Experts are registering an unusual level of hardship in the recent US election campaign. The results of the midterms will also decide the race to succeed Trump.
US President Donald Trump: The US election campaign was characterized by unprecedented intensity. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP/dpa
The election campaign in the US midterm elections is characterized by particularly personal and violent attacks against candidates, which experts classify as a new quality.
An analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project shows 220 advertisements for this election campaign that were at least partially created with the help of artificial intelligence.
According to the analysis, supporters of Republican candidates use AI significantly more frequently in election campaigns than Democratic candidates.
Election campaign researcher Erik Nisbet sees the current election as a dress rehearsal for 2028 and warns of increasing use of AI.
The summary was created and editorially checked using AI.
Washington. “Freak”, “jihadist”, “stupid Democrat”, “pervert” – the list of insults that US President Donald Trump and his colleagues have hurled at the political opponents of his Republican candidates in the US midterm elections in recent months is long. And this year's election campaign is full of low points, even by American standards.
Most recently, a commercial by the Republican candidate for governor in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, caused outrage across the country. In the TV clip, the mother of his Democratic competitor Amy Acton claims that her daughter is a notorious liar. What it doesn't mention is that Acton hasn't had any contact with her mother since she was twelve.
She lost custody of her and her brother after her husband, who was not the children's biological father, was charged with raping Acton, who was then twelve years old. Acton's mother remained on the run with the man until his death.
Even the incumbent Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, expressed shock at the election ad in a long, emotional statement and called on Ramaswamy to withdraw it. But he didn't even think about it. Both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance even explicitly supported him.
Personal attacks
US election campaigns have always pushed boundaries and spread extreme messages. One of the most famous TV commercials of all time is a campaign contribution by Lyndon B. Johnson from 1964. In it, a little girl counts the petals of a daisy - when she reaches "ten", the viewer sees the explosion of an atomic bomb in her eyes for a few seconds. The message: If you don't vote for the Democrat, you risk nuclear war.
Amy Acton: Ohio's Democratic gubernatorial candidate was vilified by her competitor, Vivek Ramaswamy. Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP/dpa
But experts see a new quality in the recent election campaign - the attacks have become more personal. “It's probably one of the ugliest election campaigns when it comes to talking about certain candidates and attacking them in different ways,” says Erik Nisbet, professor of political communication at Northwestern University in the US state of Illinois, in an interview with Handelsblatt. The Ramaswamy campaign's ad was "one of the ugliest campaign ads ever broadcast in TV history."
Another example of how personal and violent the attacks have become: Republican Senator from Kansas, Roger Marshall, accused his Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton at a campaign event of “grooming” children, i.e. planning to initiate a relationship with children with the purpose of sexually abusing them.
Strategically crucial
How the candidates and their respective campaigns perform in the elections will determine the parties' strategy in the presidential campaigns - and which candidates they field. “If Vivek Ramaswamy wins, it could justify such infamies,” says campaign expert Nisbet. “Even though the advertising might have nothing to do with it, he would say, 'Look, our strategy worked.'"
Observers like Nisbet also point to the massive use of advertising videos made with artificial intelligence (AI) in this election campaign.
In an analysis of the midterm campaign, the Wesleyan Media Project found 220 ads that were created, at least in part, using AI tools. The organization estimates that more than $137 million was spent on this. “For comparison, we identified less than $50,000 in AI-generated ad spending in the 2024 election cycle,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project. A large part of AI use is also not labeled.
Supporters of Republican candidates use AI significantly more often than those of Democratic candidates. According to the analysis, 81 percent of AI-generated ads were funded by Republican candidates or groups, but only 12 percent by Democratic ones.
Ken Paxton, Republican candidate for the Texas Senate seat, distributed an AI-generated video of his Democratic opponent James Talarico. In it, the artificially generated Talarico rewrites the Bible so that there are “six genders”.
Another AI-generated video shows Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who is defending her office against Republican candidate Bruce Blakeman, walking with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. They are talking about a fictitious “Kathy pill,” according to which the consumer doesn’t care about anything, such as the high cost of living.
And something else was new to this extent in the last election campaign: the generation of information about candidates or their opponents purely for the purpose of manipulating the results of chat programs. According to campaign researcher Nisbet, this involves “AI-generated articles or information that are essentially used to penetrate the AI Internet so that the AI summary in search queries is based on false or misleading information.”
The Newsguard organization found that leading AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude referred to partisan websites posing as independent local news outlets 48.2 percent of the time on average when asked about candidates and issues related to the midterm elections that those websites had covered.
Experts expect that this type of “pink slime,” as the method is called, will be used many times more frequently in 2028. The number of people who currently rely on AI is still relatively small, says Nisbet. It will be larger in the next election, simply because the use of AI will then be even more extensive. “The current election is a dress rehearsal for 2028,” he says.
