AI clown ad drags California county race into deepfake politics

California’s AI-election future just arrived in a county supervisor race, wearing a red nose. The Santa Barbara County Republican Party texted voters an AI-labeled attack on Ricardo Valencia, a Democrat-endorsed Latino school board member, showing him as a clown while Santa Maria burns, sirens flash, a purse gets snatched, and a narrator uses a Latino accent. Democrats called it racist and deceptive; the county GOP chair said they were experimenting with new digital tools. That is the alarming part: this was not a presidential dark-arts lab. It was a local board race. The future of campaign advertising is cheaper, weirder, and still brave enough to blame the software after the humans hit send.