The Politics of AI

Nicholas Bloom; Christos Makridis

doi:10.3386/w34813

The Politics of AI

Nicholas Bloom & Christos Makridis

Working Paper 34813

DOI 10.3386/w34813

Issue Date February 2026

Using new data from the Gallup Workforce Panel, we document a persistent partisan gap in self-reported AI use at work: Democrats are consistently more likely than Republicans to report frequent use. In 2025:Q4, for example, 27.8% of Democrats report using AI weekly or daily, compared with 22.5% of Republicans. Democrats also report deeper task-level integration, using AI in 16% more work activities than Republicans. Consistent with this, Democrats are employed in occupations with higher predicted AI exposure based on task-content measures and report larger perceived differences in AI-related job displacement risk. However, in regression models the partisan gap in AI use disappears once we control for education, industry, and occupation, indicating that observed differences primarily reflect compositional variation rather than political affiliation per se.

We would like to thank the team at Gallup for their review of the data and draft. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research or any affiliated institutions.

Nicholas Bloom
I worked for McKinsey and company as a management consultant from 2001-2002. I have not received any funding from them after that time.

I am part of the Toulouse Network for Information Technology, which carries out research on IT and productivity. From this network I receive an annual honorarium, which is funded by Microsoft.

I do occasional consulting on management practices for government and policy agencies, like the Canadian Government, the World Bank, the European Union, the British Government, and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.

I produced a report in 2008 for the World Economic Forum on management practices in private equity for which I received an honorarium.

I am a paid speaker at corporate events at which I discuss among other things working from home, management practices and policy uncertainty.

Christos Makridis
Christos A. Makridis is also an employee at Gallup.
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Nicholas Bloom and Christos Makridis, "The Politics of AI," NBER Working Paper 34813 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34813.

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