Two days out, AI chatbots, betting markets and polls each name a different Alaska frontrunner

Ask an AI chatbot who is winning Alaska's governor race, check what gamblers are betting, and look at the polls, and you will get three different answers. Two days before Tuesday's primary, those signals point at three different frontrunners, and none of them is the same thing as a vote.

That gap is the point of Voting Monitor, a tracker AlaskaNews.com publishes that lines up three things people sometimes mistake for predictions: what AI chatbots say when asked about the race, what prediction markets are pricing, and what voter polls find.

The chatbot column is there for a specific reason. When a person asks an AI which candidate is ahead, the answer arrives with the confidence of a machine but none of the visible reasoning behind it, a recommendation shaped by a process almost no one can see. And a meaningful share of voters are open to leaning on it: a University of Chicago Harris School and AP-NORC poll on the 2024 election found 14 percent of adults were at least somewhat likely to use AI to get information about the presidential race, and that was before chatbots became a daily habit for millions more people. Making that hidden output visible, and showing how unreliable it is as a guide, is much of why the tracker exists.

Right now the signals drift a lot. The chatbots name independent Bill Walker more than anyone else, about 22 percent of the time. The betting markets give Walker almost nothing, 0.3 percent, and instead put Democrat Tom Begich on top at 53 percent, roughly four times his standing with the chatbots. The polls show Begich around 19 percent and Walker under 9. Three sources, three different leaders.

None of this forecasts a winner, and the tracker says so, carrying the label "Not a forecast." The chatbot figure measures what AI products say when asked, not what anyone intends at the ballot box, drawn from more than 186,000 collected AI responses.

The market side has also moved fast. A week earlier, the betting markets had Republican Bernadette Wilson in front at 33.5 percent; by Sunday Begich had climbed to 53 percent and Wilson had slipped to 26. The chatbots, through all of it, kept naming Walker.

"With Alaska's primary two days away, the chatbots and the bettors still are not looking at the same frontrunner," Voting Monitor wrote.

The vote is Tuesday. Seventeen governor and lieutenant governor tickets are on the top-four ballot for the seat Gov. Mike Dunleavy is term-limited out of, and the four candidates with the most votes advance to a ranked-choice general election Nov. 3.