The Politics of AI

Using new data from the Gallup Workforce Panel, we show that the apparent partisan divide in workplace AI adoption is largely an artifact of educational and occupational sorting rather than ideological differences in technology adoption. While Democrats are consistently more likely than Republicans to report frequent AI use—30.1% versus 25% in Q1:2026—and exhibit deeper task-level integration across a broader range of work activities, this raw gap shrinks to statistical insignificance once we control for educational attainment, and reverses sign in fully saturated models with occupation and industry fixed effects. Democrats work in more AI-exposed occupations and more AI-supportive organizational environments, but these differences reflect where people work and what skills they hold, not political identity per se. The one dimension that resists this compositional explanation is perceived job displacement risk: partisan differences were statistically indistinguishable through 2025 but a 4.2 percentage point gap has emerged by Q1:2026, suggesting that belief divergence may be beginning to outpace the structural factors that explain behavioral differences. In this sense, the “politics of AI” is better understood as the political geography of human capital and occupational structure than as an ideological cleavage in technology adoption.