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.”