‘Total repudiation’: The blue wave is about to hit AI
AI companies have a new threat: a wave of Democrats who campaigned against them.
by Hayden FieldNov 5, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC
AI companies have a new threat: a wave of Democrats who campaigned against them.
by Hayden FieldNov 5, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC Hayden Field is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
On Tuesday night, Democrats made history as they took control of the House and the Senate, and a blue wave swept through traditionally red and swing states — with the nation’s first Black woman governor elected in Georgia, the country’s first Native American woman governor elected in New Mexico, and a Maine Senator ceding to a Democrat after 30 years in office. In these and other campaigns, one theme kept coming up: holding AI companies accountable to the American people. Now, the AI industry is left considering the prospect of regulation, data center construction slowdowns, and more.
Publicly, most major AI company CEOs have remained silent. OpenAI and Anthropic did not provide comments to The Verge; Elon Musk’s call on X to vote “red” for the midterms — the SpaceX CEO had spent close to $450 million backing Republican campaigns for the election — vanished after results poured in.
Privately, CEOs have discussed significant compute capacity constraints for their companies after Tuesday’s results, particularly OpenAI, per The Wall Street Journal. Meta’s platforms president, Dina Powell McCormick, says many are considering moving data center construction abroad. AI executives are reportedly privately nervous about the results but may also be able to blame them for not delivering as much revenue to investors. Many of the incoming leaders have promised to drag CEOs to testify. On X, a popular post by former X product lead Nikita Bier warned that “This is going to be like the Nuremberg Trials but for AI researchers.” (On Tuesday night, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did post about how “people should always be in control of the future,” but he spent other parts of the evening talking about RAM.)
Tuesday’s results were a “total repudiation” of the AI field, says Wes McEnany, the former Deputy Labor Policy Director of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions, who now works with the nonprofit Future of Life Institute. He said that AI touches “every aspect of people’s lives,” whether they’re applying for jobs, using social media, or even paying electricity bills while living near a data center, and that they’re tired of not having “any agency in that conversation.”
The bipartisan backlash against data center construction is the most tangible manifestation of that backlash. It’s going to be unquestionably more difficult to build them across the country, after 43 out of 44 local data center moratoria on Tuesday’s ballots passed, sending a clear message to AI companies. In Texas, the fastest-growing data center buildout area and a key battleground state, governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has said she plans to “issue a moratorium — a ban — on all data center approvals until laws can be passed by the legislature to protect Texans.” Similar promises have been made in a handful of other key states.
“Data centers were clearly on the ballot,” said Guru Sethupathy, GM of AI governance at Optro.
In recent months, there’s been an increasing number of protests and collective bipartisan action to battle data centers being built in a wide range of states. Residents are concerned about noise pollution, electricity bill rate hikes, and more. When NBC News polled voters on Tuesday, 76 percent opposed data centers in their communities.
“The data center backlash is one of the most bipartisan political issues I’ve ever seen,” Shaunna Thomas, co-founder and director of the Guardrails Alliance, a Super PAC pushing for AI regulation.
“Data centers are an entry point to looking at this broader corporate accountability lens of, ‘My bill is going up, why?’” said Kyle Jacobs-Morse, deputy executive director at The Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit tech industry watchdog. “People found that it was big tech companies that were the culprit.” He added that particularly in the gubernatorial races in Texas, Georgia, and Ohio, Democratic campaigns prioritized potential local issues stemming from data centers, including “spillover costs” for local residents, communities, and state governments.
“I do think we’ll hear more questions about who benefits from and who pays for AI, especially as it pertains to infrastructure, but what I’m more curious about is what changes we can expect around regulation,” said François Ajenstat, CEO and founder of Golden Analytics.
Experts say the midterm results have likely ended Trump and congressional Republicans’ repeated attempts to bar state-level AI restrictions. Thomas considers the idea “completely dead,” while McEnany said “any member who votes to wipe out state AI laws is going to be looking for a job in the next [election].” Jacobs-Morse expects to generally see more “tech accountability bills.”
OpenAI recently began calling its data centers “compute campuses,” and President Trump in September attempted to change the name of AI as a technology to “super intelligence.” But midterm results suggest that a significant portion of American voters aren’t buying the rebranding efforts.
“I don’t think it was working, and I think the prospect of it working is extremely low after the election,” Thomas said.
“The Trump idiosyncrasies around some of this stuf
Source: www.theverge.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.