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By Anna Rahmanan
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God created six genders…or so James Talarico would have you believe, according to a new political ad from his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton.
In the AI-generated video, the Texas Democrat sits at a desk rewriting the Book of Genesis, inserting six genders into the creation story and illustrating his revised Bible with a portrait of himself wearing a crown. What an extraordinary accusation and what a fabricated scene to deliver it through, the perfect political advertisement in this day and age.
With November's midterms approaching, American campaign ads are increasingly borrowing the logic of internet memes. The more absurd the premise, the greater its potential to attract attention. But how did American political advertising arrive here? Does the increasingly bizarre spectacle have to do with persuading voters or is there something else at play?
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In New York's gubernatorial race, Republican Bruce Blakeman has circulated AI-generated videos featuring Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani gardening together while supposedly conspiring to raise costs for New Yorkers. In Ohio, an artificial Sherrod Brown has appeared as the unwelcome guest at a birthday party, helping himself to leftover cake. Presumably, these ads are meant to influence how voters see the candidates. But their sheer absurdity raises another possibility—that getting people to watch and share them has become as important as changing anyone's mind.
Political Ads Were Never Particularly Civilized
Nostalgia for a more dignified era of campaign advertising requires a selective memory. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower's campaign was already selling its candidate through a catchy animated jingle, I Like Ike, alongside more conventional appeals about policy. As Josh Bramlett, an assistant professor of advertising and public relations at the University of Alabama, points out, Adlai Stevenson objected to the commercial treatment of presidential candidates even then.
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By 1964, Lyndon Johnson's campaign had produced Daisy, the notorious advertisement in which a little girl picking flower petals gives way to a nuclear explosion. The implication was that electing Barry Goldwater might bring about annihilation. The ad aired only once as a paid commercial, yet became a landmark of American political persuasion.
Daisy employed an apocalyptic fantasy to communicate a recognizable political argument about nuclear judgment. Paxton's synthetic Bible offers something more peculiar: an imaginary performance of an opponent's alleged cultural deviance. The exaggeration is itself the entertainment.
Even the premise that political ads are becoming relentlessly more negative deserves scrutiny.
"Not necessarily," says Erika Franklin Fowler, a professor of government at Wesleyan University, when asked whether advertising has become more negative. "There are more ads on air and there is more polarization and animosity, so those things may make advertising feel more negative, but the proportion of pure attacks is similar to past cycles and in fact a little lower than it has been in past elections."
The historical change may therefore be less about the quantity of hostility than its increasingly surreal presentation.
When Campaigning Became Content
The more consequential transformation is economic. A political advertisement once had to justify its production costs and the expense of television airtime. Today, it can be conceived as a social media provocation, distributed to supporters and amplified by the attention it attracts elsewhere.
Bramlett describes how a campaign can produce dozens of digital variations and test which generate the most engagement. A particularly outrageous advertisement may also earn national coverage, giving a relatively obscure candidate exposure far beyond the electorate being contested.
The result is a peculiar incentive. An ad can succeed as content even when it fails as persuasion.
Artificial intelligence has made the possibilities considerably stranger. According to the Wesleyan Media Project's October findings, political advertisers had spent more than $137 million on 220 advertisements generated or enhanced by AI. Republican candidates and affiliated groups accounted for the overwhelming majority of that spending.
Consider a Republican-backed advertisement in Ohio portraying Brown as a party guest who has overstayed his welcome. Its conceit turns an argument about political longevity into an awkward social encounter. The viewer is invited to recognize the joke before considering the underlying argument.
These ads belong to a wider cultural environment in which absurdity is a familiar language of political communication. Their visual vocabulary owes something to memes, in which exaggeration establishes group affiliation and ridicule can travel farther than explanation.
Blakeman has defended his AI advertisements as clearly labeled satire, invoking the tradition of political parody. Critics worry that fabricated depictions of real politicians can further erode the distinction between something a candidate actually did and something an opponent wishes voters would believe.
Does Any of This Actually Work?
The evidence offers an awkward answer for the people producing these spectacles.
Alexander Coppock, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University, says experiments measuring the immediate effect of a single political advertisement on vote choice find an average shift of just 0.7 or 0.8 percentage points.
More surprisingly, the emotional intensity of an advertisement appears to offer little guidance about its persuasive power.
"Even though those ads do in fact generate wildly different emotional reactions, we find no correlation between the emotional responses an ad generates and its effectiveness in changing minds," Coppock says.
An advertisement that inspires fury or delight may therefore accomplish basically nothing when it comes to an undecided voter. Its value may lie elsewhere: reinforcing supporters' existing views, attracting donations or making the candidate briefly unavoidable.
The question for November is whether the increasingly extravagant productions will translate into votes, or merely provide another form of entertainment for an electorate already saturated with political spectacle (and just general cultural spectacle, if we’re going to be honest).
Talarico, for his part, has responded to Paxton's synthetic attacks by emphasizing his refusal to use AI in his own advertisements. It is a competing theory of what voters want—authenticity in a political culture increasingly capable of manufacturing almost anything.
As usual, when looking into the future, it all feels pretty dire. As artificial images become cheaper and more convincing, campaigns will have greater freedom to depict the worlds they want voters to fear. Will voters recognize these manufactured fears or will the most outrageous fiction become the most effective political message?
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