Yale study: ChatGPT recommended a Senate candidate in 79% of political chats
luisdans · x · 2026-11-06
Yale researchers ran two preregistered studies before the November 2026 midterms examining how AI chatbots factor into Senate races.
Key findings
- About a third of users had asked a chatbot to help pick a candidate; after users shared their views, ChatGPT recommended a candidate in 79% of chats, Claude in 40%, with Grok and Gemini in between.
Method
- Study 1 (all voters): recruited via CloudResearch Connect, Oct 16–27, 500 Democrats/500 Republicans/500 independents quotas across the 35 Senate-race states; 1,455 participants retained.
- Study 2 (undecided voters): via Prolific, Oct 21–27, only participants with low vote certainty who hadn't voted; 975 participants.
- Every message was LLM-coded three times against a chat-derived codebook; off-task chats excluded; all participants consented to public release of their chats.
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