Silicon Valley’s 2028 Playbook: Don’t Talk About Tech

SAN FRANCISCO — Tech powerbrokers stung by a series of midterm defeats are learning a bruising lesson as they look ahead to 2028: Don’t talk about tech, don’t talk about AI and — whatever you do — don’t talk about data centers.

Candidates backed by Silicon Valley faceplanted in California’s primary election this month, including in the race for governor. AI-backed super PACs have become a lightning rod for criticism over their outside spending in the high-profile New York House race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler. And more than 100 proposed moratoriums on data center projects have cropped up across the country, with a Los Angeles suburb recently becoming the first city to vote to permanently ban large-scale data centers.

That has left Silicon Valley donors and operatives testing a more disciplined playbook for 2028, according to interviews with more than two dozen tech executives, fundraising consultants and political operatives: spend earlier, move down ballot, and talk about jobs and the cost of living instead of AI, data centers and billionaires. Where they can, they are also tearing into their own industry, casting opponents as being in the pocket of tech donors.

“You don’t want to be bombastic, loud, throwing your money around,” said Steve Westly, a Democratic venture capitalist and former California state controller. “There’s a way to do this appropriately.”

The stakes are enormous for tech. After years in which its leaders were treated as avatars of innovation and economic growth, the industry is suddenly confronting a more hostile political environment, with backlash expanding from regulatory circles to the mainstream public. Pollafter poll shows that many Americans are weary of tech’s influence, and especially anxious about AI.

Meanwhile, powerbrokers in the sector are desperate to shape the policy debate over AI regulations in Washington and key statehouses, from efforts to mitigate job losses to guardrails that reduce the risks posed to children, intellectual property rights and national security.

“They’re not just spending all this money and setting up this infrastructure to influence the midterms,” said a political adviser to tech donors, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “2028 is going to be much more important — and so this is their test run.”

The results so far have been lackluster at best, nowhere more so than in California, the center of the tech industry. In the Bay Area, entrepreneur Ethan Agarwal came nowhere close to advancing against Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive targeted by some tech titans over his support for a proposed tax on California billionaires. In San Francisco’s race to succeed Nancy Pelosi, former Stripe engineer Saikat Chakrabarti poured more than $10 million of his wealth into the campaign only to finish a distant third.

“Politics requires a laser, a scalpel, and they have come to the fight with a mallet,” said Cooper Teboe, a Silicon Valley donor adviser and Democrat. “They’re cementing a lot of negative feelings.”

Then there was the governor’s race, where San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a former startup executive whose campaign was bolstered by more than $33.5 million from tech donors, including money spent by tech-backed super PACs, finished in sixth place — with less than 4 percent of the vote.

A Silicon Valley consultant familiar with Mahan’s campaign, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that while tech donors fueled his late entry into the race, their support also became a liability, forcing him to fend off criticism over where the money was coming from.

“Every election cycle has its villain,” the consultant said. “Tech is the boogeyman of the moment.”

Silicon Valley has already begun de-emphasizing its brand in midterm campaigns. Like other sophisticated and well-funded political lobbies — such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has barely featured Israel as a theme in its midterm ads — new super PACs found more success in down-ballot races, where their tech donors took a back seat.

A pair of newcomer tech-backed super PACs, bankrolled by AI companies and deep-pocketed billionaires, dropped millions of dollars in state legislative races, propelling more moderate candidates into contention. Those PACs, California Leads, fueled by $10 million from Meta and Google, and Grow California — a venture of billionaires Chris Larsen, a crypto executive, and investor Tim Draper — are on track to advance 11 of the 12 candidates they supported to the November general election.

The PACs succeeded, in part, according to strategists involved in the effort, by focusing their ad messaging on kitchen-table issues like the state’s sky-high cost of living — and not tech, AI or data centers — while taking strategic advice from business-world operatives with years of experience in legislative races.

Draper and Larsen relied on a former Sacramento lobbyist, Shaudi Fulp, for their super PAC’s day-to-day strategy.

Looking to 2028, “Shaudi is coordinating with lots of different groups, and she will be able to build the playbook the way it should be built. I mean, hey, that is not my skill set,” Draper said in an interview, adding that he and Larsen will do their part and “keep putting the money in” for the next election cycle.

The candidates that Grow and California Leads backed also didn’t come from tech industry backgrounds. In ads, the super PACs sought to define their picks by highlighting associations with an assistant school principal from Compton, Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson and local law enforcement.

Across 20 ads it paid for, California Leads never referenced tech, AI or even innovation, according to a POLITICO analysis.

State Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, who represents Silicon Valley and advised the California Leads PAC, said the lesson is simple: “I told them what I tell everyone, ‘This is not about tech. This is about people.’”

Tech donors making headline-grabbing forays into congressional contests in California and elsewhere have experimented with the same tactic.

New AI super PACs have bared their teeth with particular ire in New York’s primary race to fill Nadler’s seat, where dueling AI interests have elevated Democratic candidate Alex Bores into a symbol for the fight over AI regulation. He was the first target of Leading the Future, a super PAC network funded by donors like OpenAI President Greg Brockman and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

In a recent op-ed criticizing the AI industry’s spending on elections, former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell observed that “the $6 million of ads the PAC has run against Mr. Bores make little mention of AI.” And Public First, a competing AI super PAC network that is linked to Anthropic and supports Bores, honed in on immigration enforcement for ads it previously dropped in North Carolina and Texas congressional primaries.

“We endorse officials who support reasonable regulations on AI. The aligned PACs run ads on the issues that matter most immediately to voters in each race, and for most electorates right now that means the economy, affordability, public safety, and other issues that they are facing on a daily basis,” Public First spokesperson Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez said.

Unlike in California’s state legislative races, however, opponents are repeatedly tying the varied super PAC spending to the AI industry, undermining the strategy.

Bores, a New York state assemblymember who carried a landmark AI safety law, has leaned into the opposition, telling voters that tech billionaires are trying to decide the election ahead of his June 23 primary. Rival tech forces stood up pro-Bores PACs to push back, including Larsen, who poured millions of dollars into a TV ad blitz to defend him.

For tech interests, the fallout has been impossible to ignore. This month, OpenAI released statements to distance itself from the work of Leading the Future, saying Brockman’s contributions to the PAC were in his personal capacity.

But Leading the Future, whose PAC’s ads shifted from faulting Bores for his AI policy positions to spotlighting Bores’ ties to corporate donors like Anthropic and Larsen, has had a harder time separating from its AI donors because of the way it started.

The organization’s original blueprint was modeled on the tactics of crypto donors during the 2024 campaign cycle, when the super PAC group Fairshake cultivated the idea of a “crypto voter” by spending heavily against congressional candidates it perceived as unfriendly and turning the industry’s priorities into a political identity. One of LTF’s leaders, Josh Vlasto, is a spokesperson for Fairshake.

Eric Soufer, a New York political consultant who advises large tech companies, said AI interests playing in the 2026 midterms are a bigger, harder-edged version of last cycle’s crypto donors. The goal, he said, is to send a warning message to candidates across the board: “If you mess with us, we’re going to come for you."

Even if tech’s ambitious spending can still bolster its allies in tight races, Soufer cautioned that the calculus could be changing as top Democrats and Republicans — including some close to the Trump administration — seem to be pausing and reassessing their stance on AI.

“There's a real risk of this entire strategy backfiring,” Soufer said of AI-PAC spending in affluent coastal races. “The activists on the ground are further inflamed by it. Public sentiment … depending on how you look at it, broadly seems to be turning against tech and AI.”