With the 3 November midterms two and a half weeks away, artificial intelligence has pushed its way onto the ballot, and it is behaving like almost no other issue in American politics. A new Newsweek scorecard rated all 537 sitting members of Congress across five areas, from regulation to data centers to national security, on a scale running from AI Skeptic to AI Booster. Democrats averaged 2.60, leaning skeptic; Republicans averaged 3.26, leaning booster. But the striking finding is how few sit at the poles: just 18 members rated as true skeptics and 10 as true boosters, with 191 clustered in the mixed middle. "This is not yet following the typical polarized political dynamics of so many other issues," Stanford's Nathaniel Persily observed.
The one place a sharper divide has opened is over data centers, where Republicans averaged 3.5 and Democrats 1.9. Even there, the picture is messier than party labels suggest, because opposition to the giant facilities cuts across both sides. Pollster Brent Buchanan said data centers surfaced unprompted in his focus groups late last year and hardened into a proxy question voters now ask of candidates: is this person in the pocket of special interests, or for people like me? Money has followed the salience. One reform group counted 41.8 million dollars in AI-industry federal lobbying in the first half of 2026, with more than 27 million from groups linked to OpenAI and Anthropic flowing into a single New York Democratic primary.
Few expect the election itself to produce a federal AI law. The deeper fight is over preemption, the power of federal rules to override state ones, and it is deadlocked. Democrats, likely to hold the House, will not pass a bill that broadly erases state AI laws; President Trump will not sign one that leaves them standing. The Senate already voted 99 to 1 in 2025 to strip a proposed ten-year moratorium on state enforcement out of a budget bill, and Trump later threatened to withhold some broadband funds from states with laws he considers onerous. Narrower deals, perhaps limited to safety testing, remain conceivable, telecom analysts told a Broadband Breakfast panel, but any preemption proposal is now branded "a gift to big tech" before its details get a hearing.
What the midterms will really settle is the story each party tells itself afterward. Analyst Blair Levin pointed to a telling pairing: if a Democrat wins in Ohio on a data-center message while Texas Governor Greg Abbott struggles, the lesson politicians draw could be that the revolt against AI is real and must be heeded. Abbott, notably, froze new data-center grid connections in August after requests topped five times the grid's record peak, reversing his earlier embrace. A large Democratic wave might even push Republicans toward tougher bills like Hawley's liability measure, while a narrow one could let them claim their light-touch approach was vindicated.
Underneath the electoral math is a trust problem that does not map onto left and right. Public Knowledge's Nicholas Garcia argued the industry could rebuild goodwill by dropping the nondisclosure agreements around projects, signing community benefit agreements and building smaller facilities near the people they serve. The data center, as one panelist put it, has become a Rorschach test: most Americans do not live near one, yet the buildings have become the physical face of a future many fear. Skepticism already links figures as far apart as Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders. The parties are circling a genuinely new alignment, and November will tell them which way it is forming.