The Democratic Split Over Whether to Befriend AI — or Vilify It

It’s become a common occurrence: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer posts a light-hearted video on social media. She’s Christmas shopping, or she’s talking about her Michigan accent or she’s touting her administration’s accomplishments. And immediately, the comments start rolling in, all demanding the same thing: Say no to data centers in the state. Stop construction. “All I want for Christmas is legislation banning data centers in Michigan.”

National figures in the party are beginning to notice the anger. What began on the ground with widespread protests against the facilities that provide infrastructure for the growth of artificial intelligence is finding its way into new plans, memos and rhetoric as the Democratic Party thinks about how to win in 2026 and 2028.

It’s an argument that began in the progressive wing but is increasingly finding purchase across the party: Be proudly, loudly, without reservations, anti-AI. It’s not enough, these pollsters, consultants and elected officials say, to caution, minimally regulate and signal a friendly stance toward tech companies building AI. There is a massive, growing opportunity for Democrats to tap into rising anxiety, fear and anger about the havoc AI could wreak in people’s lives, they say, on issues from energy affordability to large-scale job losses, and channel it toward a populist movement — and not doing it, or not doing it strongly enough, will hurt the party.

“The contrast is so obvious. On one side there’s the billionaires, and on the other side there’s everyone else,” said Lakshya Jain, the co-founder of the polling firm Split Ticket and the head of political data at the publication The Argument. “I think [Democrats] should be bolder. A lot of tech companies have a lot of power, and they have a lot of capital and economic influence. But politically speaking, you can go a lot harder on economic populism. The public wants to see something bold on costs.”

To many people who spend their days thinking about how Democrats can energize their base and prove their anti-billionaire bona fides, going all-in on opposing the AI industry is one obvious, winning way to do so. The loosely defined coalition of people calling for this approach includes socialists, independents from rural states and mainstream Democrats who have turned concern about tech into a pet issue, arguing it can form the basis of a new populist brand of politics that has long proven difficult for Democrats to execute effectively and on a large scale — but whose time may have come.

That includes everyone from traditional populists such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), to Democrats with a bone to pick with big tech such as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), to pollsters insisting the party focus only on popular issuessuch as David Shor, to local party officials in purple states worried about energy costs.

That’s because the polls almost speak for themselves. There is hardly any issue that polls lower than unchecked AI development among Americans. Gallup polling showed that 80 percent of American adults think the government should regulate AI, even if it means growing more slowly. Pew, meanwhile, ran a study that showed only 17 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years. Even congressional Democrats, at a record low 18 percent approval, beat that out, according to Quinnipiac.

“It’s not just the working class [that’s hurting]. It’s the middle class. It’s the upper middle class,” said Morris Katz, a strategist who has worked with incoming New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner and Nebraska independent Dan Osborn, among others. “We’re really headed towards a point in which it feels like we will all be struggling, except for 12 billionaires hiding out in a wine cave somewhere.” That argument strikes at the heart of the larger divide in the Democratic Party since the 2024 election: On one side are those who said the party lost because it abandoned the pragmatic center, and on the other are those who argue they lost because Kamala Harris did not lean in enough to a brand of populist politics that would have energized the base. This new kind of fiery, anti-AI politics is mostly opposed by pro-business Democrats who are from states with significant AI investment in their economy, such as Gov. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania.

Across parts of the party, there’s growing concern that there aren’t enough mainstream Democratic politicians willing to run hard against AI development. In recent months, that’s beginning to change, with more establishment Democrats beginning to talk about the issue. But they’re still moving too slowly, many critics say — and potentially leaving a very valuable issue on the table to be taken up by a populist Republican.

“Smart strategists in the party are starting to get this,” said a Democratic political operative who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the party, “but this feels akin to Joe Biden not talking about the cost-of-living crisis for two years.”

Since 2023, a few Democrats have become known for their strong denunciations of tech leaders and the coming age of AI. In October of that year, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) asked the Biden administration to adopt an “AI Bill of Rights” to prevent discrimination. Just last week, Sanders called for a nationwide moratorium on new data center construction and has of late been calling out “big tech oligarchs” for plans to “replace human workers.”

“There’s both a political imperative and opportunity for the Democratic Party to take advantage of the fact that the AI billionaires are in bed with the Trump administration,” Murphy said in an interview.

