RegulatingAI exists to build a grassroots platform for AI governance — bridging policymakers, technologists, civil society, and everyday citizens around one of the most consequential regulatory questions of our time.
Heading into the 2026 U.S. midterms, we identified a gap: AI policy was shaping campaigns, state legislation, and candidate platforms in real time, but there was no dedicated resource helping voters and stakeholders understand what was actually at stake. So we set out to build one.
'AI on the Ballot’ is a 20-episode weekly series produced specifically for the midterm election cycle, examining the races, ballot measures, and candidates where AI regulation is a live issue — from state-level chatbot liability laws to the federal-state authority fights shaping the next Congress. Our objective was to translate a fast-moving, technical policy space into something voters, journalists, and policymakers could actually use to make informed decisions — without sacrificing the nuance the subject demands.
The goal was twofold: give the RegulatingAI audience a rigorous, weekly throughline to follow through election season, and demonstrate that AI governance is not an abstract Washington debate — it is already on the ballot, in real races, right now.
Building "AI on the Ballot" meant designing an entirely new production architecture inside an existing show — one built for weekly, election-cycle cadence.
Editorial framework: We built a 20-episode calendar mapped against the U.S. midterm election timeline, ensuring each episode landed ahead of a relevant news cycle — primary results, state legislative sessions, ballot certification deadlines — rather than reacting after the fact. Episodes were sequenced to build cumulatively: early episodes established the policy landscape (state AI laws, federal preemption fights), while later episodes tracked how those issues played out in specific races and candidacies.
Guest vetting and editorial approach: The series tracks five core issues where AI policy directly affects American citizens — data centers and energy costs, federal vs. state AI regulation, AI and jobs, AI taxation, and AI in elections (including deepfakes) — using the midterm races as the lens through which those issues get examined. We built clear editorial guidelines to keep every episode focused on policy substance and its real-world impact rather than political advocacy — a critical safeguard for a nonprofit platform. This included guest selection criteria and balanced representation across the political spectrum to preserve RegulatingAI's nonpartisan credibility.
Format: Each episode pairs Sanjay Puri with policymakers, state attorneys general, candidates, and AI policy experts — continuing RegulatingAI's signature approach of using an informed host to translate technical and legal complexity into an accessible conversation, without flattening the nuance.
Distribution: Full episodes released weekly on the flagship podcast feed and YouTube, supported by short-form clips built specifically for social distribution to reach audiences who wouldn't otherwise seek out long-form policy content. The series is paired with a dedicated companion site, aiontheballots.com, featuring a live Candidate Tracker that shows where every featured candidate stands on the core AI issues. Each candidate has a scorecard with the most recent update, filterable by state, party, office, and incumbency — letting citizens go beyond the episodes to see where their own races stand.
Challenges we faced and overcame:
This series is also the clearest expression yet of RegulatingAI's broader mission: proving that AI governance isn't a Beltway abstraction discussed only by specialists, but a live issue voters are already deciding on — and that a podcast can be the bridge between the two.
4 episodes released on schedule across the full midterm election cycle, sustaining a weekly cadence for the first time in the show's history. The episodes have garnered 100,000+ views already. Guests included names like:
Congressman Greg Landsman (D-OH)
Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA)
Mark Baisley (R) — Colorado State Senator and 2026 U.S. Senate candidate
Eric Goldman — Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research, Santa Clara University School of Law
Wendell Wallach — Scholar, Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics
Roy Austin, Jr. — Director, Howard Law Artificial Intelligence Initiative; former VP of Civil Rights and Deputy General Counsel at Meta
Miranda Nazzaro — Senior Technology Reporter, The Hill
Aziz Huq — Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School
Ben Winters — Director of AI and Privacy, Consumer Federation of America
Beyond the numbers, "AI on the Ballot" achieved what RegulatingAI set out to do: it made AI governance legible and urgent for an audience who might otherwise never engage with the topic — right as those voters were making decisions that will shape AI regulation for years to come.
