The Brief

During the summer of 1999, when I was just 15, I moved with my family to Spain. I had never visited Europe before and I had only traveled outside the United States for trips to Mexico.

What took place over the year I spent living in the country’s capital of Madrid and traveling that country was life-altering. Not only did it leave an ever-lasting impression on how I viewed the world and culture, but my understanding of food and cooking also evolved drastically in ways I think I’m still grasping.

One of the first places that we visited in our new home after taking an overnight train from Paris (another first for me) was the legendary restaurant Casa Labra, which first opened its doors in 1860 (some 20 years before my hometown of Whittier would be incorporated) and was the site of the Spanish Socialist Party formation in 1879. My sleep-deprived teenage self wasn’t concerned with the history around me and instead sought sustenance and comfort in potato croquettes.

The small tubular-shaped fried fritters with slightly sweet-tasting outside batter and warm starchy inside arrived two to a plate.

Consumed with a Coke, it remains one of my life's simpler yet most satisfying dining experiences.

Coming full circle

I've noticed that simplicity in a new crop of restaurants and pop-ups that have begun to spring up around Los Angeles, experimenting with the same Spanish and Portuguese flavors that were a rite of passage for me.

The majority of the chefs whom I spoke to for this article were all around my age, all in our 40s, so I couldn’t help but wonder if we had all reached a similar conjecture in our life cycle, where we’d spent our 20-30s trying the most exotic foods we could get our hands out and are now coming full circle, seeking simple and well-executed dishes.

Some might view this as plain, almost even dull. But as I’ve had time to sit with the idea over the past 25+ years, it’s struck me as nearly anything but.

The Serrano Experience (pop up)

When Jorge Serrano, owner of the Spanish food pop-up concept The Serrano Experience, moved to Florida at the age of 8 from his native Spain, its food was already in his blood.

Serrano grew up in Madrid. His father is from Galicia, just above the Portuguese border to the north, and his mother is from Granada, in the South. Both parents raised Serrano with a strong passion for food early on, often dining out and cooking at home as a family.

Serrano went to culinary school for a year but quickly realized the classroom wasn’t for him, but the food was. He started working at Nobu Malibu, tirelessly learning the ropes, eventually moving back to Europe to work at different Nobu properties, then later working for Spanish Chef Dani Garcia in the city Marbella in the south of Spain and David Muñoz at Street XO.

Yet despite all that culinary world-building Serrano had under his belt, he hadn’t had an opportunity to cook his version of Spanish food professionally. He decided to dive in after moving to Los Angeles to be closer to his two sons in Santa Barbara.

I spoke with Serrano at one of his recent pop-ups, this one at the Santa Monica wine bar Esters. The lively mood of the place was buzzing with diners, which matched Serrano’s panache when it came to his dishes. “It all started with a leg of ham,” Serrano said that night, delving into the story of his start in L.A. That leg of ham, pata negra, is the highest grade of Spanish cured ham. (The name refers to the animal's hoof.)

Serrano can often be found standing behind the bar during one of his pop-ups, with his long carving knife expertly slicing up perfectly symmetric squares of the cured meat, much to the delight of the hungry crowds who were there that night. Watching him move the blade back and forth while the sounds of the solo Spanish guitarist playing from the sidewalk, it was almost as if Serrano was conducting his symphony.

Gambas al ajillo, The Serrano Experience

(

Courtesy of The Serrano Experience

)

After several runs of popping up at Alma’s, a cider bar in East Hollywood, where he only served exquisite cuts of that leg of ham and nothing else, owner Lee Briante, who loved this cured meats concept so much, asked Serrano what else he could cook up for the hungry crowd that was showing up each night.

Next followed were dishes such as tortilla de patata, croquetas, gambas al ajillo, a dish made with head-on prawns bathed in a sauce made of garlic and olive oil. The menu is curated to what Serrano feels like that week, what’s fresh at the market, and his location. “We grew into more dishes, paellas, and pulpos; depending on different pop-up locations, we can do different dishes. So now I just keep playing around every week. I try to do a new dish,” Serrano explains. Diners usually order two to three items and enjoy them with a glass of wine.

