Day: October 8, 2026

Do politicians remember to include women and women-centered policies within their campaign platforms? In a short analysis of four senatorial candidates in the 2026 midterm election, their policy platforms are analyzed for the explicit inclusion of women-centered policy. 

Abigail Adams’ legacy is not typical for the 18th-century first ladies. She is not solely known for being the wife of Founding Father John Adams, but for the letter she wrote to her husband imploring him to “remember the ladies.”¹ As history has taught us, the Founding Fathers did not consider the ladies’ role; instead, women had to fight for representation in politics. Additionally, suffrage did not come until the 19th Amendment in 1920 and even later in 1965 for women of color.

As the 20th century progressed, women began to play a crucial role in both political parties and in various areas of politics: grassroots movements, nonprofit work, activism, as well as local and national government.² Women continue to be crucial political players; in the 2026 midterm election cycle, women are running for office on both sides of the aisle. Within an era of polarized politics, it’s important to consider if politicians running in this midterm election, across gender and aisle, are “remembering the ladies.” 

For this brief analysis, four candidates running for US Senate in open-seat races were selected: N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas (D-OK), Michelle Tafoya (R-MN), Charles Booker (D-KY), and Kurt Alme (MT-R). In order to be considered as “remembering the ladies,” the politician must include women-centered policies in the policy statements on their websites. “Women-centered” policies are not concretely defined, but typically involve gendered issues that affect the lives of women, such as domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking.³ In addition, women are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage jobs, face the most sexual violence, and face high maternal mortality rates.⁴ Therefore, policy addressing any of these factors could be considered a women-centered policy. In addition, any reference to child-care policy will also be considered a “women-centered” policy, as childcare historically fell into the hands of women.⁵

First, this article will examine women politicians and their policy platforms. Thomas (D-OK) played with feminine imagery within her campaign promotional material, using butterflies as her campaign symbol. Within her policy section, she also goes into detail about reproductive health and maternal mortality rates. In addition to her section about “women,” she includes policies about safety, which mention a proposal to expand the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) as well as Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).⁶ On the other hand, Tafoya (R-MN) does not explicitly mention women’s rights as a policy sector, but she mentions women in her efforts to “get men out of women’s sports.”⁷Additionally, she mentions policies that could be considered as women-centered, such as creating “stronger schools” and advocating for “parents’rights.” 

While observing the male candidates, there might be an assumption that there would be a partisan divide similar to that of the women candidates: Democrats explicitly supported women-centered policies while Republicans supported family-centered policies. However, Booker’s (D-KY) policy section did not mention women, but he did mention women’s reproductive health under his affordable healthcare plan.⁸ It’s worth noting that Booker did mention women’s access to contraceptives as part of healthcare, but he did so without explicitly labeling it as a “women’s” issue, and instead labeled it as solely healthcare policy. In contrast, Alme’s (R-MT) did not mention women in his policy section, nor did he mention family-oriented policy outside of his work with different childhood programs such as serving as president of the “Yellowstone Boys and Girls Ranch Foundation.”⁹

From this limited analysis, it appears politicians are not “remembering the ladies” as Abigail Adams hoped they would. This could be because most Americans are less concerned with social issues than with matters such as the economy and affordability.¹⁰ However, it is important to consider what social policies are being proposed in this midterm election, as only 17% of the U.S. population has trust in the federal government.¹¹ If constituents think that the implementation of certain policies would benefit their communities, such as policies focused on half the US population, then trust in government could increase.

Candidates are not remembering the ladies when campaigning and displaying their policy platforms. While the Republican male candidate did not mention women, the Democratic male candidate did mention women’s health, but did so as a side note. In addition, three candidates did not explicitly promote women-centered policies, excluding children-based policy. Even though women-centered policies encompass many different sectors of policy– reproductive healthcare, childcare, sexual violence, etc.– they are being forgotten in this midterm cycle. 

