A New AI Tool Lets Candidates See What Chatbots Are Telling Voters

In California’s gubernatorial primary, Tom Steyer had the biggest war chest in a crowded field of Democrats, spending more than $200 million out of his own pocket. But money alone wasn’t enough — he ended up placing third, falling just short in his quest to compete for November’s general election.

A contributing factor, according to a case study shared with NOTUS, was the unflattering response voters were presented with when they asked artificial intelligence-powered chatbots about Steyer’s candidacy. In fact, according to most models, the billionaire was just lucky to have made it into the top three.

“In ranked lists of working-class affordability candidates, AI explicitly placed him [Steyer] sixth. Cost-of-living: sixth. Education funding: sixth,” the progressive political organization Run for Something reported in its case study, which found that Reddit threads in r/California were frequently cited next to more established mainstream newsrooms like CalMatters.

As the AI industry continues to pitch its nascent technology as a resource for voters in understanding complicated political matters, there’s little public insight into how models arrive at their conclusions, making it incredibly difficult for candidates and their campaigns to message through the increasingly popular medium.

There’s little assurance, for example, that chatbots will cite candidates’ websites or public statements when most major tech companies train their models on databases filled primarily with social media posts.

It’s a problem Run for Something is hoping to solve with a new AI tool called CampSight, which launched earlier this month. The new program runs AI chats in real browser sessions to mimic how voters communicate with other large language models like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, compiling the responses to help candidates understand how their message is being received.

“We have already seen there is so much discrepancy between how a candidate describes themselves and how AI is describing them,” Amanda Litman, a cofounder of Run for Something, told NOTUS.

Through CampSight, Litman said her organization is trying to “lift up what voters are seeing, and then help make recommendations to candidates on how to influence it,” noting that any suggestion made by the tool should be reviewed by candidates themselves. CampSight can also run queries based on different baseline personas the system developed.

“You can see how a single mom who really cares about child care might be getting a different answer than an older retiree whose main focus is their Social Security,” Litman said.

It’s part of a broader effort in both parties to make sense of how to use AI chatbots as a messaging tool. Many operatives admitted to NOTUS earlier this year that they had not thought much about large language models, or LLMs, even as their popularity has skyrocketed.

“Nobody has written that playbook yet on the LLM stuff,” said Pat Dennis, the president of the liberal group American Bridge 21st Century. “So a lot of people just aren’t doing it.”

Dustin Lloyd, an Army veteran endorsed by Run for Something in his race for state House District 39 in Missouri, spoke with NOTUS after using CampSight for a few weeks. Lloyd, who’s campaigning on lowering the cost of living, supporting veterans and increasing access to mental health resources, said the tool has helped him deliver these messages in a “more readable and understandable” way.

“My social media — since using CampSight and just being consistent — my views and the reach of everything in regards to the platform on social media has blown up,” Lloyd said.

CampSight has recommended “better verbiage or wording” for the policy pages on Lloyd’s website by explaining “how certain keywords will stand out more” in other AI chatbot searches. The tool also suggested adding specific coding to improve his website’s search engine optimization to help chatbots pick it up.

The Army veteran said the tool is “very affordable for a grassroots candidate” like himself who’s running a campaign with little outside help. Lloyd appeared encouraged that CampSight found he shows up in certain queries significantly more than his opponents, Democrat Tanya Lakins and Republican state Rep. Mark Meirath (who currently holds the seat).

Run for Something is “still working” on making strategic recommendations through the tool, like telling candidates to pitch to certain media outlets that CampSight has found get “lifted up to the top of every search,” Litman said.

She and her team spent close to a year building the tool. Through extensive research for CampSight, the team found that popular chatbots often left out results from publications with paywalls and from news companies that had filed lawsuits against AI companies. Media companies like The New York Times use software to block AI from scraping their sites, making them even less likely to show up on chatbot searches. LLMs also cited social media sites like Facebook and Instagram far less than Reddit and LinkedIn, according to Litman.

When it came to AI chatbots citing candidates’ actual websites, Litman said it “depends on how credible and how well structured the candidate website is.” Ballotpedia, a nonprofit, nonpartisan digital encyclopedia for American politics, “was a huge source of information,” for the LLMs Litman’s organization reviewed.

“We found that for a while, if you were asking in Mississippi who’s running for the United States Senate or who should I vote for, it would not even list the Democrat running for office,” Litman said. “That’s not malicious censorship, there wasn’t well-structured information about it.”

Run for Something “soft launch[ed]” CampSight over the past few months, building a waitlist of more than 60 campaigns and organizations in addition to the close to 400 candidates the group plans to endorse this year.

Litman, who’s worked on multiple national campaigns, said she’s excited to step into this space because tools like CampSight are often used internally by large presidential campaigns and never offered publicly.

“This is a chance to really go on offense,” Litman said. “As far as I know, no one on the right is doing anything like this.”

NOTUS analyzed AI tools offered by right-leaning organizations and did not find similar products that operate in the same manner by scraping popular chatbots and providing recommendations to candidates.

Neither the National Republican Congressional Committee nor the Republican National Committee responded to a request for comment on whether or not they provide resources for campaigns to track or influence chatbots’ responses.