That menu that evening at Ester’s featured this new a variety of tapas consisting of his Cadiz crudo, made with bluefin tuna belly, Japanese rice wine vinegar, nori, crispy shallots, and an arbequina extra virgin olive oil from Spain which makes for an onslaught of clean and exquisite flavors and textures as the fattiness of tunas pairs with the saltiness of the nori.

Another standout dish was Serrano’s pulpo Galleo, a Galician-style dish made with tender octopus over a bed of softly crushed potatoes sprinkled with smoked pimento that melts in your mouth.

Diners can finish their meal with a slice of burnt Basque cheesecake. Serrano’s version makes excellent strides to distinguish itself, upping the custard factor of the cake’s incredibly soft and creamy texture. His secret? Serrano takes things a step further, adding fio de ovos, threads of egg yolks boiled in sugar syrup, making them soft, almost noodle-like, an exquisite accompaniment to the richness of the cheesecake.

It looks burnt. But that's the magic of the Basque Cheesecake from The Serrano Experience: The inside is ethereal.

(

Courtesy of The Serrano Experience

)

For Serrano, the similarities between Spain and California in climate translate well for food and wine from an approachable and affordable perspective. “I'm very excited to do this kind of food. "I've worked at Michelin-rated restaurants my whole life as a chef, and I respect it, but I just want easy food from a cooking perspective that people enjoy and can afford," he said.

"It's like a happy medium for everyone. The future of food is going more casual, more rustic kinds of plates.”

Baserriko Peppers (pop up)

Gill Gonzalez of Baserriko Peppers, a Spanish Basque pop-up, started cooking Basque food because he couldn’t find it in Los Angeles. The Basque country is an autonomous region of Spain and France, known for influences from both cultures. Gonzalez had grown Basque peppers in his backyard in Walnut Park, near South Gate. His varietals included choricero (often used as the main spice component found in Basque-style chorizo) to piparas, the small yellow peppers usually found in tapas across Spain.

From his cultivation of these rare and exotic peppers, Gonzalez began cooking as a respite from his work as an engineer.

Bocadillo de Txuleton, tistorra caserra, y melted garrotxa — steak, sausage and melted goat cheese, heading for a plate.

(

Courtesy of Baserriko Peppers

)

The pepper is central to Gonzalez's pop-up concept, which is interesting given that he’s cooking a cuisine not generally known for containing a lot of heat. Hence, the name of his operation, Beserriko Peppers.

The Basque dishes that Gonzalez serves at his pop-up — pintxos and tapas, tortillas, and paella are excellent primer for folks with limited Spanish food exposure. However, the dish he's most proud of is his chistora, a cured sausage that he says isn’t found anywhere else in Los Angeles. It is known for its meaty and juicy flavor with just a hit of sweet, a dish often fried and served cut up into pieces as pintxo or in a bocadillo, a small sandwich made with Spanish bread and best enjoyed with a beer or cider. Gonzalez describes his dishes as “nothing elaborate, nothing too fancy. Just simple stuff you can enjoy around the table".

The paella at Otoño, now on the menu after so many requests for it.

(

Courtesy of Otoño

)

Otoño (Highland Park)

Chef Teresa Montano, the owner of Otoño, which opened in 2018 in Highland Park, fell in love with Spanish cooking after working for the Border Grill group, at Ciudad in downtown Los Angeles, known for its pan-Latin cuisine. Montano worked as a line cook a few nights a week, serving Spanish dishes such as paella and tapas.

For Montano, this marked a tipping point of sorts. “I just got turned on by those flavors, and I started traveling to Spain, and that was it,” she said.

Montano recalls gravitating to paella early on. Growing up in New Mexico, Montano’s mother made her version of Spanish rice, with tomato, garlic, onion, and other assorted spices. Immediately she saw the parallels between the dish she grew up eating at home and the yellow saffron rice featured in paella.

After being bit by the Spanish food bug, Montano remained transfixed by the straightforward cooking in her travels to Spain. “As I explored more, especially in Barcelona, it was the simple seafood, like razor clams, the fried croquetas, and things like that just kept piquing my interest,” Montano said.

Montano says the straightforward style of Spanish cooking forces you to emphasize the quality of the product: “If you just have three ingredients on the plate, they better be the best ingredients you can find.”

