‘vance Is Handcuffed’: The Tech Fight Bedeviling 2028 Republicans

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is worried his constituents are about to be left flattened by artificial intelligence.

In comments at Broward College on January 12, he insisted it’s the state’s job to make sure “Floridians are not going to end up roadkill with this AI revolution that’s going on.” And in his final year as governor, DeSantis has made the fight against unchecked AI development a priority for his administration. Allies in the Florida Senate kicked off this year’s legislative session by introducing the Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights, a hefty new regulatory framework that’s been decried by tech groups.

DeSantis is staking his political reputation — and his future in national politics — on the idea that Americans are just about ready to turn on big AI companies. He’s not the only one.

In Utah, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox is trying to enact a strategy that would invest in “pro-human” elements of the industry, such as AI training programs in schools, while increasing regulations around chatbot companions.

“You do not hate these companies enough,” Cox has said about large social media companies that themselves are increasingly dedicating resources towards AI products.

And in Washington, some Republicans are also starting to wonder how best to control an industry that is evolving every day. At the National Conservatism Conference in September, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) invoked God in his criticism of the tech industry.

“The AI revolution is proceeding on transhumanist lines. It is working against the working man, his liberty and his worth,” Hawley told the audience. “It is operating to install a rich and powerful elite. It is undermining our most cherished ideals. And insofar as that keeps on, AI works to undermine America.”

Hawley, DeSantis and Cox are far from ideological duplicates. They represent distinct wings of the party, from the populist-nationalist approach of Hawley to the more pro-business, hawkish and anti-woke DeSantis to the civility- and family values-minded approach of Cox. But they have each been discussed as potential 2028 contenders, right after the more likely possibilities, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance.

On the issue of AI, Hawley, DeSantis and Cox are breaking with President Donald Trump, who has consistently opposed almost all regulations on building AI. In December, Trump issued an executive order attempting to stop states from writing their own AI regulations and declared “United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.” Trump has also built a close relationship with Silicon Valley venture capitalist and AI and crypto czar David Sacks, who largely wrote the state law pre-emption executive order and thinks government and industry stakeholders should do more to convince Americans to be optimistic about AI products in order to maintain an advantage over Chinese counterparts.

“By fully harnessing AI, rather than letting America fall behind in the global race to lead in its development, we will unleash this productivity for the full benefit of American workers,” said a White House official. “AI will augment, not replace, workers.”

Outside of Trump, though, opposition to unchecked development of AI products is growing quickly within the Republican Party, with the divide even spilling into the White House. The increasingly public skepticism on the right toward AI holds important clues into the potential GOP electorate of the future — and who might lead it in a post-Trump era.

That's because AI is poised to strike directly at the contradictions embedded within the new coalition that Trump has built: It will pit the new blue-collar members of the GOP base against the business-aligned sector that Trump has increasingly won over in his second term. It will pit family-values and religious conservatives against the newly emboldened tech wing.

And it is a policy issue that could prove particularly problematic for the 2028 contenders who are closest to Trump, because the Trump White House is pursuing an agenda on AI that is out of step with what many Trump-aligned voters and influencers want — especially the more populist elements that are increasingly prominent in the GOP’s ranks.

“Vance is handcuffed because he can’t say a word,” said a former Trump administration official who was granted anonymity to frankly discuss White House dynamics. “Hawley can spend the next three years railing against AI.” A spokesperson for Vance declined to comment.

The disagreements are at the heart of how the Republican Party has evolved and what it could still turn into. “The reason why resistance to the White House’s AI policy has been so strong,” said Michael Toscano, the director of the Family First Technology Initiative for the Institute for Family Studies, “is because the figures and the voices and the ideas that have reacted to it were formed, emboldened or unleashed by Trump himself.”

In June 2016, during a rally outside of Pittsburgh, Trump told the assembled crowd, “I want you to imagine how much better our future can be if we declare independence from the elites who led us from one financial and foreign policy disaster to another.”

Trump critics like to point out that his policies often don’t benefit working people over businesses — he has cut corporate tax rates and passed significant estate-tax exemptions — but this populist posture has been central to his decade-long appeal and has remade the GOP. According to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, in 2012, 60 percent of voters who make under $50,000 per year voted for Barack Obama, compared to 38 percent who voted for Mitt Romney. By 2024, Trump won those voters outright, 50-48, against Kamala Harris. Trump has also won the majority of white voters without a college degree since 2016, and in 2024, he increased his margins with non-white voters without a college degree, too.

But Trump’s winning coalition in 2024 included far more than just low-income and non-college-educated Americans. It included religious conservatives, pro-business Republicans hoping for lower taxes and a whole lot of Gen-Z men. And in fact, many of the richest people in the world — tech billionaires — helped to bankroll his campaign, in large part because of their frustrations with the Biden administration’s hostility to Silicon Valley and its efforts to impose new regulations.

