Democrats use AI in effort to stay ahead with Latino and Black voters

Latino and Black-led Democratic and progressive organizations are mobilizing to come up with novel uses of AI to reach voters of color.

With the election mere months away, the challenge facing Democrats remains how to galvanize younger voters and voters of color.

Canvassers with the group ask for permission to record conversations with voters on their mobile phones or tablets. Those interactions are then turned into data using natural language processing, a type of AI. This way, MFV is able to quickly summarize voter priorities and figure out if it is speaking about the economy, reproductive rights or climate optimally to voters.

Many leaders of color said they are mindful of pitfalls around AI but open to harnessing its power and testing possible strategies. Larry Huynh, the president of the American Association of Political Consultants and the founder of Trilogy Interactive, is so interested in incorporating AI into political campaigns that he followed leaders in other industries by creating an internal taskforce at his company.

Yadira Sanchez, the co-founder of Poder Latinx, was happy with how the campaign reached voters, over-delivering impressions and click-thru rates from Latinos, including finding a 64% Hispanic male audience.

But AI may not be viewed as safe enough for initiatives that require serious resources to scale up in time for November. And there are concerns it could freak out voters in the wrong context.

Quentin James, founder and president of The Collective Pac, a group that works to elect Black Democrats and is using the Facebook Messenger chatbot to get registration information from voters, stressed that deepfakes or ads where one campaign is using the likeness of their opponent to mislead voters should be shut down immediately.

Still, he said, Democrats must be willing to use the tools at their disposal to beat Trump, because the other side will be looking at them as well.