Voters Blocked Datacenters in Over 30 Localities — AI Is Now a Political Weapon

Voters in more than 30 localities across nine states passed datacenter moratoriums or restrictions in last week's midterms, and an estimated 41% of planned U.S. datacenter capacity now sits in states with governors-elect who back moratoriums. That's the headline finding from journalist Garrison Lovely, author of Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us – And How to Stop It, who argues the election marks the arrival of anti-AI populism as a durable political force.

The Democrats' sweeping midterm victory doubles as a rebuke of Donald Trump, the AI industry's most powerful champion, Lovely writes. The election wasn't primarily about AI — exit polls cited corruption, the cost of living, Iran and immigration as top drivers. But AI and datacenters were named "crucial" by 23% of voters, and Democrats won those voters 67% to 30%.

What does this change for the AI industry?

For practitioners, the math is blunt. Local organizing against datacenters has gone from fringe to mainstream, and it delivered concrete policy wins in Texas, Ohio and Georgia. Lovely's warning for the industry: all of this backlash emerged during a period of 4% unemployment. As signs of widespread labor automation grow, he writes, "we're nowhere close to the ceiling of anti-AI sentiment."

The industry's own rhetoric hands opponents their material. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote that "AI isn't a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans." OpenAI 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." And one Microsoft executive described the industry's training data practices as "the largest theft of labor in human history."

How big is the political opening?

Neither party owns the issue. When NBC asked which party would handle AI better, 30% of voters named Democrats, 27% named Republicans, and 43% said neither. Lovely calls it "anyone's game" — and predicts AI will be the defining political fight of the 2028 cycle.

Republicans carried real liabilities into November. Trump, advised by billionaire venture capitalists including David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, took a "let it rip" approach. He declared on social media this summer: "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." Nearly every House Republican voted for a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to override state AI regulations with no federal replacement — a move Senate Republicans stripped.

Money didn't save the industry either. Democrats ran tech-accountability or AI messaging in more than 130 federal and gubernatorial races, versus just two Democratic-aligned ads mentioning big tech between 2020 and 2024. The main AI industry Super PAC's biggest competitive bet ended in a loss to Democrat Annie Andrews in South Carolina, who campaigned on "protecting kids, not big tech." Elon Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars — a record — and Republicans lost all five Senate races where he spent the most.

Who are the new anti-AI champions?

Democratic leadership and incoming committee chairs have signaled AI will be a top priority, and the party's left flank is going further:

• Greg Casar, Texas Democrat, former labor organizer and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, declared: "AI will be the number one issue in 2028." He has co-sponsored a bill with Senator Bernie Sanders that would pause AI development until a federal cabinet-level agency exists and ban artificial super-intelligence outright.
• Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan senator-elect, called for a "full-on pause" on frontier AI development in a 60 Minutes interview and made AI his number one issue.
• Troy Jackson, senator-elect from Maine, said in his victory speech: "We are not that far from Terminator, and I don't want to be 'hasta la vista, baby.'"
• Ed Markey, senator, warned big tech executives: "They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we'll be printing."

Some Republicans see the same opening. Missouri's Josh Hawley has led on drafting robust AI-regulation bills, and Lovely notes that GOP senators with White House ambitions may break with the party — creating a path for Democrats to clear the 60-vote filibuster threshold.

What legislation could follow?

Lovely sketches a pro-worker agenda Democrats could pass and dare Trump to veto: ban surveillance pricing and "bossware," make unionization easier across sectors, and create strict liability for AI developers. He'd strengthen workers' ability to file wage theft claims when their work trains AI models that lead to layoffs or cut hours. And if an AI agent does something that would be criminal for a human — as he says OpenAI's and Anthropic's agents have — the developer should face criminal liability.

Subpoena power changes the oversight game too. This summer, Casar pressed AI companies on the spate of criminal hacking incidents they were responsible for and got, per Lovely, "incomplete and misleading answers." Now those inquiries can be compelled under oath.

His sharpest recommendation: hearings exposing the industry's stated goal of fully replacing AI researchers with AI systems that train smarter generations — and fully automating AI safety research too. The people leading that work, Lovely writes, admit it's a terrible plan; they just can't think of a better one. The so-what for the industry: with Trump off the ticket in 2028 but AI firms not term-limited, whoever runs most convincingly against Altman, Amodei, Musk, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg stands to gain more politically than they'd lose in Super PAC money.