RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Back in March, we all couldn’t help but watch with trepidation as Senator Bernie Sanders sat in a darkened room and interrogated a smartphone running an instance of the Claude chatbot , and then later said he had spoken to an "AI agent ." The resulting video looked like a scene from an A24 horror movie. It was an unsettling stunt from a not-so-tech-savvy politician, but it was at the very least an elected official trying something when it came to AI.
So much has changed in the past few months that now countless would-be elected officials are trying something too. In fact, according to new data from the Washington Post , 40% of current races in the U.S. involve candidates who list AI and data centers as issues on their websites.
In terms of presence on candidate websites, the Post found that AI and data centers are more important than cryptocurrencies, Israel, manufacturing, or race and racism. Guns and gun violence rank just a tiny bit higher.
AI has also, the Post found, become an issue in 90 percent of U.S. states.
However, “AI and data centers” as a broad concept is metabolized into talking points in drastically different ways depending on the partisan lean of the politician in question, the Post found. It broke the topic down into subtopics, and found that Democrats who made AI an issue spoke about:
Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed exemplifies these trends with a detailed section in his website’s policy agenda called “ First, Do No Harm: AI Under Democracy .” The document includes a long list of specific actions aimed at preventing harm, along with proposals for democratic control and private ownership. He has a separate policy document about data centers.
I stood with local and state elected officials to say that we cannot approve any more AI data centers until we have federal guardrails to protect local communities like Saline Township from being run over by the likes of DTE, Oracle, and OpenAI. pic.twitter.com/2PgTJ4m7WJ
— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) August 1, 2026
And what aspect of the AI conversation dominates Republican talking points? China, of course, along with national security in general. AI-concerned Republican candidates addressed this 76% of the time, compared to 24% for Democrats.
The campaigns of prominent politicians struggling to deal with data center backlash in particular have flamed out dramatically this primary season. The most notable of these might be J. Stuart Adams, president of the Utah State Senate, who quickly sought to revamp his image with regard to data centers in the waning days of his campaign before unexpectedly losing last month.
AI’s shift from nothingburger to decisive, life-or-death political issue happened fast according to a recent survey by Heatmap Pro . Over the course of nine months, public opinion on data centers swung by an astonishing 49 points.
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