Americans are turning to chatbots created by Silicon Valley leftists to determine how they will vote in the midterm elections. For example, Adam Johnson, a West Virginia Republican who despises the MAGA movement, spent a September evening asking ChatGPT to help him make sense of his midterm ballot.
NPR reports that Johnson, who is studying to become an illustrator, already uses ChatGPT for meal planning, job hunting and other household tasks. This time he wanted help with something bigger: deciding how to vote. He typically votes Republican but refuses to support the MAGA movement, picking Democrats or third-party candidates instead. That night, he wanted to compare Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) with challenger Rachel Fetty Anderson in West Virginia’s Senate race.
Johnson isn’t unusual. About half of American adults say they use AI chatbots, according to Pew Research Center, and roughly 42 percent of those users turn to the tools to search for information.
Johnson opened his ballot research by bringing up an earlier run-in with the chatbot’s caution around politics. “A previous time I brought up politics you didn’t seem to want any part of it. You just gave a simple ‘I can’t help you with that.’ So, I don’t know if we want to go into what my guiding principles are,” he wrote. ChatGPT responded: “We can discuss your guiding principles. I shouldn’t try to manipulate your political views or tell you how to vote, but I can help investigate candidates according to criteria you choose, compare evidence, discuss political philosophy, and reason through priorities.”
When Johnson raised immigration, telling the bot “Immigrants/refugees is an interesting one because I am left on that issue. Let’s touch on that,” ChatGPT laid out the candidates’ positions in detail: “We briefly separated border enforcement, illegal immigration, asylum, legal immigration, and refugee resettlement. Capito has supported stronger border enforcement, ICE/CBP funding, the Laken Riley Act, and Trump administration border policies. Fetty Anderson had less detailed immigration material publicly available at the time, so I avoided assigning her generic Democratic positions without evidence.” Johnson had wanted something shorter. “I just wanted to touch on it,” he replied. The chatbot conceded the point: “Fair – I turned ‘touch on that’ into an immigration policy seminar.”
Johnson still has county commission races left to research before he finishes his ballot. Looking back on the exchange, he said he’s noticed the tool tends to flatter rather than challenge him. “ChatGPT is just kind of a people pleaser. Whatever you lean towards, it will speak positively about it,” he said.
Rafael Batista, a fellow at Johns Hopkins University who studies how AI shapes people’s experience of the world, said that tendency can quietly entrench existing views instead of broadening them. “It might select some things that would reinforce and persuade you even more towards the way that you were leaning already. So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world,” he said. Recognizing and resisting that pull is hard, he added: people need to “protect our minds from these influences.” Batista also suggested users hide their personal preferences in prompts and browse in incognito mode, to limit bias drawn from a chatbot’s memory of past conversations.
Other voters described similar habits, with their own workarounds. Lisa Veldran, 65, who spent nearly four decades as a staffer for the Madison, Wisconsin City Council before retiring, used Gemini this summer to compare gubernatorial primary candidates Francesca Hong and David Crowley after Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez dropped out of the race. Veldran said voters need to stay mindful of who is behind the technology: “You also have to keep in m[ind]” who owns and builds these tools.
Wynton Hall, author of the New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, demonstrated AI’s political bias when he documented that Google Gemini AI smeared Republican senators, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as “hate speech violators:
Using Google Gemini Pro’s “deep research” setting, I asked the AI chatbot the following: “Based on your hate speech policies, assess the statements of the current 100 U.S. Senators and list the names and party affiliations of those Senators who have made statements that violate your hate speech policies.”
Gemini generated a comprehensive report, first covered by Fox News, totaling over 3,400 words in length titled: “Analytical Assessment of Congressional Rhetoric: Evaluating U.S. Senatorial Discourse against Algorithmic Hate Speech Safety Standards.” Despite Google receiving billions of dollars in federal multi-year contracts, and despite President Donald Trump’s 2025 AI Action Plan stating that “AI systems must be free from ideological bias” in order to receive lucrative federal procurement contracts, Gemini AI declared that the following seven Republican Senators, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are guilty of violating Gemini’s “hate speech policies.”
Read more at NPR here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.