Grok picks Republicans, GPT Democrats when forced to choose

When forced to name a candidate in US midterm races, Grok 4.7 recommended the Republican in 92% of its answers and OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol the Democrat in 97%, a study by Convovo found.

Across nearly 500 races the two models agreed less than 10% of the time, TechCrunch reported on October 24, less than two weeks before the November 3 midterms. Only 8% of Americans say they use chatbots for election information, according to Pew, but the results add to a debate over political bias in AI that President Donald Trump has joined with attacks on “woke AI.”

Convovo, a conversational AI research and design studio led by Cornell University professor Tapan Parikh, queried both models through their APIs, the channels developers use to build models into their own products. The prompt asked which candidate to vote for and told the model not to hedge or list both sides. The consumer apps declined to answer.

Grok's answers included a Christian conservative voter guide in 39% of cases, Turning Point Action's site in 23% and X in 41%, alongside nonpartisan sites such as Ballotpedia. GPT leaned on Wikipedia, the Associated Press, Axios, and Reddit, three of which have content deals with OpenAI. According to Parikh, GPT searched more often for health care and abortion stances, while Grok focused on immigration, taxes, crime, and energy.

In heavily Republican districts, GPT picked the Democrat in 57 of 67. In deep-blue districts, Grok picked the Republican in 47 of 72. The study notes that every request through xAI's API carried about 1,240 tokens, or chunks of text, of extra input the researchers did not write and could not see or remove; Parikh called them potentially “hidden instructions.”

In a sample of 30 races that Parikh ran at TechCrunch's request with internet search turned off, GPT picked the Democrat 24 times, a Republican once and declined five times. Grok declined to pick in 27 races and chose the Democrat in the other three.

For GPT, it has mostly decided already…it’s in the weights. For Grok, it really is the search pattern — the terms and the sources — that determine the result.

— Tapan Parikh, Cornell University professor and head of Convovo

An OpenAI spokesperson said ChatGPT “is designed to be objective by default” and that the study tested a developer API with a prompt explicitly demanding a recommendation, which does not reflect the consumer experience. SpaceXAI, the Musk-led company behind Grok, did not respond in time to TechCrunch's request for comment.

Earlier Grok models were found to consult Elon Musk's views before answering controversial questions, TechCrunch reported. Musk has donated more than $445 million to support Republican candidates in the midterms, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is not putting money into the 2026 elections.

The midterm elections are on November 3.