AI will be on the ballot in the 2026 midterms

The 2024 US presidential campaign season may have been the first time voters had to contend with AI during an election, confronting deepfakes of Taylor Swift vowing support for Donald Trump and AI robo-calls of Joe Biden telling voters not to cast their ballots. But the 2026 midterms are shaping up to be the first time the technology itself becomes a kitchen-table issue, touching prices, jobs, and political power.

If AI were a candidate in this cycle, it wouldn't be a popular one – and that cuts across party lines. In a recent poll, only 26% of voters said they viewed AI positively. Democrats and Republicans are almost equally as likely to say they are more concerned than excited about AI’s increased use in daily life: 50% of Republicans vs. 51% of Democrats.

Because of its broadly ominous reputation, Noah Daponte-Smith, a US analyst at Eurasia Group, expects AI to be “background music” in American politics in 2026, amplifying anxieties about the economy rather than commanding the campaign on its own.

Worried about your power bill? Electricity prices jumped 6.9% in 2025, with data centers accounting for roughly 40% of the growth in electricity demand. Worried about your job? AI is the new automation threat – only this time, it’s coming for white-collar work.

“I see this playing out for voters on two main lines: data center development (of which electricity prices are a subcomponent) and worker protection,” says Daponte-Smith.

AI as a pocketbook issue. Data centers – the massive warehouse-like facilities that house the servers powering AI, cloud storage, and the modern internet – have been expanding rapidly across the US. Electricity consumption from these facilities is expected to double or more by 2030, making their footprint an increasingly contentious issue in local and state politics.

On the jobs front, polls show 63% of Americans already expect AI to reduce overall employment. February’s jobs report didn’t help: the US economy shed 92,000 positions, having added just 116,000 in 2025. The pain is being felt most acutely by young college-educated workers, who are entering a labor market bleaker than they were promised, as companies slow entry-level hiring and cite AI as the reason. This is predicted to turn white-collar professionals into a politically pivotal demographic as AI adoption grows. Anthropic's chief executive has warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Accurate or not, that kind of prediction is now in the political bloodstream.

Political messaging battle. AI anxiety could land squarely on Washington. Every midterm election is, to some degree, a referendum on the president. The Trump administration has made an explicit bet on AI as a pillar of American economic revival by signing executive orders to create a “minimally burdensome national policy framework,” curb state-level environmental and safety laws – a win for tech companies lobbying against a patchwork of regulation – and pull back restraints on building AI infrastructure. A 2025 executive order by Trump essentially cleared the path for AI data centers to get built faster – cutting through federal red tape, fast-tracking environmental reviews, speeding up permits, and even opening up federal land for development.

This creates a political tightrope for Republicans, who want to support Trump’s agenda but also appear cautious of affordability concerns. They are also operating when the history of AI development is still being written. If electricity prices continue to climb and AI-linked job losses accelerate in the months ahead, Democrats have a ready narrative: that the administration handed a small group of tech oligarchs the keys to the grid, the labor market, and the halls of Congress, and ordinary Americans got the bill.

If, on the other hand, the AI boom produces visible economic growth and the administration can credibly claim that its deregulation investment accelerated it, Republicans have a genuine vindication story.

Meanwhile, Democrats have yet to coalesce around a coherent strategy on AI, though Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia gubernatorial race last year by linking affordability and high utility bills to the idea of making data centers “pay their fair share” for electricity usage. This strategy could be copied by other Democrats. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who is running for reelection in 2026, has added making data centers pay more taxes to her list of campaign promises.

Daponte-Smith says something to watch is “whether a political entrepreneur emphasizing AI issues becomes dominant in either party, much like Trump on trade.” Back in 2016, President Donald Trump harnessed blue-collar anger over automation and globalization taking jobs to build a new coalition of MAGA voters, which has become the primary base of the Republican Party.

Big Tech invests big in midterms. The tech industry is pouring money into races. Leading the Future, a super PAC backed by OpenAI President Greg Brockman, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Palantir co-Founder Joe Lonsdale, has raised $125 million to hamper pro-regulation candidates from both parties in 2026.

The playbook was borrowed directly from crypto: in 2024, the crypto-friendly Fairshake PAC became the single-largest corporate donor in the election cycle and helped elect more than 50 candidates. The AI industry is looking to repeat the formula. So far, the members of the AI industry have put approximately $150 million and counting towards the 2026 midterms.

Their first target is Democratic New York assembly member Alex Bores, who has been hit with over $1 million in negative advertising after co-authoring an AI regulation bill for New York state. It may be backfiring. As Daponte-Smith notes, Bores can now portray himself as the victim of “a small group of AI oligarchs.”

The ingredient that could scramble everything? AI is ripe for a political playbook that taps into economic anxieties. It has all the raw material and cuts across issues and party lines. AI may not be a candidate on the ballot in 2026, but the emotions it's generating very much are.