Democrats are teaching candidates how to use AI to win elections

Fast Company

4 hours ago

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Artificial intelligence is moving from a buzzword to a working tool in politics. The National Democratic Training Committee (NDTC), which has trained more than 120,000 Democrats since its founding in 2016, has launched its first playbook on how campaigns can use AI responsibly.
The three-part training explains how AI works and offers guidance on using it to draft speeches, phone-banking scripts, and social media posts. It also highlights clear boundaries, warning campaigns not to create deepfakes, impersonate people, or generate misleading images and videos. Candidates are encouraged to disclose when AI has been used in content creation, particularly in personal messaging or policy development, as a way to build transparency and trust.
The project was created in partnership with the Higher Ground Institute. For NDTC founder and CEO Kelly Dietrich, the goal is to make sure Democratic campaigns have the knowledge and confidence to use AI effectively. Fast Company spoke with Dietrich about the new training, the opportunities it opens, and the standards he believes campaigns must uphold. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you feel campaigns needed something like this training?
AI is increasingly becoming a part of everyday life. Politics are traditionally lagging in adoption of new technology. Candidates especially are a little tenuous about adopting new tech and strategies that aren't proven. That's because running for office is sometimes the biggest decision of someone's life, and candidates are sometimes scared to try something new and fail. That way, if they don't win, they can say, 'Well, I did everything right.'
We're constantly trying to get people to stay on the cutting edge and understand how new tools can make their campaigns more effective. The training that we've put together shows people how to understand AI. And this isn't like a college course; you don't need to understand how AI is built. But you should understand what it can and cannot do, and how you can use it ethically and most effectively on your campaign.
When most of us think about campaigns, we think about big presidential [ones] or maybe a really fancy congressional race. That's not reality for 99% of the campaigns run in our country. There's more than 518,000 elected officials. Only 537 of them are at the federal level, only 15,000 and change are at the state level. The other half million-plus are local offices: city council, school board, library board, county boards, all of these elected offices that very few people think of but have a very important and direct effect on our lives. And for 90-plus percent of those, they usually have budgets of less than $2,500. Usually, it's just the candidate and maybe one or two dedicated volunteers. In those campaigns—in addition to the big congressionals—everybody has limited time, money, and people. AI allows you to accomplish more with those three limited resources.
The training seems pretty practical, from what I've seen. Can you break down the program's approach?
Every training that we built is designed for a candidate or a staff person to be able to use immediately. So if you're going to give us a half hour of your time, you don't need just theoretical background information on AI. So, the course breaks down what AI is, but then we can show you examples of use cases and specific AI tools within the Democratic ecosphere that you can use—say, helping you to write a door-to-door script. And honestly, Republicans are already using this, and they're using it in ways that I don't think are necessarily ethical or even moral. But Democrats need to be using this or risk being left behind.
NDTC trains in three different ways. First, we have on-demand courses like the AI course, which are available 24/7. If you're running for local office, that's usually not a full-time job. So whether you're a teacher, lawyer, nurse, or anything else, you can go to work, come home, have dinner with your family, put your kids to bed, and then pull out your iPad or laptop. In 30 minutes, you can understand what AI is, how to use it, and what it can do for your campaign immediately.
Second, we do virtual live trainings. We hold a couple hundred of these each year. We don't call them webinars—webinars put everyone to sleep—but instead interactive online trainings, usually held at noon Central [time]. We've already seen interest in developing an AI live training to complement the on-demand course.
Third, we train through cohorts—multiweek live sessions. We'll be incorporating AI into those as well, making it one of the core lessons candidates and staff need to be more effective.
Can you tell me a bit more about which AI tools can be especially effective in campaigning?
You have your general-purpose AI tools, whether that's Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. And then there are specific political AI tools, like Chorus AI, which optimizes political content for impact and engagement across platforms and audiences. And you've got Change Agent, which is more of a general language model but aligns with organizers and activism values.
Have campaigns jumped on board with the training?
We've already had more than 250 people take the course online, and it's only been up for a few days.
How do you make sure these tools aren't abused or opening up a floodgate?
Since the dawn of time, technology has been used for good and for bad, and the best we can do is educate and show people the difference. At the end of the day, everyone makes their own moral choice, and I think the values Democrats represent preclude those types of abuse.
What we need to do is create education, because most candidates know of AI but don't know how to use it. They don't understand what a powerful tool it can be. Can we make it more approachable, easier to understand, and walk people through exactly how it can help them accomplish their campaign goals? It can help them talk to more voters, win more votes—all the things that matter. Once you've laid out your campaign message and core talking points, AI can take those and help you create scripts, press releases, and a whole range of materials.
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