Let the flavors shine

She recalls attending a food talk featuring the late Los Angeles food critic Jonathan Gold, and asked him why there wasn’t more Spanish food in Los Angeles. She remembers Gold saying that was because Spanish food was plain. “I was like, 'What are you talking about?' I didn't want to argue with him, but that was his answer. And it could come off as plain, but I think just having those great ingredients and letting them shine is beautiful.”

Montano made it her mission to unlock the Spanish flavors she had experienced during her travels. Before opening Otoño, she had opened another restaurant in Pasadena called Ración. The menu at Ración had more of a fine-dining emphasis, with many seafood-inspired dishes that took influence from Spain's Basque and Catalan regions.

Paella, please!

Montano recalls that while she and her staff were trying to execute a higher-concept menu, customers often asked for paella. After her time at Ración ended in the summer of 2016, she traveled back to Spain to Valencia, the birthplace of paella in the south of Spain. What she discovered when it came to the dish was that a paella, in its natural environment, was more of a rustic dish, that field workers would eat with whatever they had on hand.

Armed with that knowledge cultivated in Spain, Montano wants her menu to remain approachable regarding the price point and execution of each dish. “I want to offer more raciones—more of the larger plates. And so our menu is going to trim down and become tighter on the tapas end.”

Serving dishes at good value remains an important principle for Montano, but it also serves comforting food. She describes the current menu at Otono as “about that sharing, and it's the conviviality.”

While in Valencia, she visited the neighborhood known as El Carmen. It’s an area known for its older architecture, with cathedrals built 500 years ago along cobblestone streets juxtaposed with large street art style murals.

“It's so stunning that they live parallel, and that was what I wanted to do here with the food,” she said. “It's classic and modern, and they're together on the same menu or sometimes on the same plate.

Bar Moruno in Silver Lake

Chris Feldmeier, the owner and chef of Bar Moruno in Silver Lake, wanted to fill a void for a cooking style he loved. That specific style of cuisine was a southern Spain style of cooking that he refers to as “Andalusian style cooking.” It’s food originating from an area most famously known for being conquered by the Moors in 700 A.D. It’s a style of cooking that takes heavily from Middle Eastern influences using spices — lots of turmeric, lots of coriander, cumin but using a lot of European techniques in cooking those things.”

The Tinned Fish plate at Bar Moruno

(

Ann Fishbein

/

Courtesy of Bar Murano

)

Using the Andalusian concept as his North Star, Feldmeier knew he didn’t want his menu to consist solely of tapas. “We consciously wanted to expose more of what Spain has to offer than the usual, I don't know, a run-of-the-mill Spanish restaurant.”

At Bar Moruno, chef Feldmeier wants to expose his diners to new things. Tin fish is a central focus on the menu at Bar Moruno, which is found all over Spain and Portugal. (Pro tip: if traveling to either of these places, it makes excellent souvenirs to bring home.) Usually consisting of fish like sardines, mackerel, oysters, and mussels, all preserved in olive oil or different sauces.

When describing the menu, Feldmeier explains, “I advise people to come in, and I design the menu first and foremost so you can eat any way you'd like. It's supposed to show the flexibility of Spain and the entire region's food. And make it approachable for everybody in a different way.”

Barra Santos (Cypress Park)

When Mike Santos and Melissa Lopez first came up with the idea to open a Portuguese restaurant, they knew they didn’t want it to feel like L.A. Entering the small restaurant space in Cypress Park, with its blue and white tile bar and carved brick, with the small group of diners casually drinking glasses of wine and nibbling on Alorena olives that has been marinated with coriander and orange, it does manage to make you feel like you’ve been whisked away to another place.

The salt cod fritters at Barra Santos.

(

Courtesy of Barra Santos

)

Santos and his head chef, Melissa Lopez, wanted the food to showcase specific simple flavors representative of Portuguese cooking, an underrepresented cuisine in Los Angeles.

Seafood is a significant focus of the menu at Barra Santos, featuring standouts such as salt cod fritters that are ultra-savory and meaty.

Eating with a fork or just your hand after squeezing a bit of lemon juice over them is almost a meditative experience, allowing you to dial directly into the flavors. With each bite, all the other noise of your day seems to fall away.

“Specifically to Portuguese food, it's very low-key flavor. It's very flavorful, but you must source great ingredients and try not to do much with them. The bacalao (cod), we soak them for three days. We make caramelized onions. It takes three to four hours to get them nice and sweet. And that's it. I think it speaks for itself in the dish,” Lopez says.

