Voters are worried about AI and don’t trust either political party to tackle the rapidly developing technology, according to a new national NBC News poll.
A majority of registered voters, 57%, said they believe AI’s risks outweigh its benefits, while 34% said the opposite. What’s more, a majority of voters view AI negatively and don’t believe that either Democrats or Republicans are doing a good job handling policy related to the rapidly developing technology.
Only 26% of voters say they have positive feelings about AI, compared to 46% who have negative views. In fact, the only things less popular than AI in an NBC News poll were the Democratic Party and Iran.
AI industry leaders have said their technology will lead to companies eliminating jobs in the next few years. AI’s impact on the political landscape is still shaping up, with politicians so far trying to address issues related to the rapid expansion of AI data centers, child safety, and rising electricity bills related to the use of AI in the military.
At the same time, economists, tech leaders and elected officials from both major parties have talked about the technology’s promise, pointing to the potential advances that AI can help unlock while emphasizing the need to secure those advances ahead of China. The Trump administration has made clearing the field for AI advancements a top priority, with President Donald Trump pushing back against concerns that AI will eliminate jobs in an interview with NBC News last month.
“They said the Internet is going to do — everything is going to do — robots are going to kill jobs. Everything is going to kill jobs,” he said. “And if you’re smart, you’ll do well.”
Asked which party was better at handling AI, 20% of voters in an NBC News poll said Republicans, while 19% said Democrats. Meanwhile, 33% of voters said neither party was good at dealing with AI, while 24% said the parties were about the same.
The shares of voters who said Republicans or Democrats were better at handling AI were lower than the share of voters who said either party was better at handling any other issue surveyed by NBC News.
Bill McInturf, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies who conducted the NBC News poll with the Democratic polling firm Hart Research Associates, said the findings are an AI “seized issue” by both parties to try to gain political advantage.
The demographic groups with the most negative views of AI were voters aged 18-34, who reported a net favorable rating for AI of minus 44, and women aged 18-49, who reported a net AI favorable rating of minus 41. Voters also have a plus 2 favorability rating.
There’s also a partisan divide in the data, with Republicans holding more positive or negative views of AI (33 each), independents and Democrats holding more negative views. For independents, 26% have positive views, while 48% view AI negatively. For Democrats, the division is 20% to 56%.
The survey data, conducted Feb. 27-March 3, showed the job market contracted in five of the past nine months, with a record 25% of unemployed workers holding four-year college degrees in November. Entry-level jobs seem likely to have the greatest impact on AI, as a team of Stanford researchers found in a report that workers aged 22 to 25 will experience a 16% relative decline in employment by the end of 2022 in industries most exposed to productive AI.
Separately, in a new report, Anthropic, the AI company that built the cloud, found that women and older workers in more educated, higher-paid, and more AI-exposed professions are more at risk of losing their jobs.
Republican pollster Micah Roberts of Public Opinion Strategies said “this reflects a lot of concerns people have about the technology’s negative impact on jobs and how it relates to these groups: younger voters (and) women under 50.”
“The economic conditions and level of education of voters are strongly dividing attitudes,” he said. “You can clearly see in this data … how the negativity toward AI goes down as people become more highly-educated.”
Overall, 56% of voters said they had used AI in the past two months, followed by 77% of professional managers, 74% of white-collar workers, 50% of blue-collar workers and 30% of retirees.
“There’s obviously a work element to it,” Roberts said.
The NBC News poll 1,000 registered voters were surveyed from February 27-March 3 through a mix of telephone interviews and an online survey sent via text message. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