The AI issue is almost tailor-made to break this coalition.

Many of the conservative AI policy analysts and political operatives who spoke to POLITICO Magazine for this article say that Trump’s embrace of tech CEOs and venture capitalists on the issue has also been bad for the new populist brand of the GOP. Much of these insiders’ anger with the White House’s lax approach to AI regulation has been directed toward Sacks and what he represents: the sudden influence of a tech elite on a political movement that has taken great pains to capture more working-class support in the last decade.

“At the inauguration, you see all these tech barons seated behind President Trump. I suspect that how he thought about it was that he was the conquering Roman general who comes into Rome with all the defeated enemy chieftains,” said Brad Littlejohn, the program director and policy advisor at American Compass, a conservative, economic populist think tank. “But I suspect they were thinking ‘Okay, we're happy to come in as prisoners on his train, if that means that he brings us into the inner sanctuary. Because once we're there, we can start whispering in his ear.' And I think that dynamic explains a lot of what we've seen over the past year.”

“They’re talking about a technology that will render the entire working class obsolete,” said Joe Allen, a Steve Bannon ally and the author of Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity. “I’m surprised no one in the White House will stand up to [Sacks].”

And many in the party have begun to take a tougher line on AI, even distancing themselves from Trump. These evolving stances are a window into how Republicans are carving out new lanes in the party, where they think the base is and how they want to conceive of a post-Trump politics.

Thus far, Hawley has been the national politician most willing to loudly and directly challenge administration policy on AI. Hawley called a White House executive order that pre-empted state regulation of AI a “terrible provision” in December, and he has also pressured the administration on AI-related export control failures in a joint letter with a tech-skeptical populist on the other side of the aisle, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

He’s also a Republican who has long sought to appeal to blue-collar workers with populist stances on other economic issues, winning headlines for teaming up with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to try to cap credit card interest rates.

He is now incorporating AI into that worldview, and his messaging seems to be resonating with voters. Polling from the Institute for Family Studies shows that out of five tested messages related to AI, there were two that scored highest among voters: Hawley’s statement that “[AI is] against the working man, his liberty and his worth. It is operating to install a rich and powerful elite” and Pope Leo XIV’s statement that “[Builders of AI must] cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work.” Pro-AI statements from Sacks and fellow venture capitalist Marc Andreessen scored lowest.

“I think Hawley is almost unique right now among Republicans in DC in terms of actually articulating a full spectrum range of concerns around AI,” said Littlejohn.

DeSantis’ opposition is targeted less at existential threats to humanity and more at specific parts of the AI development project, such as affordability problems posed by an over-taxed electric grid — an approach likely to appeal to the newer GOP voters Hawley is aiming for, too.

And so far, DeSantis’ anti-data center tirades have found support in Florida, where local lawmakers are starting to put more development plans on hold. At a recent meeting on the postponement of the development of a data center in Palm Beach County, county commissioners sat and heard hours of testimony from hundreds of residents who spoke up, one after another, against the project.

“It’s hell no. It’s not no, it’s hell no,” said Alexandria Larson, one resident. “The postponement should be permanent. Forever.”

Pollsters disagree on the degree to which AI is a salient issue on its own in polling, though the public’s concerns are clearly growing.

Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics and a prescient observer of white working-class voters, noted the industry “has a broad, negative connotation in America.” But, he added, affordability concerns are at the top of most voters’ minds — and DeSantis’ energy push allows him to tap into those worries.

Cox is also righteously indignant at social media companies, but he wraps it up in moral outrage and concern for kids rather than the populist fury of Hawley or DeSantis. That’s in keeping with the other parts of Cox’s brand; he is a teetotaling Mormon father who has led efforts to decrease political polarization and had long refused to support Trump because of his divisiveness. (He endorsed Trump in 2024 after the assassination attempt in Butler, Penn.) In Cox’s telling, tech companies are “profiting off of destroying our kids and destroying our country.”

It’s a slightly different tack on the issue than Hawley and DeSantis are taking, but it, too, appears primed to appeal to a new, post-Trump group of voters: those who are looking for a politics that has a moral vision at its core, and that takes issues affecting the future and children seriously — a sentiment among Republicans that is already strong in Cox’s home state of Utah. His focus on children has also found some allies in Washington; Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) introduced a regulatory AI framework in December that focuses on kids’ safety and that has won the approval of religious conservative groups and the enmity of industry.

The two leading Republicans in the 2028 conversation remain Vance and Rubio, and both are directly associated with a White House that has mostly taken an accelerationist approach to building AI tech. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both men have a significantly more complicated relationship with AI than the 2028 contenders who have more distance from the president.

