Axios,