But they’re the exception; most mainstream Democrats have been either quiet on the issue or trumpeting the success of AI advancement, while also noting the need for some regulation aimed at discrete concerns — affordability, for instance, or intellectual property rights. There are multiple big reasons for this reticence, according to insiders: A concern about further angering the tech industry, a belief the government can’t put the AI genie back in the bottle and a simple lack of understanding about the technology.

The first rationale is simple. The AI industry has a lot of cash at its back, and its growth has almost single-handedly powered American GDP growth in 2025. It’s attractive to Trump and big blue-state governors for that exact reason. And when the Biden administration began efforts to regulate the industry and use the power of the federal government against the industry on antitrust grounds, it sent AI billionaires running into the open arms of the Republican Party. The cash they donated helped to power Trump back into office. The Democratic Party taking an explicitly anti-AI stance could push even more of those industry types away.

“It would be a shame if the business community didn’t feel like Democrats were on their side,” said Ruth Whittaker, the director of technology policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “We would lose out on some important perspectives, and important connections to voters as well.”

“There is definitely tension in the Democratic Party right now with how to address AI,” said Julie Samuels, the president of TECH:NYC, an industry association that has supported New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul. But Samuels comes to the opposite conclusion of consultants who think Democrats should spend a lot of time attacking AI billionaires. “If the Democrats come out in 2026 as the anti-AI party, I think they will be alienating a lot of voters, she says.”

Samuels cited the fact that Mamdani received significant contributions from major tech companies’ employees during the mayoral race despite being an avowed progressive and socialist. She worries that if Democrats completely abandon the tech industry, they’ll lose not only the class of billionaires that has already jumped ship, but also the rest of their (often well-heeled) workers and anyone with an interest in tech.

“I think the best thing we can do in this moment is lead, and really show what responsible regulation looks like,” said Betsy Hoover, the co-founder and managing partner of Higher Ground Labs, a venture fund using technology to support left of center politics. “Another approach is for people to feed that fear [of AI among the public], and ride it, and say Democrats are the party of ‘not.’ In the short term that may make some voters feel better, but I don’t think that’s a solution.”

Third Way went so far as to publish its own AI framework over the summer, which argued that Democrats are already too pessimistic about AI.

“There’s a strain of reflexive antagonism to AI [within the Democratic Party], which I think is a mistake,” said Whittaker.

These more pro-AI Democrats argue that those who are concerned about the future are reading the polling wrong. They are aware of the deep fears of job loss and societal collapse, but argue that the only way out is through — that Democrats need to do a better job of explaining the potential benefits of AI.

“There isn’t a lot of credible information about how AI is actually affecting the job market right now,” said Whittaker. “How AI is actually affecting the economy. How people are using it.”

But while many Democrats stay quiet, Americans are getting worried. “The AI issue is growing in salience amongst the public, and their concern is growing as well,” said Ryan O’Donnell, the executive director of the progressive polling firm Data for Progress. “Voters are very concerned about [AI’s] application, and the fear of job displacement is incredibly widespread.”

This means, some consultants say, that the politics of the issue are changing.

State Assemblyman Alex Bores is running for Congress in a competitive New York primary in large part on an anti-AI message. A former data scientist at the data analytics firm Palantir, Bores is now using that experience to make an insider’s case for why the Democratic Party needs to be much harsher on tech companies.

Bores helped write, pass and just secured Hochul’s signature on the RAISE Act, a sweeping piece of legislation aimed at regulating the industry. But it passed only after the pro-business governor struck the entirety of the original text and replaced it with a new draft that reportedly copied almost verbatim a California bill that is much more friendly to AI companies. After an intense back and forth, she ultimately signed a bill that was somewhere in between the original draft and her edit.

“New York is once again leading the nation in setting a strong and sensible standard for frontier AI safety, holding the biggest developers accountable for their safety and transparency protocols,” Hochul said after the RAISE Act’s passage.

Bores touted the legislation, but wants more.

“What I’m hearing from my voters is that they want to go even further than the bills that have been passed,” he said.

