America Is About to See What Happens When Voters Turn to AI

If you were wondering whether AI could make the midterms even more confusing, here’s one data point: Several people who thought they were donating to James Talarico unwittingly gave their money to someone else.

Talarico, a Texas Democrat, is running for Senate in what’s probably the most closely watched race of the upcoming elections.

Search Google for how to contribute to his campaign, and you might get an AI-generated answer that links to ways “you can chip in securely.” Until a few weeks ago, one of those featured links was actually controlled by an unrelated political-action committee that sent the money instead to the reelection campaign of another Democrat: Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado.

The mix-up wasn’t all AI’s fault.

The link led to a misleading donation page that carried Talarico’s name and picture, and specified only at the bottom that the money would go to Hickenlooper.

But Google’s AI tool evidently didn’t read the fine print.

And perhaps no one would have clicked on it had Google not highlighted the page in an authoritative-sounding AI response.

A spokesperson for Hickenlooper’s campaign told me that the Colorado Democrat, whose seat is considered safe, had not intentionally siphoned the donations.

Rather, an outside group, the Kitchen Table Values PAC, had created the fundraiser without Hickenlooper’s knowledge.

This appears to have fooled at least three people, who donated a combined total of $1,011, the spokesperson said.

Rich Wilkins, the Democratic organizer behind the PAC, told me that the money was supposed to be split between Talarico and his group.

“If a page was incorrectly going to Hickenlooper, that sounds like a human-error issue,” he said.

After a Democratic digital-advertising strategist discovered the misleading fundraiser while Googling his party’s Senate candidates, the page was removed from the fundraising platform ActBlue, and Hickenlooper’s campaign forwarded the misdirected money to Talarico.

The 2026 midterms will mark the first federal election in which tens of millions of voters are getting some of their political information from generative-AI tools.