Adrianne Marsh, CEO of Altum Insight and a 25-year Democratic operative, went to rural Nebraska expecting to hear about the economy. Her team came back talking about AI.
Not the jobs angle. The values angle. Parents at church coffee hours worried about kids submitting homework they didn't write. Neighbors with no one they trusted to do anything about it. The concern wasn't economic disruption – it was something more intimate: a community and a way of life that felt like it was changing without anyone's consent, and no advocate in sight.
Adrianne walks Eric through the methodology behind the findings – which itself runs on AI. Altum Insight uses conversational bots to conduct open-ended interviews at scale, tools respondents find so human-like they often share things they wouldn't tell a live interviewer. The approach is a deliberate departure from traditional polling, which Adrianne argues has been running the same narrow issue battery for 30 years and keeps missing what's actually moving people.
The most counterintuitive finding: Gen Z was the most skeptical cohort in the study – more reluctant, even angry, than older voters. Gen Xers found practical utility in AI tools. Younger voters wanted to know where the off switch was. That's a problem for any campaign trying to thread the needle. You can't run AI-made ads and campaign on AI accountability. Adrianne's take: you can't be half pregnant on this.
The warning for 2026 draws on her earlier Montana research, where voters who felt talked at rather than heard chose disruption over the status quo – not because they wanted chaos, but because no one had offered them anything that felt honest about what was broken. Her read on AI is the same. Campaigns that don't understand where voters' comfort level actually sits will deepen a trust problem that's already bad and getting worse.