1. .Adams, Abigail. 1776. “Founders Online: Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March 1776.” Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0241.
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2. Schaeffer, Katherine. 2023. “Data on Women Leaders in the U.S.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/the-data-on-women-leaders/. 
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3. Women and Gender in Public Policy | U.S. GAO.” n.d. Government Accountability Office (GAO). https://www.gao.gov/women-and-gender-public-policy.
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4. UNESCO. “Women in Policy- and Decision-Making.” In Fostering Women’s Leadership. UNESCO, 2024. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep70572.8. ↩︎
5. National Women’s Law Center. n.d. “Undervalued: A Brief History of Women’s Care Work and Child Care Policy in the United States.” National Women’s Law Center. https://nwlc.org/resource/undervalued-a-brief-history-of-womens-care-work-and-child-care-policy-in-the-united-states/.
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6. 2026. Jasmine Thomas for Oklahoma | Join the Movement Now. https://www.jasmineforok.com/. ↩︎
7. “Issues.” 2026. Michele Tafoya. https://micheletafoya.com/issues/. ↩︎
8. “Meet Charles Booker | Kentucky’s Fighter for U.S. Senate.” 2026. Charles Booker. https://charlesbookerky.org/meet-charles.
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9. “Media.” 2026. Alme for Senate. https://almeforsenate.com/media/.
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10. Daniller, Andrew, Andy Cerda, Hannah Hartig, and J. Baxter. 2026. “As the 2026 Midterms Approach, Economy Is Front and Center.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/07/23/as-the-2026-midterms-approach-economy-is-front-and-center/.
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11. “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025.” 2025. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust-in-government-1958-2025/.
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As AI and deepfakes edge their way into electoral processes, it is important to recognize that voters control the influence of these tools.  Understanding voters’ psychological and behavioral responses to deepfakes is required in order to develop policy that can restore trust in democratic institutions and improve public awareness of AI’s role in electoral processes.

The chances that you’ve seen a deepfake video within the past year are pretty high – 60%, according to data from Jumio.¹  Today, AI and deepfakes are all over the Internet, on topics from finance to healthcare to government and politics.  According to Łabuz and Nehring (2024), deepfakes are defined as “AI-generated or AI-manipulated audio, image, or video content that appreciably resembles existing persons, objects, places, or other entities or events and would falsely appear to a person to be authentic or truthful.”²  In recent years, deepfakes have increased in quality and availability to the average person while decreasing in cost, contributing to a surge in their proliferation.³

Deepfakes have been used in the lead-up to elections in many ways, varying in believability, timing, and impact.  Most of the time, deepfakes have next to no impact on elections, such as the 2024 U.S. presidential election, when deepfake images featuring Kamala Harris with communist imagery and Trump with the Taliban proliferated online.⁴ In some cases, though, deepfakes are strategically employed in ways that do influence elections.  For instance, a few days before the 2023 Slovakia parliamentary election, an audio deepfake circulated on social media depicting Progressive Slovakia party candidate Michal Šimečka talking with a journalist about a “scheme to rig the election by buying votes from the country’s marginalized Roma minority.”⁵  Although “police concluded the recording was not persuasive enough to warrant a criminal investigation,”⁶ Šimečka still ended up losing the election by 5%.

For the most part, however, unless deployed on a strategic timeline (usually close to an election), deepfakes tend to have minimal impact on elections.  Studies by the Institute of Political Science at the University of Bamberg show that even when parties use deceptive AI (such as impersonating public figures), public support for the party does not change.⁷  The study suggests that although “partisans disapprove of deceptive AI use in principle,” they “are unwilling to penalize their own party for it in practice.”⁸  Therefore,  candidate favorability within one’s own party is unaffected by the use of deepfakes, suggesting that candidates’ deceptive use of deepfakes in campaigning is unlikely to lose them votes.

That is not to say deepfakes have no real effect on politics – quite the opposite.  But the deepfake’s real power comes not from the content itself, but from voters’ reactions.  Deepfakes often elicit real psychological and behavioral responses.  For one, deepfakes encourage political polarization and extreme views.  As economist Zeynep Arzu Kelani and sociologist Darina Lepadatu explain in their article on deepfake propaganda during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, “deepfakes that depict political figures in a negative light tend to disproportionately impact members of opposing parties, resulting in intensified distrust and division” along partisan lines.⁹  Many deepfakes are emotionally manipulative, eliciting intense reactions to “emotionally charged content” which encourage  individuals to “share misinformation that resonates with their social identity, beliefs, or social norms.”¹⁰

