The Democratic Party’s New Villain

A new boogeyman arrived in Democratic campaign ads this year with such force that it was possible to forget it had ever been absent. Slotted between clichés about “rising costs,” the “rigged economy,” and the elusive “fair shot” for the middle class, the familiar villains of billionaires, insurance companies, and “MAGA extremists” were joined by a friend turned foe.

“Big Tech’s invading Ohio, driving up our electric rates, damaging our environment, destroying our farmland,” Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio warned in one ad. Roy Cooper, who is running in North Carolina for Senate, said in another: “My plan stops grocery stores from using AI to overcharge you.” A 30-second spot in Wisconsin features Rebecca Cooke, a congressional candidate, promising voters seated around a kitchen table: “I don’t want to be beholden to any of these Big Tech companies.” And the House Majority PAC, a group closely aligned with Democratic leaders that has been attacking Republicans for their proximity to the new baddie on the block, released an ad labeling the incumbent Republican in Wisconsin’s Third District “Data Center Derrick Van Orden”—and suggesting that he was designed by artificial intelligence to serve its interests.

The sudden Democratic revulsion toward Big Tech and all its offspring—data centers, artificial intelligence, tech oligarchs—has defined this midterm election and will likely continue through the early innings of the 2028 presidential campaign. For most of the past few decades, Democrats cast themselves as a futurist party heralding a digital utopia, a posture founded by Al Gore and solidified when Barack Obama traveled to Google’s headquarters in 2007 to announce his presidential campaign’s commitment to “use technology to reach ever-expanding horizons.” Republicans were the ones warning about censorship and centralized power, as corporate executives clumsily adjusted the levers of permissible speech on social media.

But partisan passions on tech have been realigning from the moment President Trump delivered his second inaugural address in 2025, with Silicon Valley’s centibillionaires as background props. The president’s hostility toward attempts to rein in AI has solidified the shift. Democratic politicians and strategists now enter the final weeks of a midterm season convinced that they have uncovered a way to persuade Trump’s voters to at least hesitate before voting for Republicans. “Trump and his anti-AI-regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” Rob Flaherty, one of Joe Biden’s top digital strategists, told me. “They are grabbing the wrong side of an 80–20 issue at exactly the wrong time.”

Republican campaign advisers, including those in Trump’s circle, admit the new vulnerability—and are taking tentative steps to address it. The president laid out a voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March, aiming to assure voters that new AI server farms would not increase their utility bill. The Republican-led House voted in September to request that state regulators require those standards, legislation that was then championed by Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, who is in a tight race with his Democratic challenger, former Senator Sherrod Brown. “The data center brand is the anchor,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote in an August memo, describing a drag on Husted’s reelection efforts that was first reported by The New York Times. Republican strategists were also alarmed by how much voters responded to the issue: “This messaging is significantly more effective than traditional messaging tracts, as it introduces new information on a highly relevant, emerging topic.”

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

But the memo declaring “a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle” had little influence over Trump’s own rhetoric, and the president spent much of September insisting that concerns of an AI-induced apocalypse were a “hoax” and “sick conspiracy.” While his Cabinet went on television to defend data centers as a great American boon, Trump gathered the leaders of the nation’s technology companies at the White House so that he could praise them and they could praise him. Democrats have been delighted. When the progressive data firm Catalist asked in a poll which party Americans trust when it comes to “responding to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs and society,” they favored Democrats by eight percentage points in July and August. The lead grew to 12 points in September, just as the explosion of television advertising started hitting screens. “Donald Trump decided to convene executives from Big Tech and then lecture the American people that their concerns about data centers are unfounded,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told me in a recent gaggle with reporters. “This is extraordinary stuff.”

The anti–Big Tech ads have saturated swing districts around the country. Reset Tech—a left-leaning group focused on the intersection of AI, media, and democracy that supports more technology regulation—recently used advertising data collected by the tracking firm AdImpact to quantify the messaging shift. From 2020 to 2024, a period that includes three congressional and two presidential cycles, Republican candidates and their allies spent more than $7.3 million on 26 ads that name-checked Big Tech, while Democrats spent just $512,000 on two ads. This cycle the polarities have reversed. Democrats have spent $14 million on 86 ads that mention Big Tech, compared with almost $6.3 million by Republican interests on 37 ads. The contrast in this cycle regarding spots critical of the data-center boom is even more profound: Democratic candidates and groups have run 286 critical ads, compared with 121 ads by Republican interests.

Rishi Bharwani, the U.S. director of Reset Tech, told me that the investments Democrats have made over the past three months to “seed this issue” are now helping produce changes in polling. “This will play a meaningful factor in the outcome of the 2026 midterms,” Bharwani said, “and put Democrats on a strong footing going into the presidential election cycle.”

[Read: Trump’s see-no-evil AI policy]

Democratic strategists began tracking the opportunity earlier this year, when polling from House districts showed surprising concern about AI. In one batch of Democratic polls from March, which I obtained, unfavorable views of AI stood at an average of 63 percent across Maine’s Second District, California’s Twenty-Second District, and Colorado’s Eighth District—all battlegrounds.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was an early tech critic, and her 2025 campaign focused on online safety for children. She told me that she became interested when, during her time in Congress, Republican leaders in the House refused to call a vote for the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which had passed the Senate with 91 votes. Since then, she has signed multiple bills in New Jersey that regulate social-media access for children and clamp down on the use of algorithms to set grocery prices and rent. “Trump is the Republican Party in Washington,” she said. “Democrats have to step into this, and they have to lead here, and I think you see it in these campaigns.” Just this week, two candidates from opposite ends of the party’s ideological spectrum—Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate in Michigan, and David Crowley, the candidate for governor in Wisconsin—released plans for technology regulation.

Flaherty and Bharwani argue that the potency of this issue will only grow as AI’s disruption persists. Polls this cycle continue to show that AI barely ranks as a priority for voters. But Democrats believe that they can tie it to the cost of living and economic insecurity—issues that are at the top of the list. A Democratic-aligned super PAC called Tomorrow Together, which Flaherty co-founded, recently began testing the theory with a $4 million ad buy in four House districts. The ads connect concern over Big Tech with the populist frustration over diminished economic opportunity. One of the taglines: “Lining their pockets, emptying yours.”

Bharwani said that the Democrats’ new stance is a recognition that Obama’s vision of a virtuous cycle of tech-driven innovation never came to pass. “What we all experienced was a ton of growth in the tech sector, the creation of numerous new billionaires, and even the world’s first trillionaire, and a bunch of working families basically recognizing that they’re not sharing,” he told me. “These tech companies are actually undermining their economic security and their safety.” That argument is now being served up to prospective 2028 presidential contenders, who will be shaping the next vision for Democratic governance in a nation where technological change continues to accelerate.