And, some strategists say, it’s not just in very blue places. “On the ground in each of the places where data center construction and development is going on, there's a lot of anger in these communities who are experiencing it directly,” said Faiz Shakir, the executive director of the progressive news group More Perfect Union who served as Sanders’ campaign manager for his 2020 presidential campaign. Shakir was referring to protests in Virginia, Wisconsin, Tennessee and other states, along with those outside the San Francisco offices of major AI companies. These kinds of protests will only become more widespread, according to Shakir, as the technology expands.

The knock on progressives like Shakir from pollsters has historically been that they pursue policies that might work in deep blue places but are less popular around the country. On the issue of AI, though, this is less obvious.

“The partisan fault lines have not formed yet,” Shor, the head of data science at the polling firm Blue Rose Research, recently said in an interview with Biden White House vet Bharat Ramamurti. “Voters see the storm clouds on this coming, and they’re really quite scared. I think it’s incumbent on Democratic politicians to take this issue head-on. There’s overwhelming support for AI regulation.” In a separate post on X, Shor suggested that Democrats “seize the means of computation.”

“It feels to me that the angle [of AI populism only working in certain places] is overthinking it,” Jain agreed. “The public doesn’t like the consequences around [AI development] … we’re all footing the bill for OpenAI.”

According to Jain, his polling currently suggests that the public is much more concerned with rising energy costs than job losses. But that issue is animating a coalition that doesn’t always respond to populist economic arguments.

For the past several elections, Democrats have lost, by increasing margins, voters without college degrees. They are increasingly stuck with a white-collar base that disadvantages them politically and makes them seem out of touch in large swaths of post-industrial America. Now, though, white-collar workers are also deeply concerned about AI stealing their jobs. A passionate case against AI not only allows the Democrats to adopt a populist posture on a massive issue, these consultants and pollsters say; it also allows them to loop in their white-collar base to a populist cause.

AI’s successes have already disproportionately affected white-collar work. In May, AI giant Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cautioned that AI could soon eliminate up to 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs. But blue-collar work is at risk of further AI-driven automation, too, and blue-collar workers are already angry about rising energy costs. That both groups can be mobilized under the cause of protecting jobs against AI and lowering energy costs could be a game-changer for Democrats.

“I think it’s a massive political opportunity,” said Katz. “We’re seeing the ruling class try to, as a final act, make extinct the working and middle class in this country, and we need a politics that’s willing to name a villain … If NAFTA lost us a generation of white working class voters, this is our trade deal moment on steroids.”

A large part of the reason a small but loud minority of Democrats are only getting louder about this issue is that they see little or no action from the party and believe it’s creating a vacuum that Republicans are filling. Right now, the AI industry has an ally in the White House, but there is an increasing number of skeptics in the Republican Party, and those figures could become more influential in the future.

“As I talk to you right now, it feels like the most prominent [anti-AI] actors are [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis — he’s taken a stand against data centers — Marjorie Taylor Greene, Steve Bannon and obviously Bernie Sanders,” said Shakir.

As in the Democratic Party, there are different flavors of GOP skepticism from different wings. DeSantis is worried about data centers and energy costs. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox is a “tech pessimist” due to the way he believes social media companies are harming American children’s brains. Steve Bannon and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) are more traditional right-populists, worried about political power consolidating in Silicon Valley. Hawley has even cited the Bible to argue against the “tech barons” of Silicon Valley.

Republicans’ concerns about AI development often come from a different set of beliefs than for those on the left, but their worries have produced the same result: a party with a rising anti-AI tide that’s in a pitched battle with itself over how best to move forward. And just like some Democrats are worried they’re ceding the anti-AI development lane to Republicans, the same is true on the other side.

“AI doesn't need to be a political liability for the right, but it can be,” said Evan Swarztrauber, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and a former Trump administration official. “If working people are seeing their energy bills go up, even temporarily, to support data centers, that could hurt Republicans at the ballot box.”

Each party looking over their shoulder at the other one speaks to the power and rising importance of the issue. And even as the mainstream of each party remains cautious when opposing the powerful AI industry, a few bad election results could turn this issue into a mad scramble, and quickly.

“As Democrats, I see much more of a desire right now to say, ‘Can we all have it all? Can we be nice to the oligarchs? And can we just do something nice for working-class people when they get displaced?’” said Shakir. “That harkens us back to NAFTA all over again on an even a bigger scale.”