Deepfakes can also diminish trust in elections and democracy overall.¹¹ After interacting with deepfakes, people often begin to view legitimate government content with skepticism, including election results.  Fola Adeleke, Executive Director and co-founder of the Global Center on AI Governance, notes one key example that occurred in the 2022 Kenyan Supreme Court case Obinga v. Ruto.¹²  In this landmark case, the court ruled that the Kenya Integrated Electoral Management System, or KIEMS (a technological tool used for voter registration and identification, as well as transmitting election votes to be counted), was constitutional and had produced accurate election results for the 2022 presidential election.¹³  Despite the court’s ruling, however, Kenyan citizens largely distrusted the election results and questioned the government’s transparency in using KIEMS.¹⁴  Such citizen distrust can be dangerous because it often means that “political participation declines and government finds it difficult to command…legitimacy and respect,”¹⁵ thus contributing to the erosion of democratic institutions over time.

As AI and deepfakes continue to take on an ever greater role in government processes, leaders must develop policies focused on a framework centered on the human person.  Politicians must assure citizens of accountability and transparency in elections, and one way to do this is by creating policies that review election technologies to verify their ethicality.¹⁶  Adeleke also suggests that political institutions should consider partnering with private corporations such as nonprofits to run elections.  Doing so will increase transparency and trust in government, since multiple organizations will be involved in the electoral process, many of which the public see as “trustworthy.”¹⁷  Additionally, it is important for governments and citizens to recognize that people do not have equal access to technologies and may be illiterate.¹⁸  As such, investing time and resources in public education on AI and other technologies could be a helpful way to build public trust in government institutions. Additionally, education resources can promote acceptance of certain uses of AI while instituting legal consequences to dissuade people from unethical practices such as spreading misinformation through deepfakes.

Despite deepfakes’ inability to influence election outcomes on a large scale, their ability to elicit a psychological and emotional response should not be understated.  Nevertheless, the key takeaway is that deepfakes draw their power from the voters.  Therefore, it is up to the voters to decide how much power to give to them in our democratic institutions and whether we allow them to influence the way we approach and view our electoral processes.

1. Jumio. “2024 Online Identity Study: Global Consumer Research.” Jumio, 2024. https://www.jumio.com/2024-identity-study/.
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2.  Łabuz, Mateusz, and Christopher Nehring. “On the Way to Deep Fake Democracy? Deep Fakes in Election Campaigns in 2023.” European Political Science 23, no. 3 (2024): 454–73. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-024-00482-9. 
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3. Ibid. ↩︎
4.  Kelani, Zeynep, and Darina Lepadatu. “Generative Artificial Intelligence, Misinformation and Political Polarization: A Content Analysis of Deepfake Propaganda During the 2024 US Presidential Election.” Journal of Information Technology & Politics (2026). https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2026.2652897. ↩︎
5. Labuz and Nehring. “On the Way to Deep Fake Democracy? Deepfakes in Election Campaigns in 2023.” ↩︎
6. Kováčik, Timotej, and Veronika Frankovská. “How AI-Generated Content Influenced Parliamentary Elections in Slovakia: The Slovak Police Will Investigate the Recording for a Third Time.” CEDMO, November 25, 2024. https://cedmohub.eu/how-ai-generated-content-influenced-parliamentary-elections-in-slovakia-the-slovak-police-will-investigate-the-recording-for-a-third-time/. 
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7. Jungherr, Andreas, Adrian Rauchfleisch, and Alexander Wuttke. “Artificial Intelligence in Election Campaigns: Perceptions, Penalties, and Implications.” Political Communication 43, no. 4 (2026): 585–606. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2025.2611913.
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8. Ibid. ↩︎
9. Kelani and Lepadatu. “Generative Artificial Intelligence, Misinformation and Political Polarization: A Content Analysis of Deepfake Propaganda During the 2024 US Presidential Election.” ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. Jungherr, Rauchfleisch, Wuttke. “Artificial Intelligence in Election Campaigns: Perceptions, Penalties, and Implications.” ↩︎
12. Adeleke, Fola. “Reinstating Trust in Elections in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies.” Data and Policy 7 (2025): e38. doi:10.1017/dap.2025.14
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13. Ibid. ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. Diamond, Larry. “The Political Drivers of Low Trust.” Open Government Partnership. Accessed October 4, 2026. https://www.opengovpartnership.org/trust/the-political-drivers-of-low-trust/. 
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16. Fola. “Reinstating Trust in Elections in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies.” ↩︎
17. Ibid. ↩︎
18. Ibid. ↩︎