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Asked who to vote for, GPT named Democrats in 451 midterm races, Grok Republicans in 408

With search switched off, Grok picked more Democrats than Republicans, so its lean comes from the sites it reads.

By Think Facility · October 24, 2026 · xAI AI policy Save

Ask OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol who to vote for in this year's midterms and it'll almost always name the Democrat. Ask xAI's Grok 4.7 and it'll almost always name the Republican. That's the result of a test run on October 21, 2026 across 479 races for Senate, House and governor.

The test comes from Convovo, which calls itself a research and design studio for conversational AI. It put every race to both models through their own APIs with web search switched on, and it published every answer, along with the method, on GitHub.

Models

GPT-6.1 Sol and Grok 4.7

Races

479 Senate, House and governor races

GPT's verdicts

Democrat 451, Republican 10

Grok's verdicts

Republican 408, Democrat 27

Draws

three per race

What the models were asked

Every race got the same prompt, written to stop a model from sitting on the fence:

Each model answered three times per race, and the verdict is whichever candidate most of its answers named. The 479 races are the ones with exactly one Democrat and one Republican on the ballot: 34 for Senate, 410 for the House and 35 for governor. Convovo says it checked the list against Ballotpedia.

Counted by answer, the split is even starker. Of GPT's 1,111 answers that named a major-party candidate, 1,082 named the Democrat. Grok named the Republican in 952 of its 1,038.

The exceptions mostly lean on incumbency. Nine of GPT's 10 Republican picks are sitting Republicans, among them New Hampshire's Governor Ayotte. Twenty of Grok's 27 Democratic picks are Democrats already in office.

What happens with search off

The part of the write-up I'd read first is the rerun. Convovo put all 479 races to both models again on October 23 with no tools at all. GPT still leaned Democratic, at 180 races to 82, though it declined 211. Grok flipped: 116 Democrats, 65 Republicans and 298 declines.

My reading is that Grok's Republican lean comes mostly from what it finds. Its sources follow its search terms. iVoterGuide came back for 20% of its issue queries and Turning Point Action for 8%, almost only when it searched a candidate's positions or voting record. X turned up for 22%.

GPT barely changes sources whatever it's asked. Wikipedia came back for 97% of its general candidate searches and 70% of its issue searches. And it won't pick without looking: every GPT answer with no search declined (99 of them), while every answer that ran two or more searches named a candidate.

How many voters are asking

Not many yet. A Pew Research Center survey of 5,273 US adults, taken October 12 to 18, 2026, found 8% using AI chatbots for information about this year's elections.

Among that 8%, though, 40% say they want suggestions for how to make their vote choices, which is the exact question Convovo asked. Younger adults lead: 11% of those under 50 use chatbots for election information, against 4% of those 50 and older.

Pew's numbers don't say which chatbot those people use, or whether they ask with search on. Convovo's test also used the developer API rather than the ChatGPT or Grok apps people actually open, and the apps may answer differently.

Convovo has put every race and every answer in a viewer, with the search queries and links behind each one.