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by CORY SMITH | The National News Desk
(TNND) — New research shows Democrats might be more affected than Republicans by the wave of change coming from artificial intelligence.
Brookings researchers found that 62 of the 100 most AI-exposed counties in the country went "blue" in the 2024 presidential election.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro who researches AI and the digital economy, was careful to note that their report doesn’t directly measure how politics influences AI usage or vice versa.
But it does show a correlation between high AI usage and Democratic strongholds.
“To be involved with AI is to be, to an extent, anxious about it, and that … may have an influence on voting behavior,” Muro said.
At the very least, the research points to an underlying economic and demographic reason why Democratic officials are showing more “agitation” over the issue of AI than their Republican counterparts, Muro said.
“Those who are involved with the technology are jittery about it, … and the Democratic Party seems more tapped into that right now,” he said.
Punchbowl News on Wednesday listed off some of the AI-related positions taken up recently by Democratic lawmakers in Washington and beyond. Efforts include a pause on data center construction, taxing AI companies to save jobs, and taxing big AI companies to give the American public something of an ownership stake in the technology.
Muro and his colleagues pointed to a recent survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, which showed broad pessimism over AI that was more strongly felt among Democrats.
That survey showed just 17% of Americans expect the impact of AI on the country over the next decade to be somewhat or very positive. While 23% of Republicans expect a positive impact, just 12% of Democrats do, as well.
Over three-quarters of Democrats said the government hasn’t done enough to regulate AI, compared to around half of Republicans who hold that sentiment.
Among Americans who are employed, 41% said in the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s survey that they are somewhat or very worried about losing their job or having their hours reduced due to AI. Half of Democrats expressed that concern, compared to 32% of Republicans.
However, the Annenberg Public Policy Center survey did find similar rates of AI usage between Republicans and Democrats, with 25% and 22%, respectively, saying they interact with it almost every day.
Muro and his fellow researchers overlaid usage data for Anthropic’s generative AI chatbot, Claude, with county-level voting outcomes in the 2024 presidential election to get their map of red-blue AI exposure.
Muro and Brookings have previously released research on occupations with the highest AI exposure, including which are best and worst equipped for adapting to AI-driven job loss.
They’ve also looked at how AI might disrupt vital “gateway” jobs and career pathways for millions of Americans.
And this new research builds on Muro’s past work that looks at regional impacts of the AI revolution.
The new report noted that 14% to 19% of workers in the most AI-exposed counties are employed in occupations where AI is already being used for automation over augmentation, though Muro also said many high-exposure regions are major technology and business centers that could benefit the most from AI-driven productivity and growth.
Generative AI is most heavily used by white-collar, information-sector workers, who tend to cluster in large urban areas that often vote Democratic, Muro said.
The new research matched their hypothesis, though Muro said they were “surprised at how sharply demarcated this is.”
Some of the Democratic-leaning areas with the highest levels of AI exposure and usage include San Francisco, San Jose (Santa Clara County), Seattle (King County), Minneapolis (Hennepin County), and New York.
But Muro said there are still big cities that skew Republican and share in the high AI usage. Some of those include Collin County, Texas (part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area); Hillsborough County, Florida (home to Tampa); Miami-Dade County, Florida (home to Miami); and Maricopa County, Arizona (home to Phoenix).
2026 Sinclair, Inc.