Rubio and Vance have put no daylight between themselves and the president on AI questions publicly, but people familiar with internal White House dynamics suggest that both are closely attuned to the elements of the party that are likely to be skeptical of AI.

According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, Rubio was a key voice in stopping the sale of Nvidia’s Blackwell Chips to China. And multiple people with direct knowledge told POLITICO Magazine that Rubio has also raised concerns at least once internally about the Trump administration’s plans to preempt state regulations on AI development with a national standard. Rubio’s concern thus far has been centered mostly around national security questions that are more within his remit. But there is also reason to believe he sees the current alliance between tech CEOs and the Republican Party as a transitory one.

“The idea of giving the tech industry preemption, especially coming from his state in Florida, which had one of the first [allegedly] AI-related suicides — Rubio is not stupid, he’s very, very astute,” said a Republican operative granted anonymity to candidly discuss internal White House dynamics. “I think he’s reading the tea leaves … it’s good politics to be strong on AI guardrails.”

“Secretary Rubio fully supports the president’s policies,” said a State Department spokesperson when asked about internal debates around AI policy in the administration.

Then there’s Vance.

One of the biggest questions for Republicans who are trying to predict the future of their party is where he stands on questions of AI development. Vance has roots in Silicon Valley as a former venture capitalist himself, and tech billionaire Peter Thiel donated significantly to a Super PAC supporting his Senate campaign, which helped Vance first win elected office in 2022. And yet, he’s also broken with the industry by supporting higher tariffs, immigration restrictions and at certain points raising the minimum wage. Vance has tried to center economic populism and speed the transition of the GOP into a party of workers while remaining friendly with big tech.

Early in the Trump administration, he looked like he would be out in front on AI issues; in February 2025, he delivered a speech at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. There, he laid out what sounded like the Trump AI agenda.

“I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago. I’m here to talk about AI opportunity,” Vance said. “We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off.”

He combined that anti-regulation message with one centered around the dignity and importance of work — an idea that has become a north star as he’s built a political philosophy around his Catholic faith and ideas about blue-collar work.

“We will always center American workers in our AI policy. We refuse to view AI as a purely disruptive technology that will inevitably automate away our labor force,” he continued.

Since that February speech, though, he has increasingly ceded the role of public face of Trump’s AI efforts to Sacks. When Trump signed the state preemption executive order in December, he was flanked by senior White House policy adviser on artificial intelligence Sriram Krishnan, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Sacks — Vance was nowhere to be seen. By not associating directly with every Trump decision on AI development, Vance may be leaving some of his political options open.

Brendan Steinhauser, a conservative communications strategist and CEO of The Alliance for Secure AI, called Vance’s Paris speech “a little accelerationist for my taste.” But Steinhauser, an AI skeptic, thinks that Vance is more aligned with his camp than the more pro-AI side, even if not openly so.

“JD Vance is very conservative, devout, cares about the future of family, cares about society, cares about American jobs and workers,” he said. “I think he’ll be able to do some things behind the scenes. … He and people in his orbit are very sympathetic to a lot of the concerns we have.”

But as of yet, there is no indication that Vance has broken with the White House’s policy on any important tech issue. And not everyone within the party agrees with Steinhauser’s assessment. One Republican operative granted anonymity to speak candidly said Vance was “perceived as being in the tank for the tech industry.” A former senior Republican Hill staffer said that “Whether it’s a Thiel thing, whether he’s keeping his powder dry, it’s hard to tell where he fits.”

The former Trump administration official who said Vance was “handcuffed” called the vice president a “team player.” But Vance, this person said, “does not buy this idea that any regulation is a problem,” and in fact his team is full of “Hawley types.”

But for now, he’s walking a fine line. According to reporting from CNN, when Sacks and Trump legal adviser Mike Davis recently got into a heated argument about AI regulation in Vance’s office, the vice president tried to play peacemaker.

Skeptics believe that even if Vance does take steps to distance himself from the tech world, his background and his political coalition will make it hard for him to do so. Many of the Vance allies reportedly working on raising money for a potential 2028 run are members of the Silicon Valley elite.

As the perceived frontrunner for the nomination, where Vance ultimately comes down on these issues once he’s out of the shadow of the Trump administration will likely define the debate around AI issues in the 2028 primary.

Even with the populist shift the party has undergone in the past decade and a half, not everyone is convinced that anti-AI politics are the future of the GOP.

“Most Americans have basically not formed their opinion on this technology,” said Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and a former Trump administration official who last July authored the Trump AI Action Plan. “If you’re positioning yourself as anti-AI as some people are trying to do, in the hopes of a coming electoral wave of support for you, I just think it's worth noting that that’s a bet.”