Young Conservatives Surprisingly Open to AI Governance, Heartland-Rasmussen Survey Reveals

Despite Claims of Liberal AI Bias, Right-Leaning Youth More Willing to Embrace Algorithmic Decision-Making

In a striking revelation that contradicts prevailing political narratives, young conservatives are significantly more receptive than their liberal counterparts to the prospect of artificial intelligence systems governing major aspects of society, according to a newly released survey conducted by the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports. This unexpected ideological divide emerges despite years of conservative criticism regarding perceived left-leaning biases in AI systems, making the findings particularly noteworthy in today’s polarized political landscape.

The comprehensive poll, which surveyed 1,496 likely voters aged 18 to 39 between October 31 and November 2, explored attitudes toward potentially transformative proposals for AI governance. Respondents were asked whether they would support allowing artificial intelligence to control public policy decisions, determine constitutional rights, or even command the world’s largest military forces with the explicit goal of “reducing the number of people who die from war.” With a sampling error margin of plus or minus three percentage points, the results provide a statistically significant window into the perspectives of younger Americans on AI’s expanding role in governance structures.

“If you go into the cross tabs, those who self-identified as Republicans or conservatives were more likely to say yes or support these proposals that are outlined in the survey,” explained Donald Kendal, director of the Glenn C. Haskins Emerging Issues Center at the Heartland Institute, in an interview with Decrypt. “As for why that’s the case, honestly, I’m at a loss.” The Heartland Institute, a conservative public policy think tank recognized for its influence on state-level legislation and critiques of federal regulatory overreach, seems equally surprised by the ideological breakdown of responses. The survey methodology relied on self-identified ideological affiliations, with conservative-identifying participants consistently showing the highest levels of support across each hypothetical AI governance scenario presented.

Institutional Distrust May Drive Support for Algorithmic Governance

The counterintuitive findings may reflect a deeper crisis of confidence in traditional governance structures among young conservatives. “We’ve got so little trust, faith in our institutions,” Kendal observed, suggesting that widespread dissatisfaction with current political frameworks might be driving openness to alternative systems. “There’s such a terrible approval rating of Congress that it’s so bad that we might as well just blow it all up and start from scratch.” Indeed, the survey results emerge against a backdrop of historically low public trust in government institutions. An October 2025 Gallup poll revealed that a mere 15% of Americans approve of Congress’s job performance, creating fertile ground for radical reimaginings of governance structures.

This profound institutional skepticism may help explain why some respondents view AI-driven decision-making as potentially superior to human governance, despite documented concerns about algorithmic bias. “There’s this misconception that AI systems are just these objective sources of truth,” Kendal noted, highlighting a fundamental misunderstanding about how artificial intelligence operates. The perception of AI as an impartial arbiter stands in stark contrast to a growing body of research documenting political leanings in major AI systems. Since ChatGPT’s public debut in 2022, multiple academic institutions and think tanks have identified left-of-center tendencies in large language models. A peer-reviewed study published in Public Choice found that these systems produced predominantly left-leaning responses in standardized political assessments, while the Manhattan Institute documented ChatGPT’s tendency to frame Democratic positions more favorably than Republican ones. Further corroborating these findings, a 2024 review by the American Enterprise Institute examined GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini, discovering that these platforms consistently rated right-leaning think tanks lower in “objectivity,” “morality,” and “quality” compared to left-leaning institutions.

Military Control and the Promise of Reduced Casualties

Perhaps most startling among the survey’s findings was that more than one-third of young voters supported transferring control of the world’s largest military forces to an AI system. When probed about this particularly surprising result, Kendal suggested that respondents may have been influenced by the humanitarian framing of the question, which explicitly mentioned reducing war casualties. “If you’re taking that in good faith, fewer casualties of war is a fairly sympathetic dream,” he explained, articulating the potential reasoning behind such support. “If putting AI in charge of this could reduce the amount of wars, or at least the amount of carnage associated with these wars, then, let’s just do it like it’s certainly not working out the current way.”

This willingness to consider algorithmic military command reflects both the growing sophistication of AI technologies and the deep frustration many young Americans feel with conventional approaches to international conflict resolution. The proposition of AI-managed warfare represents a radical departure from centuries of human military leadership, yet significant portions of young voters across the political spectrum—with conservatives leading the trend—appear open to this revolutionary shift. The finding suggests that for many young Americans, the potential benefits of reduced human casualties might outweigh concerns about removing human judgment, ethics, and accountability from decisions of war and peace. This perspective underscores a crucial misunderstanding about artificial intelligence systems that Kendal emphasized throughout his analysis of the survey results: “One of the things I try to drive home is dispelling this illusion that artificial intelligence is unbiased. It is very clearly biased, and some of that is passive,” he cautioned, noting society’s increasingly uncritical reliance on AI technologies. “We do so at our own peril and with a blindfold on, because these things aren’t obvious.”

The Heartland-Rasmussen survey ultimately reveals a complex and evolving relationship between political identity and attitudes toward technological governance among younger Americans. As artificial intelligence continues to advance and integrate into more aspects of public and private life, these findings suggest that traditional political alignments may not reliably predict positions on AI governance. The higher support among young conservatives for algorithmic decision-making—despite documented concerns about AI’s political leanings—highlights the multidimensional nature of technological attitudes that transcend simple left-right categorizations. For policymakers, technologists, and citizens alike, understanding these nuanced perspectives will be essential as societies navigate the profound questions of how much authority to delegate to increasingly capable artificial intelligence systems in determining our collective future.