Anti-AI populism is the future of American politics | Garrison Lovely

The AI industry had a bad night last week.

The Democrats’ sweeping midterms victory is a rebuke of Donald Trump, the industry’s most powerful champion.

Almost everywhere they could, voters rejected datacenters: moratoriums and other restrictions passed in more than 30 localities across nine states. And, with wins in places such as Texas, Ohio and Georgia, an estimated 41% of planned datacenter capacity is in states with governors-elect backing moratoriums.

To be sure, the election results were not primarily about AI. In 2024, Trump ran on lowering prices and starting no new wars, then began a war that raised prices. While corruption, the cost of living, Iran and immigration were seen as more important to people’s votes in NBC exit polls, AI and datacenters were cited by 23% of voters as “crucial” in their decision, and Democrats won these voters 67% to 30%.

AI will become the defining political fight of the 2028 cycle. The future of US politics will belong to whoever voters believe will bring the industry to heel.

AI industrialists, in their telling, are racing to build job-destroying machines that might also destroy us. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, writes that “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans”.

And OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, infamously said, “AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies.” They built their machines on “the largest theft of labor in human history”, as one Microsoft executive put it.

Could you script better villains?

And in recent years, no issue has grown more in salience than AI. Local organizing around the country drove an explosion of opposition to AI datacenters. Following a summer full of rogue AI hacking incidents and prominent warnings from AI developers, AI extinction fears have gone mainstream.

Hacks and cyber-attacks, driven by AI, have recently spiked and will get much worse. And all the backlash we’ve seen to date emerged in a period of 4% unemployment. As signs of widespread labor automation grow, we’ll find that we’re nowhere close to the ceiling of anti-AI sentiment.

The industry will be hard to tame, but the political upside of doing so is enormous – and it’s anyone’s game. When NBC asked which party would be better on AI, 30% of voters named Democrats and 27% named Republicans, with 43% saying neither. The savvier Republicans realize this and are already making the case for a post-midterm break with Silicon Valley.

Indeed, coziness with the industry trying to replace us with machines was a political liability for Republicans on Tuesday. Trump, following advice from billionaire venture capitalists like David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, has taken a “let it rip” approach to AI.

Tech executive donations got them prime seating in the Capitol rotunda during Trump’s inauguration, and no industry has donated more to his ballroom. This summer, the president declared in a social media post: “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.”

And at the industry’s behest, almost every House Republican voted for a provision in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to override state AI regulations with no federal replacement – an unprecedented move. (Senate Republicans wisely voted to strip the measure.)

All this and more was fodder for Democratic attack ads, with more than 130 federal and gubernatorial races mentioning tech accountability or AI (only two Democratic-aligned ads between 2020 and 2024 mentioned big tech).

To get more than a one-cycle bump, Democrats actually have to deliver on the accountability Republicans failed to provide. And Trump won’t be on the ticket in 2028, but the AI industry isn’t term-limited.

Whoever can most convincingly run against Altman, Amodei, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg will gain far more politically than they’ll lose in foregone Super PAC contributions, the limits of which were also on display on Tuesday.

The only competitive race the main AI industry Super Pac spent big in resulted in a loss to Democrat Annie Andrews in South Carolina, who ran on “protecting kids, not big tech”. Musk’s record-breaking spending of nearly half a billion dollars flopped: Republicans lost every one of the five Senate races he spent the most on.

All this argues against a return to Democrats’ Obama-era chumminess with Silicon Valley. Tuesday night clearly demonstrated that economic populism is the most potent force in American politics – and it’s incompatible with a friendly relationship with corporations that have already grown far too powerful.

Thankfully, those worried about AI’s dangers have more – and more empowered – champions than ever. Democratic leadership and key incoming committee chairs have signaled that AI will be one of their top priorities. And the party’s left flank is going further.

Texas Democrat Greg Casar, a former labor organizer and the chair of the Congressional Progressive caucus, declared: “AI will be the number one issue in 2028.” Casar has co-sponsored a bill with the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders that would pause AI development until a federal cabinet-level agency is in place and ban artificial super-intelligence outright.

In his 60 Minutes interview, the Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed called for a “full-on pause” on frontier AI development and also said he was making AI his number one issue. In his victory speech, the senator-elect Troy Jackson of Maine said: “We are not that far from Terminator, and I don’t want to be ‘hasta la vista, baby.’”

Republican senators with competitive races or White House ambitions will want to differentiate themselves from their party, creating opportunities for Democrats to pick up the votes needed to get over the 60-vote filibuster threshold. And some Republicans, like Missouri’s Josh Hawley, have been leaders on drafting robust AI-regulation bills. Trump, as he’s reminded us, could always use his veto power, but he’s signaled a surprising openness to working with Democrats.

To mitigate the harms from AI and deliver on their affordability mandate, Democrats should pass popular pro-worker legislation and dare Trump to veto it. Some ideas: ban surveillance pricing and “bossware”, make it easier for workers to unionize (and organize across sectors), and create strict liability for AI developers.

Democrats need to get creative in shifting the incentive structures for companies from labor replacement to worker augmentation. Legislation should strengthen workers’ ability to make wage theft claims if their work is used to train AI models that lead to layoffs or reduction of hours.

And if the AI you develop and use does what would be criminal if a human did it, as AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic have, you should be criminally liable.

I’ve previously argued here and in my new book, Obsolete, that we urgently need to stop the race to build universal labor-replacing machines (what the industry calls artificial general intelligence).

That requires more political will than we currently have. In my view, if the public really understood what the industry was trying to do, we would shut down further development immediately.

Congressional hearings can compel the sharing of important non-public information under oath. This summer, Casar asked AI companies difficult questions about the spate of criminal hacking incidents they have been responsible for but got incomplete and misleading answers in return.

Now, Democrats will be able to back future inquiries with subpoena power – something the senator Ed Markey reminded big tech executives of: “They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing.”

Congressional hearings can also create a spectacle around something that is technically public, but not widely known, like the industry’s holy grail. AI companies are explicitly planning to fully replace their researchers with AI systems that can train smarter generations, hoping to kick off an explosion in AI capabilities that results in systems that are superhuman at basically everything.

Seems risky? Don’t worry, they’re planning to fully automate AI safety research too. If you talk to the people leading this work, they’ll admit it’s a terrible plan – they just can’t think of a better one.

Democrats should drag Altman, Amodei and Musk before the world and make them explain just what it is they’re trying to do and why they’re doing it without our consent. It will also be a chance for Democrats to show whose interests they’ll put first: the public or the billionaires trying to replace us with machines.