Raconteur Media’s 2025–2026 voter survey of 2,744 respondents reveals an important dynamic for campaigns navigating today’s information environment: AI tools remain largely untrusted as a source of political information, while the sources voters trust most are ones campaigns can control directly.
Start with the baseline. Only 5.5% of voters list an AI tool such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity among their most trusted sources for candidate information. Meanwhile, 15.4% say they would never trust AI for this purpose at all. Most voters sit somewhere in the middle: not hostile to the technology, but not ready to hand it any meaningful role in their voting decisions.
What does this mean for your campaign? The good news is that the sources voters trust most are ones you can own. Live events where candidates speak without a script, direct video in the candidate’s own words, independent research voters can verify themselves, and peer recommendations from real people in voters’ lives all ranked significantly higher than AI tools in voter trust. These are not passive channels. They reward campaigns that show up consistently with authentic, well-crafted content.
The survey also found that as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, some voters are applying a new level of scrutiny to digital content generally. Roughly 30% of respondents said AI’s growth has made them more cautious about candidate videos and social media posts as trusted sources. Campaigns that get ahead of this by publishing content that clearly reflects the candidate’s authentic voice will stand out from the noise.
The path forward is straightforward. Voters want to hear directly from candidates. They want content that answers their questions, reflects a real point of view, and gives them something they can verify. Campaigns that publish consistently, stay on message, and give voters direct access to the candidate’s record and positions will build the kind of trust that AI-generated content simply cannot manufacture.
The competitive advantage in this environment belongs to campaigns willing to invest in their own content infrastructure: a consistent publishing cadence, a clear candidate voice, and a strategy built around the channels voters already trust. That is exactly the kind of discipline that separates campaigns that break through from those that get lost in the feed.