Public anger over AI boom triggers GOP midterm worries

The spread of Flock cameras and AI data centers have become big issues in the midterm elections, with lawmakers calling for curbs on Flock’s surveillance network and more than 700 candidates mentioning data centers in their political ads, according to a recent study.

Republicans acknowledge the growth of AI-related technology, and the massive data centers needed to run it have become a liability for their party.

A growing number of GOP lawmakers are speaking out against Flock’s surveillance network, and more are joining Democrats in calling for guardrails on artificial intelligence.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who represents a critical Senate battleground state, says that AI has become a political liability for Republicans.

“I don’t know why, but yeah,” Tillis said. “There’s this irrational response. ‘Data centers are bad.’ Are they really? If they’re off-the-grid, they have power generation, they’re silent, they capture their own water and use it for cooling, that’s bad?”

“We got to go out and educate people,” he continued. “I hope we just get reasonable so we can have a good, sustainable commercial base of data centers in and around North Carolina.”

The fight over data centers has become especially heated in the Ohio Senate race, where Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown has spent more than $430,000 on online ads that talk about data centers, according to a study by public affairs firm Absecon Group.

The study found that 717 campaigns have run online ads on Meta, YouTube and Google this year that talk about data centers.

Rob Sand, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Iowa, has spent more than $380,000 on social media and online ads that discuss AI data centers

Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), the Republican nominee for governor in the Badger State, has made cracking down on data centers a central issue in his campaign. He has promised to repeal tax breaks to bring them to Wisconsin and has launched an ad branding his Democratic opponent as “Data Center David Crowley.”

But Democrats, led by Brown, feel that campaigning against data centers is a potent weapon to use against Republicans.

Progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has led the fight in the upper chamber to crack down on data centers.

Sanders this week introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act that would pause advanced AI development until federal regulators establish safety rules.

Tom Egan, the political strategist who founded Absecon Group, said some local officeholders “are losing their jobs for supporting these projects.”

“Both sides are fully taking advantage of the distrust that voters have toward data center developers and the gap that the developers left in these communities because it’s their job to work with these communities, talk about the benefits and win them over, but they haven’t been doing that,” he said. “Now there’s just this major onslaught of attacks against them from both sides and we’ve already seen people lose their election primaries for supporting these data centers.”

“It’s really challenging to be a Republican and try to hold data centers accountable when you have President Trump talking about how essentially if you don’t support data centers, you’re missing out and you’re dumb,” Egan added.

Egan is a paid media professional who doesn’t work for political candidates but has a background in Democratic politics.

Mark Brewer, a professor of political science and chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Maine, said that data centers have come up as a political issue in the Maine Senate race — one of the most competitive contests in the nation.

“It is an issue here. It came up relatively early on because there was a state bill to put an AI data center moratorium in place,” he said.

He noted the bill passed the state legislature but was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, who was running for Senate at the time, provoking an angry backlash.

“She was looking for a carve-out for a project that was going to be built in an old paper mill in Jay, which is in her home district where she was born, grew up, first held legislative office. And a lot of Democrats were very unhappy about the fact that she vetoed that bill,” Brewer said.

Graham Platner, who was Mills’s opponent in the Democratic Senate primary, and Troy Jackson, the eventual Democratic nominee in Maine’s Senate race, both leaned in heavily against the construction of data centers without strict regulations.

Mills suspended her campaign a week after vetoing what would have been the nation’s first moratorium on data centers.

Incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a top Democratic target in this year’s midterm election, has taken a cautious approach toward data centers.

“Now that we’ve moved into the general election phase of this, Susan Collins has been much more cautious on data centers,” said Brewer, who added that the GOP senator previously said people should be conscious of the risks they could use too much water or increase electricity rates for consumers.

“She also said it would be short-sighted to treat all projects as a one-size-fits-all, saying we should evaluate them project by project, which fits with the cautious nature that Collins has had as a public official,” he added.

The spread of Flock Safety’s AI-powered surveillance network has also become a hot-button issue ahead of this year’s elections.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who chairs the Senate Judiciary crime and counterterrorism subcommittee, has launched an investigation into Flock’s surveillance network of more than 120,000 cameras and has demanded that the company’s CEO explain what safeguards are in place to protect Americans’ data.

Other prominent Republicans have weighed in, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who said the use of license plate readers has gotten “out of control” and announced last month that Florida’s Department of Transportation would take down automated license plate readers across the state because of privacy concerns.

“I don’t want to have this become a surveillance state,” he said last month. “That’s why we wanted an AI bill of rights. Remember, we were pushing for that because the Flock is artificial intelligence.”

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott last month ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras because of privacy concerns.

Egan, who has studied this year’s political debate over AI, said the backlash to Flock reflects public skepticism about artificial intelligence in general.

“People just don’t want what these companies are giving them, whether it’s data centers or Flock cameras,” he said.

He noted the backlash against AI is reminiscent of the backlash against solar and wind energy projects during the Biden administration.

“Everything I’m seeing for data centers and Flock cameras is the same stuff I saw over the last few years in clean energy. People were saying the same sort of stuff except it’s more universal now,” Egan said.

Several Democratic lawmakers raised new alarms about the rapid development of AI technology after several current and former Anthropic researchers warned that artificial intelligence could pose a danger to humanity if it spun out of control.

Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI, warned this week that AI firms are racing to develop the new technology without proper safeguards and are “gambling with our lives.”

“Anyone still denying the risks posed by unregulated AI should read this,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wrote on social media, circulating Coxon’s warning that OpenAI and Anthropic are not acting responsibly.

“It’s time to pump the brakes & take action NOW. We need: – Mandatory safeguards – A comprehensive testing regime – Urgent dialogue with China,” Van Hollen declared.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) argued on social media that the problem of “AI companies in a blind race to build a death machine first” could be solved “through a regulatory system that allows the research to continue, but in a way that doesn’t destroy us.”