When speaking to Santos, who was born in Portugal, about the reasoning behind the simple cooking style in Portuguese cooking, “It came out of necessity and using what you had. You couldn't access many gourmet products, so you just kept things simple.”

Santos' comments remind me of how many of us were cooking and eating based on what we had because of the pandemic.

Such staples, good bread, and olive oil felt essential in our kitchen; therefore, it makes sense why we, as diners, are increasingly seeking similar dining experiences when going out.

California State University is betting that artificial intelligence will transform the workplace — and that its 470,000 students need to learn how to use it before they graduate.

Last year, CSU became the nation’s first public university system to pay for students’ access to ChatGPT Edu. It has awarded over $3 million in grants for faculty to experiment with how to use AI in classrooms. Several campuses now train students in how to responsibly use the technology.

Those measures are all pieces of CSU’s strategy to prepare students for a future labor market reshaped by AI. But the investment in AI has come under criticism from some CSU faculty, and some students remain skeptical of the value of knowing how to use AI even as most are concerned the developing technology will threaten their chances of landing a job and keeping it.

The success of CSU’s AI strategy will depend on the extent to which AI affects the workforce that today’s college students will soon enter.

Hiring is frozen in many sectors right now as employers wait to see the true extent artificial intelligence will change the labor market, said Eric Bettinger, a leading education economist with Stanford Graduate School of Education. But it’s not clear if the slowdown in the labor market can be attributed to AI.

As with previous emerging technologies, AI is forcing employers to decide whether they should replace workers with the technology, or hire more employees who can leverage AI to be more productive, Bettinger said.

New graduates are facing a difficult labor market, considering the unemployment rate for this population has steadily risen since 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

“The reality is that the world outside of school isn’t slowing down, and we need to prepare our students for that reality,” James Frazee, San Diego State University’s vice president for information technology, told EdSource.

Students worry AI is taking their future jobs

Ismaeel Malik, a San Jose State University justice studies student, said he worries about AI taking over jobs in his desired field.

“Entry-level jobs are work that people don’t want to do,” Malik, who will graduate next spring, told EdSource. Malik said he doesn’t think AI proficiency will make it easier to win a position out of college.

Other San Jose State students who spoke with EdSource say they think some majors will be more affected than others. San Jose State prenursing student Jade Goodewin said the “hands-on” part of her preferred future career seems fairly AI-proof. But second-year student Vien Tang, who is studying advertising, said that AI could replace some of the work of entry-level jobs in the advertising industry.

“It’s definitely a possibility, because I think a lot of companies try to cut costs,” Tang said. “There’s a likelihood of that happening.”

Given SJSU’s proximity to Silicon Valley and many companies whose technologies are reshaping the workforce, the university hopes to be a leader in AI adoption, said Sandra Hirsh, special assistant to the university’s provost for AI initiatives.

“We need to be preparing students with whatever the latest opportunities are, but also prepare students for the fact that change and evolution are going to continue to happen,” she said.

Hirsh said companies want graduates to have a basic understanding of AI and how to use it in their work. Despite the nebulous changes happening in the job market, companies that hire SJSU graduates have told university leaders that students also need skills in leadership, inventiveness and ethics.

The CSU system is paying $13 million a year to provide ChatGPT Edu to all 470,000 CSU students.

Artur Gafurov, president of the California State Student Association and a fourth-year student at San Jose State, said many students appreciate access to AI tools like ChatGPT Edu, but don’t necessarily know how to use them responsibly and effectively.

“I know a lot of students who are taking it upon themselves to learn a bit more about the tool and restrict themselves with how they use it,” Gafurov said.

Some question the value of AI initiatives 

Other private and public universities have signed agreements with companies such as OpenAI to give students access to large language models, including ChatGPT Edu. Large public university systems, such as State University of New York, have also developed systemwide AI policies, and some colleges, such as Northwestern University, have launched AI majors.

But not everyone at CSU has embraced the growing use of AI on campuses. Some professors pushed back on the OpenAI deal after CSU signed it in early 2025. Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University, said CSU administrators did not clearly explain how AI would be used on campuses and in classrooms by students.

