‘Prattman,’ Murder by Tractor, and Painted Clowns: How AI Is Transforming the Political Campaign
Earlier this month, Facebook users in Michigan were treated to an AI-generated video featuring the current governor, Gretchen Whitmer — accompanied by gubernatorial candidate and current Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz — absorbed in scheming around a fire after dark.
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The background track is an instrumental version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and the post caption reads, “Democrats just wanna have fun- at your expense.”
“Can you believe it’s been eight years already?” AI-generated Whitmer asks at the start of the video.
“Time flies when you’re getting rich off the taxpayers,” AI-generated Newsom replies, and the four of them laugh. The video, produced by Michigan Republican Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt’s campaign for governor, ends with Nesbitt on a tractor, plowing directly toward Benson before she can get out of its path.
“This AI-generated video from Aric Nesbitt is disgusting and uses violent and inflammatory imagery,” the Michigan Democratic Party responded in an official statement on June 10.
The video is part of a trend of “deepfakes” capturing the attention of voters in races across the country and causing concern among political professionals warning about a race to the bottom in which campaigns employ increasingly savvy — and dishonest — methods to fool voters.
“We’re going to have major trust issues in not just the political system . . . but across everything,” Tyler Doornbos, co-founder of the nonpartisan AI company RunTogether, told National Review. “I think it’s only going to get worse.”
Back in March, a deepfake video of Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico was created and posted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It featured an AI-generated Talarico reading his old X posts on controversial issues like religion and gender.
Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate, Brian Shortsleeve, has also faced backlash for using AI to create a fake audio clip of his Democrat opponent, Maura Healey.
“Maura Healey just announced she’s officially running for re-election. Here’s what one of her radio ads might sound like — if she was honest,” he announced in a social media post back in January. The AI-generated radio ad sounded like Healey discussing the spending of “excessive fees to fund my climate agenda” and how Massachusetts is “the second most costly state to retire in.”
Last month, the Santa Barbara Republican Party ran an AI-generated ad in which Democrat candidate Ricardo Valencia was portrayed as a red-haired, red-nosed clown. Amid backlash from the left decrying the ad as racist, chairwoman of the Santa Barbara Republicans Bobbi McGinnis compared the clown video to Spencer Pratt’s Los Angeles mayoral campaign videos.
These AI videos of Pratt range from a spinoff of the theme song from the 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to a Batman — “Prattman” — versus Joker faceoff between Pratt and current Mayor Karen Bass highlighting the core issues plaguing Los Angeles under Bass. Though these videos were not created by Pratt or his campaign team, Pratt did repost them on social media.
“If I could go back in time, maybe I wouldn’t have reposted a couple,” he told CNN in an interview on June 4. “The AI actually has not really helped my campaign because a lot of the messaging in it isn’t what I focus on — it’s not laser-focused on the failures of the city leaders.”
Nevertheless, he did not criticize his fans who created the videos.
“At the end of the day, these AI artists are creators,” he said. “Art is art. I don’t judge the person that made something very compelling that people love to watch or somebody that made a really good song that people love to listen to.”
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Unfortunately for his AI-artist fans, Pratt failed to advance to the general election against Bass, losing out to left-wing city council member Nithya Raman.
Researchers say that such AI-generated content, even when false, can have a psychological effect on people’s decisions.
A January 2026 study from the National Library of Medicine found that “some people employ a ‘seeing is believing’ heuristic to make a personal judgement about the authenticity of a video, even when they have been specifically warned that it is fake.”
Viewers are confident in their ability to spot a fake, citing “technical defects” to explain to researchers why they knew a given video was AI, rather than the fact that they were told explicitly it was AI. But the technology is improving all the time.
Amid this controversy over “deepfakes,” some entrepreneurs are hoping to harness AI to improve trust and transparency in the political system, rather than erode it.
Doornbos’s company, RunTogether, is just one of many examples.
Inspired by his “singularly unpleasant” experience running for city commission in Kentwood, Mich., RunTogether co-founder Daniel VanderMolen partnered with Doornbos, brought in three other experts, and developed a platform to support candidates who don’t feel like they’re getting necessary backing from their party.
“Our idea is that if you can get more people into the system — if you can get more people . . . to represent the communities that they serve or that they love — that you’re going to have a fairer, less polarized, less captive political system,” Doornbos said.
RunTogether includes branding, website building, outreach, and fundraising and promotional materials. Services like managing ads, printing and distributing campaign material, and receiving contributions are all offered free, and it costs $29 monthly to publish a website.
The company still uses traditional print flyers and encourages its customers to include real photos instead of AI-generated images. “[I]t’s an old-school way of approaching it with a little bit of a new-school technique for accessing the information,” Doornbos said.
AdvocacyAI is another site that offers campaigning services. Though its target users are nonprofit organizations at large, it advertises access to “8,000+ verified federal, state, and local legislators” and aids in otherwise time-consuming tasks like professional messaging, engagement tracking, data collection, recruiting, and digital community-building.
In this age of AI, Doornbos believes campaigning will inevitably look different but not necessarily in ways we would expect.
“I think people underestimate how attractive it is to see your own community reflected in the political materials that you’re receiving,” he said. “I do think we’re going to see in some of these campaigns that the slickness is going to be dialed back to a degree because the slickness can read as fake.”
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