As the US midterms approach, AI is going to emerge as a key issue concerning voters | Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier

In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states’ ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to avoid any constraints and consequences on their deployment of AI, while undermining the efforts of consumers, advocates, and industry associations concerned about AI’s harms who have spent years pushing for state regulation.

Trump’s actions have clarified the ideological alignments around AI within America’s electoral factions. They set down lines on a new playing field for the midterm elections, prompting members of his party, the opposition, and all of us to consider where we stand in the debate over how and where to let AI transform our lives.

In a May 2025 survey of likely voters nationwide, more than 70% favored both state and federal regulators having a hand in AI policy. A December 2025 poll by Navigator Research found similar results, with a massive net +48% favorability for more AI regulation. Yet despite the overwhelming preference of both voters and his party’s elected leaders – Congress was essentially unanimous in defeating a previous state AI regulation moratorium – Trump has delivered on a key priority of the industry. The order explicitly challenges the will of voters across both blue and red states, from California to South Dakota, scrambling political positions around the technology and setting up a new ideological battleground in the upcoming race for Congress.

There are a number of ways that candidates and parties may try to capitalize on this emerging wedge issue before the midterms.

In 2025, much of the popular debate around AI was cast in terms of humans versus machines. Advances in AI and the companies it is associated with, it is said, come at the expense of humans. A new model release with greater capabilities for writing, teaching, or coding means more people in those disciplines losing their jobs.

This is a humanist debate. Making us talk to an AI customer-support agent is an affront to our dignity. Using AI to help generate media sacrifices authenticity. AI chatbots that persuade and manipulate assault our liberty. There is philosophical merit to these arguments, and yet they seem to have limited political salience.

Populism versus institutionalism is a better way to frame this debate in the context of US politics. The Maga movement is widely understood to be a realignment of American party politics to ally the Republican party with populism, and the Democratic party with defenders of traditional institutions of American government and their democratic norms.

This frame is shattered by Trump’s AI order, which unabashedly serves economic elites at the expense of populist consumer protections. It is part of an ongoing courting process between Maga and big tech, where the Trump political project sacrifices the interests of consumers and its populist credentials as it cozies up to tech moguls.

We are starting to see populist resistance to this government/big tech alignment emerge on the local scale. People in Maryland, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and many other states are vigorously opposing AI datacenters in their communities, based on environmental and energy-affordability impacts. These centers of opposition are politically diverse; both progressives and Trump-supporting voters are turning out in force, influencing their local elected officials to resist datacenter development.

This opposition to the physical infrastructure of corporate AI is so far staying local, but it may yet translate into a national and politically aligned movement that could divide the Maga coalition.

Datacenters are one of a dwindling few national issues not yet polarized. The December Navigator Research polling found that most voters have heard little or nothing about datacenter development. A February poll of voters found relatively little difference (less than 10 percentage points) between Harris and Trump voters on their likelihood to support or oppose datacenter development where they live. The pace of datacenter investment is still accelerating dramatically: big tech AI spending is anticipated to reach nearly $700bn in 2026. The intensity of local response in the communities where datacenters have been proposed combined with this rapid expansion suggests fertile ground for activating and persuading voters around this issue – irrespective of political party.

So far, few political leaders have emerged to guide their parties towards a clear position on these concerns. Within the Republican party, Florida governor Ron DeSantis seems to be positioning himself against the administration as the party’s chief AI skeptic. On the other side of the aisle, the progressive independent Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic House colleague congresswoman Rashida Tlaib proposed a moratorium on AI datacenter construction, while senator Amy Klobuchar has been a vocal opponent of the Trump order. Some local legislators in Georgia have passed such a moratorium in their jurisdictions.

While the political reverberations for AI accelerationism are hitting datacenter locales first, this issue should encompass far more than just construction. The energy and environmental costs associated with datacenters are just one of many costly harms that tech companies are trying to foist on the public. And the Trump administration’s frequent justification of its corporate AI boosterism as a national security priority in an arms race against China is hokum.

Any policy discussions about AI should include the individual harms associated with job loss, as employers seek to replace laborers with machines. It should also include the systemic economic risks associated with concentrated and supercharged AI investment, the democratic risks associated with the increased power in monopolistic and politically influential tech companies, and the degradation of civic functions like journalism and education by AI. In order for our free market to function in the public interest, the companies amassing wealth and profiting from AI must be forced to take ownership of, and internalize, these costs.

The political salience of AI will grow to meet the staggering scale of financial investment and societal impact it is already commanding. There is an opportunity for enterprising candidates, of either political party, to take the mantle of opposing AI-linked harms in the midterm elections.

Political solutions start with organizing, and broadening the base of political engagement around these issues beyond the locally salient topic of datacenters. Movement leaders and elected officials in states that have taken action on AI regulation should mobilize around the blatant industry capture, wealth extraction, and corporate favoritism reflected in the Trump executive order. AI is no longer just a policy issue for governments to discuss: it is a political issue that voters must decide on and demand accountability on.

• Nathan E Sanders is a data scientist affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center of Harvard University and co-author, with Bruce Schneier, of the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Bruce Schneier is a security technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University