“What will students be doing with AI that’s so valuable? If it’s so valuable to them professionally, educationally, where is that value and what does it look like?” Lincoln said.

Martha Kenney, a professor in the SFSU Department of Women and Gender Studies, said CSU’s claims that AI is helping prepare students for the changing labor market are dubious because the university has not clearly identified skills young people should develop for their future careers.

“It’s possible it has no use for our students in this way,” Kenney said.

According to an OpenAI spokesperson, ChatGPT Edu provides students with access to the company’s latest large language model, and includes plug-ins that students and faculty can use to personalize their accounts for teaching and learning.

University officials say providing access to tools like ChatGPT is essential to prevent a digital divide for CSU students who may not be able to afford subscriptions to these technologies.

“We believe we’re doing the right thing to serve our mission to prepare our students for the future workforce,” said Ed Clark, CSU’s chief information officer.

The future workforce

Erika McEntarfer, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, said some experts in recent years have forecast that AI would wipe out white-collar workers’ jobs. There’s little evidence that has happened, she said.

It’s difficult for universities to predict which skills will be in demand in the future, she said, but colleges should prepare their students for disruptions to their careers. She noted that roughly 60% of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940.

Universities need to prepare students for a tough labor market, and not just because of AI, McEntarfer said. The recent rise in the unemployment rate among new graduates started before ChatGPT was introduced in 2022, she said.

McEntarfer’s advice to recent or soon-to-be graduates is to develop skills that make you a good “human” worker, such as small talk, showing up to work on time and meeting the needs of company leaders.

“With AI you need to make sure you’re using it as a personal trainer, not a human forklift,” McEntarfer advised future college graduates. “Hopefully that’s what colleges are doing.”

Mariana Sanchez is a fourth-year journalism major at San Jose State University and a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps.

This story was originally published by EdSource.

Comedian Christopher Titus brings his 11th stand-up special Doomed to Repeat to Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank on Saturday, Oct. 10.

 Titus is one of the most prolific stand-ups of his generation. Over the past 25 years, his 10 comedy specials have touched on everything from his dysfunctional upbringing in the San Fernando Valley to issues of love, marriage and parenting, and even life under the Trump administration. All summer, he's been touring his 11th special, Doomed to Repeat, which he said is about what's going on in our country right now.

"Do you remember the bicentennial? I was around for the bicentennial. Don't do the math on that," Titus said. "I remember really being proud of my country. I was a little kid and was watching the sailing ships in New York and the fireworks behind the Statue of Liberty. I was proud to be an American. And then we had our 250th birthday, and it was thrown by our drunk, abusive stepfather. It was the weirdest, worst thing I've ever seen."

Titus said he goes after President Donald Trump "pretty hard" in Doomed to Repeat, but he does it "sideways."

"I did it in Texas, and I didn't get killed," Titus said. "So, it's good."

The signature bit of Doomed to Repeat centers on immigration, a topic Titus said he has a unique perspective on, pointing out that his ancestors have been in America for 400 years.

" I thought, what an interesting perspective with all that's going on with our country right now and all the hatred and demonization of immigrants, to talk about it from a place where my family's been here before there was a country," he said.

Titus said the routine is so pointed that it's caused people who disagree with him on the issue to walk out.

"You paid. We got your drink money. We got your ticket money, and now you're leaving?" Titus said. "The bit really nails why anybody who hates immigrants is not just a hypocrite, but like a mentally ill hypocrite."

Titus said that whether it's personal or political, no topic is too messy to bring to the stand-up stage.

"If talking about my mom's mental illness and being in bars when I was four and being kidnapped ... by my dad, I mean, I don't think so," Titus said. "Pryor taught us that. Richard was raised in a brothel. I think the whole point is to drag the audience through the horror that you went through, because we're all the same machine, right?"

Although Titus is currently touring his 11th comedy special, he's already thinking about No. 12.

" I'm at 990 minutes of stand-up comedy that I've written and produced," Titus said. " Carlin's my favorite guy, him and Robin [Williams].  George did 16 specials. I'm going for 17, hopefully before I crank out."

Titus headlines Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank on Saturday, Oct.10.

Newport Beach voters might get two separate ballots for the November election, which will determine whether they vote on one local ballot measure, or four.

