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Now, here’s Ian…

Over the past year, I’ve spoken to dozens of politicians and political operatives—Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, OpenAI’s Chris Lehane, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and many more—about the coming war to regulate artificial intelligence, and their own plans to get ahead of what everyone in Washington expects to be one of the defining issues of the decade. Just this week, I hopped on the phone with William Lawrence, a Bernie-endorsed congressional candidate who is running a fierce anti-tech campaign in Michigan. “It wasn’t something I expected to be talking about when I got into the race,” he told me. But that was before his district received proposals to build four giant data centers. “I’ve seen people packing township halls and high-school auditoriums on a weekly basis since last fall on this issue,” he continued. “People are incensed.”

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Of course, there’s no question that data center construction is a salient issue at the local level—as ever, NIMBYism is one of the most powerful forces in American politics, across party lines. But the extent to which A.I. itself is top of mind for voters is a lot less clear. On the one hand, plenty of surveys have found that Americans are generally anxious about a potentially job-killing technology. According to a new poll from the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute, large majorities support more regulation and safety guardrails, while Blue Rose Research found that nearly eight in 10 Americans worry the government doesn’t have a plan for potential job displacement. In late June, Athena Insights found that 66 percent of Americans are concerned about A.I., up nearly 10 points from earlier that same month.

But when you ask Americans to rank their top political issues, A.I. isn’t one of them: A recent Emerson College survey identified the economy as the number one issue for voters, followed by threats to democracy, immigration, healthcare, crime, and housing affordability. When Harvard and Yale polled young voters earlier this year, respondents overwhelmingly mentioned rising prices and other cost-of-living issues as their most urgent concerns.

And yet, among the most plugged-in political observers, there’s a feeling that Americans’ current economic anxiety is a leading indicator that A.I. is likely to cause a political earthquake in the coming months and years—even if it’s too early for many voters to connect their feelings of precarity to the technological shock waves that Dario Amodei says are headed their way. “I don’t think we’re picking up the right signals,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. The surface-level summary of recent polling, he acknowledged, is that voters are focused on affordability. But “the real issue is that people just want to have some sense of stability in their lives.” And A.I., according to recent focus groups he’s conducted, has the potential to impact that sense of stability enormously.

Della Volpe, who advised Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, believes there’s an obvious thread between A.I. and general aversion toward the billionaires at the center of it, and that the most-successful politicians will be those who anticipate the backlash before it fully arrives. “Candidates win—movements win—when you find the signals for the things that aren’t the top issue,” he told me. Lawrence, the progressive candidate running for Congress in Michigan, agreed that A.I. is perhaps most potent as a political metaphor. “It’s really about who decides,” he told me. “It’s about control.”

The challenge for these politicians, as Della Volpe pointed out, is that A.I. seems likely to have economic benefits as well as harms. Forthcoming data shared with me by Athena Insights shows that half of voters expect that A.I. will “likely” lead to both existential challenges, like the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and important medical and scientific breakthroughs over the next two decades. At the same time, none of the most utopian or dystopian predictions have yet come to pass, leaving voters somewhat confused. A whopping 70 percent told Athena that they feel no sense of agency either way, agreeing that “A.I. is coming into our lives whether we want it or not.” Still, only 38 percent ranked A.I. as a top priority—the same share as those who prioritized climate change.

I asked Jesse Stinebring, the C.E.O. of Blue Rose, what to make of this apparent divergence. “I think that the most important fact about public opinion around A.I. has nothing to do with A.I.,” he told me. “And that fact is we’re in the most populist economic moment in recent American political memory.” Under Biden, Stinebring noted, voters felt like their concerns over affordability weren’t “taken seriously.” So they took a chance on Trump to shake things up, economically speaking (something he certainly accomplished, for better or worse). “A year and a half in, they feel like that was an abject failure,” Stinebring said. “And increasingly, they feel as if their experience in the economy is a reflection of a system that is rigged for the elite. So that is the lens through which you should view everything as it relates to A.I.”

Americans, Stinebring continued, do perceive the potential of the technology. But they’re worried about what it might mean for their jobs and society at large. “They assume this thing that is coming fast—that they don’t fully understand and that they don’t know the implications of—will be used to leave them behind,” he added.

According to Clayton Allen, the head of the Eurasia Group’s U.S. practice, A.I. will matter for 2026… just not as a stand-alone issue. “The only thing that really matters in U.S. elections is, and always will be, the economy,” he told me. As a background issue, Allen continued, A.I. will shape “people’s perceptions of affordability, and so it becomes a necessary talking point.”

For his part, Della Volpe hypothesized that, in the near term, A.I. “may not be an issue that is meaningful enough to enough people.” In the context of the midterms, he continued, “I don’t see this as a dominant issue. The reason is that there’s no clear victim, or hero, or enemy yet.” That’s not the case at the local level, where voters on both sides of the aisle mostly agree that they don’t want hulking data centers driving up electricity prices in their backyards. But it’s an open question whether anti-A.I. activism manifests as a major issue nationally. As Athena research lead Colin Bortner put it, “Is this NIMBYism? And if it’s not NIMBYism, what is it?”

Nevertheless, most everyone I spoke to was united in the impression that A.I. will likely become a central political topic in 2028. “This will be a story that will unfold over many years,” said Chad Maisel, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “There’s at least some chance that in 2027, 2028, there’s an acute reckoning, and a moment that will bring lots more eyes to the issue, and people will have some expectation for what those running for president, for example, will offer to solve the problem.” According to Allen, the impetus for such a reckoning could be twofold: Either the technology fails to deliver “all of the benefit it was supposed to,” or it has a materially negative impact on jobs. In the meantime, Stinebring told me, A.I. remains “probably the most underpriced issue in politics today.”

Thanks, Ian. That’s all for today.

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