How could LLMs influence our democracy? We investigate LLMs' political leanings and the potential influence of LLMs on voters by conducting multiple experiments in a U.S. presidential election context. Through a voting simulation, we first demonstrate 18 open- and closed-weight LLMs' political preference for a Democratic nominee over a Republican nominee. We show how this leaning towards the Democratic nominee becomes more pronounced in instruction-tuned models compared to their base versions by analyzing their responses to candidate-policy related questions. We further explore the potential impact of LLMs on voter choice by conducting an experiment with 935 U.S. registered voters. During the experiments, participants interacted with LLMs (Claude-3, Llama-3, and GPT-4) over five exchanges. The experiment results show a shift in voter choices towards the Democratic nominee following LLM interaction, widening the voting margin from 0.7% to 4.6%, even though LLMs were not asked to persuade users to support the Democratic nominee during the discourse. This effect is larger than many previous studies on the persuasiveness of political campaigns, which have shown minimal effects in presidential elections. Many users also expressed a desire for further political interaction with LLMs. Which aspects of LLM interactions drove these shifts in voter choice requires further study. Lastly, we explore how a safety method can make LLMs more politically neutral, while raising the question of whether such neutrality is truly the path forward.

A group of voters polled by Fox News Digital in real-time react to former President Trump's defense of his cognitive abilities. Independent and Republican voters in Fox News Digital's focus group appeared to have mixed reactions to President Biden and former President Trump's sparring over their respective cognitive abilities and golf handicaps, while Democrats generally disapproved. During the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday night, CNN moderator Dana Bash presented the ages Biden and Trump would be at the end of a potential second four-year term. Biden would be 86, while Trump would be 82. Former President Trump, left, and President Biden squared off in their high-stakes 2024 election debate on Thursday, and the contrast between the pair could not have been starker, a body language expert tells Fox News.

In recent weeks, as so-called cheapfake video clips suggesting President Joe Biden is unfit for office have gone viral on social media, a Kremlin-affiliated disinformation network has been promoting a parody music video featuring Biden wearing a diaper and being pushed around in a wheelchair. The video is called "Bye, Bye Biden" and has been viewed more than 5 million times on X since it was first promoted in the middle of May. It depicts Biden as senile, wearing a hearing aid, and taking a lot of medication. It also shows him giving money to a character who seems to represent illegal migrants while denying money to US citizens until they change their costume to mimic the Ukrainian flag. Another scene shows Biden opening the front door of a family home that features a Confederate flag on the wall and allowing migrants to come in and take over. Finally, the video contains references to stolen election conspiracies pushed by former president Donald Trump.

Last week, a special counsel report looking into President Biden's handling of classified documents described the president's memory as "poor," with "significant limitations." Speculation about Biden's cognitive state immediately followed. In its coverage, Fox News featured a doctor--not Biden's--who said the president had symptoms of age-related dementia. Also stopping by the network was Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who said Biden either had dementia or should be charged with a crime. Some Democrats, in response, pointed not just to Donald Trump's own mishandling of classified documents, but to the former president's memory lapses.