In one of the weirdest cases to join Orange County’s substantial history of election oddities, Newport Beach is scrambling to comply with a court order by trying to stage its own election in conjunction with the regular, general election. This is highly unusual — the vast majority of cities in Orange County, and across California, rely on the county registrar of voters to administer their elections.

Lena Shumway, Newport Beach’s city clerk, has been tasked with pulling off the flash election, including putting together voter rolls, getting ballots and election guides printed and mailed (there will be no in-person voting), and, if the election happens, counting ballots and verifying voter signatures. She told LAist she’s running into multiple roadblocks, some of them seemingly insurmountable.

And yet, she said, “We’re going to hold the election because we have to comply.”

How we got here

Newport Beach is in this bind because it challenged the validity of three ballot measures in court and, in the meantime, missed the deadline to have the Orange County Registrar of Voters place them on the general election ballot. The three measures would:

• Limit City Council members to serving a total of eight years — currently, council members are barred from serving more than eight years consecutively, but can run again as long as they take a break.
• Establish by-district voting where residents in each of the city’s seven districts vote only for their district representative on council — currently, all residents vote for representatives of each district.
• Add a “sunshine provision” to the city’s charters that would, among other things, require the city to make advisory committee meetings accessible to the public, and establish a “Sunshine Task Force” to watchdog public records requests.   
  

The measures are sponsored by the Southern California Opportunity Group, a company owned by local real estate developer Ken Picerne and his Picerne Group.

According to campaign filings, Picerne has sunk more than $1 million into these and a fourth initiative, Measure H, which will be on the regular, general election ballot. Measure H would essentially redo the city’s state-approved housing development plan and substantially decrease the number of units that could be developed.

How did Measure H make it on the general election ballot while the other three did not?

Measure H actually qualified last year, and the city promptly asked the O.C. Registrar of Voters to put it on the November 2026 general election ballot.

That didn’t stop the city from trying to block Measure H in court this year, but the effort was unsuccessful.

What’s so hard about putting on an election?

Historically, many cities did put on their own separate elections for city leaders and city-specific ballot initiatives, said Fredric Woocher, a Southern California-based election attorney. Some cities held local elections in a totally different month and day than state and federal elections. And some held them on the same day, with separate ballots.

“It was always very confusing to voters,” Woocher said. Plus, turnout for municipal elections was often dismal, leading the state to pass a law in 2015 requiring most cities to align their local elections with the statewide dates.

These days, there aren’t many companies around that offer the kinds of services Newport Beach needs, Woocher said. The city is already on its second ballot printing company, after the first company bowed out because the time frame was too tight, according to Shumway.

To help coordinate the election, Newport Beach hired a fledgling consulting firm, Stellara Group, which opened for business last year, according to its filings with the Secretary of State.

Under the contract, the city could pay up to $495,000 to Stellara and subcontractors if the election actually happens. That is still unclear.

Is Newport Beach’s parallel election really going to happen?

Shumway said there are several major hurdles that could make it impossible to successfully put on the city’s special municipal election.

For one thing, the O.C. Registrar of Voters has said it can’t provide the complete files for Newport Beach voters. This includes the signatures on file, which are used to verify mail-in voters’ identity, and confidential voter files.

Without this information, Shumway said, carrying out the election is essentially impossible “because we’re disenfranchising people … and we can’t verify signatures,” she said.

Bob Page, the O.C. Registrar, said he “felt bad” for the city during a recent media call. “I just can't put the general statewide election at risk by dropping what we should be doing to create ways to help them when their request has come way too late,” he said.

Another major hurdle for Newport Beach — the California Secretary of State has thus far refused to provide the city with the required watermark and special ballot tint. Without those two things, the printing contractor says it won’t print the ballots for the city’s parallel election.

The company has given the city until Oct. 7 to get everything in place, or else look for a new, third printing company. “At this point, it’s a waiting game,” Shumway said.

On a September evening, Adam Johnson, 40, settled on his porch chair in Morgantown, West Virginia, to go over his ballot for the upcoming midterm election.

Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values. But rather than discussing it with a friend or family member, he held an hours-long discussion with ChatGPT — a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM) owned by OpenAI, an AI research company.

A graphic designer studying to be an illustrator, Johnson said ChatGPT is a significant part of his life. He uses it for meal planning, assistance in job hunting and various other tasks around the house.

After prompting the AI-powered chatbot to make a list of all the races on his ballot this year, Johnson dug deeper.

Johnson is one of a growing number of voters using chatbots to research their ballots for the first midterm election since AI has taken the country by storm. About half of American adults report using AI-powered chatbots and about 42 percent of users said they use it to search for information, according to the Pew Research Center.

Several voters NPR spoke with said they rely on chatbots for down-ballot races — with thinner news coverage, to make tables comparing candidates for governors' races and to verify or debunk viral claims. Some have been using it to create tools to help others look up their own ballots. Experts say the properties that make chatbots useful also make them subtly persuasive and eager to please.

"It might select some things that would reinforce and persuade you even more towards the way that you were leaning already," said Rafael Batista, a fellow at John Hopkins University, who studies how AI shapes the way people experience the world. "So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world."

Since AI companies don't disclose how their commercial models are trained or how they choose which sources to draw on, it's hard to know what biases might shape their answers, Batista said.

Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, a chatbot, and Gemini, a Google-owned chatbot, did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for OpenAI, directed NPR to its election information and safeguards page which notes that the company continues to "monitor bias in our models to keep ChatGPT's responses politically neutral."

Concerns about AI

Johnson in West Virginia continued his research by outlining his political beliefs for ChatGPT. He stated that he usually votes for Republicans, unless those candidates are part of the Make America Great Again movement, in which case he votes for Democrats or a third party.

While deciding between candidates for the Senate race, Johnson nudged the chatbot about other issues he found important.

Johnson recognizes that AI-powered chatbots have sycophantic qualities.

"ChatGPT is just kind of a people pleaser," he said. "Whatever you lean towards, it will speak positively about it."

Still, Batista from JHU said that knowing these models are agreeable and persuasive, is not enough to "protect our minds from these influences."

Voters use chatbots in a variety of ways

Lisa Veldran, 65, was a staffer in the City Council in Madison, Wisconsin for almost four decades before retiring. This summer, she used Gemini to answer very specific questions she had about the primary election for governor.

After Sara Rodriguez, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, dropped out of the race, Veldran needed to choose between two candidates: Francesca Hong and David Crowley. She prompted Gemini to make a comparative table of both candidates.

Veldran said the chatbot can be a research tool, but it's not something that determines her life.

"You also have to keep in mind what's running these chatbots and AI in general," she said. "Who's paying to build these bots and what is their ultimate goal."

Lakshmi Iyer, an author living in Exton, Pa., describes herself as a power user of chatbots and thinks "it is capable of a lot of things, but the human in the loop is absolutely essential."

Iyer, 50, is part of They See Blue, an Indian American grassroots Democratic organization to drive up voter registration.

She did not use a chatbot to research her ballot, she said, but she used Claude, to create Ballot Lookup — a website that can inform Pennsylvania's voters about who is on their ballot and their stance on certain issues.

The website is described as an "independent, volunteer-built, nonpartisan lookup," and Iyer built it to help voters who may not learn more about candidates by searching across various sources.

Like other users, Iyer is aware that if chatbots "can infer your political leanings, they will push you towards what you are leaning to." To keep her own bias in check, Iyer prompted Claude to pick statements from the candidates' own speeches or from their official websites.

Some users noted that the decimation of local media has left them with fewer options for learning about down-ballot races. Tyler Black from Nashville, Tennessee, said he didn't use chatbots for House or Senate but is using them to learn about local candidates.

Black, who is a vice president at a software development company, is aware that chatbots sometimes hallucinate — that's when chatbots respond to prompts with false, misleading or fabricated answers. To overcome that problem, he often checks the information one chatbot has provided him against another.

Batista from JHU said that method of fact-checking is better than using the same model twice, but he hasn't seen evidence that it is effective.

If users are using chatbots to research their vote, Batista said, they should frame their prompts in a way that their personal preferences are hidden, and they could use incognito mode so the chatbot doesn't have much prior information on them.

Adam Johnson in West Virginia is still researching and chatting with ChatGPT about his ballot. The county commission races are still on his list to look into. But he feels like AI helped him learn everything else he needed to know for November.

"I wouldn't feel too bad if I had to do the election today," Johnson said.
Copyright 2026 NPR