From electricity bills in Pennsylvania to sovereign wealth funds on Capitol Hill, the politics of artificial intelligence are being felt at every level of American government. Governors are forcing data center operators to bring their own power. A senator wants to seize half the stock of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies. A vice president is warning soldiers to guard their right to pull the trigger. And a president who has championed AI’s rise just killed his own administration’s plan to put guardrails on it. The 2028 presidential race is taking shape against a backdrop of record corporate AI investment, rising public anger and a policy vacuum that no candidate has yet filled. Polls show that Americans are more anxious about artificial intelligence than at any point since the technology entered daily life, yet neither party has offered a coherent answer for what to do about it. What has emerged instead is a contest of instincts, proposals and positioning, each shaped by the particular fear a candidate believes will matter most on Election Day.
The artificial intelligence industry has never been wealthier, more politically connected or more publicly distrusted. That paradox is now shaping American politics at every level, and by the time voters go to the polls in November 2028, the technology may well be the defining issue of the presidential campaign.
Companies are pouring record sums into AI development as public anxiety about the technology intensifies. A Fox News poll published in April found that 66 percent of registered voters are now concerned about artificial intelligence, up from 56 percent in 2023. A separate Quinnipiac University survey found that 80 percent of Americans described themselves as very or somewhat concerned about the technology. And a Gallup poll released in May found that 71 percent oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local area, with opposition spanning partisan and demographic lines in ways that have alarmed strategists in both parties.
“AI will force itself onto the political agenda in 2028,” Chris McGuire, an AI policy expert at the Council of Foreign Relations, said in a recent blog post. “When it does, the American people will expect policymakers to have serious answers ready.”
Those answers are still being drafted. Technology is advancing faster than policy can be developed, and neither party has a settled, coherent position on how to manage the disruption. What has emerged instead is a scramble, as prospective candidates stake out territory on energy costs, job displacement and corporate power, each trying to channel a voter anxiety that is only deepening.
| BY THE NUMBERS $50.8 Billion Amount the U.S. spent on data center construction in April 2026 alone, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, outpacing public transportation infrastructure spending for the first time. |
AI companies are not passive bystanders in this political reshaping. This year’s midterm elections are awash in nearly $265 million in planned spending from super PACs with ties to Anthropic and OpenAI, the two largest American AI firms. The investment signals how much both companies understand that the regulatory and political environment being built today will govern how they operate for decades.
A record number of data center projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2026 amid community resistance, according to Heatmap Pro data. Morgan Stanley analysts, in a note to investors, described public pushback as “a binding constraint, particularly around data center buildout.” At Jefferies, analysts warned that the setbacks were “sapping confidence” among investors who had treated AI infrastructure as a one-way trade.
Pennsylvania: Energy Costs as a Campaign Issue
In Pennsylvania, a swing state where the governorship, state legislature and multiple congressional districts are contested this fall, the politics of AI have arrived in the form of monthly electricity bills. Average household electricity rates in the state jumped nearly 14 percent in the last year, a rise that state officials and consumer advocates have directly linked to the energy demands of data centers expanding across the region.
Gov. Josh Shapiro, widely seen as a leading Democratic contender for 2028, has made data center accountability the centerpiece of a consumer-protection push he calls the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development Standards, or GRID. The plan, first outlined in his 2026-27 budget address, would create a pathway for data center developers to receive state tax incentives and streamlined permitting, but only if they meet standards around energy affordability, clean energy generation, community engagement and workforce development.
The political heart of the proposal is the “bring your own energy” principle: data center operators must demonstrate they can power their facilities without passing infrastructure costs on to residential ratepayers. The state’s Public Utility Commission reinforced that framework in May when it released a model tariff recommending that utilities across Pennsylvania adopt rules creating a separate rate class for large-load data centers.
“That’s why I am putting clear guardrails in place to hold developers accountable to protect consumers, strengthen communities, and put Pennsylvanians first.” — Gov. Josh Shapiro
Shapiro’s plan faces significant implementation hurdles. It requires buy-in from state legislators, utility regulators and stakeholders with competing interests. But its political logic is unmistakable: Shapiro is seeking to occupy the space where economic populism meets technological governance, a position that would be central to a national campaign.
He is not alone in this calculation. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, also considered a 2028 prospect, proposed a two-year pause on tax incentives for data center construction in February. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has called for an outright moratorium on new data center development and has pressed federal officials on their impact on drinking water and local infrastructure.
Transmission costs are already approaching 35 percent of electricity bills within the PJM grid, which approved another $12 billion in infrastructure projects in February, according to energy policy analysts tracking the issue. Critics say that amount is being driven almost entirely by data center demand, and that the costs are being socialized across millions of ordinary ratepayers.
California: The Governor Threads the Needle
California Gov. Gavin Newsom occupies a more complicated position. Long the beneficiary of deep relationships with Silicon Valley, he has also positioned himself as one of the country’s most prominent Democratic voices on the risks of unchecked AI adoption, a balancing act that will only intensify if he formally enters the 2028 race after the November midterms.
On May 21, Newsom signed a first-of-its-kind executive order directing California state agencies to develop policies for managing AI-driven job displacement. The order was signed the day after Meta announced it was eliminating approximately 8,000 positions, cuts the company attributed in part to its $100 billion AI infrastructure investment.
The order mandates agencies to explore severance standards, expanded unemployment insurance, job retraining programs aimed specifically at white-collar workers in fields like customer service, software development and marketing, and worker ownership models. It also directs a study of what Newsom called “universal basic capital”, a concept under which residents would receive stakes in assets like corporate stocks, bonds or public wealth funds rather than direct cash payments.
“California has never sat back and watched as the future happened to us, and we won’t start now,” Newsom said in a statement.
“This moment demands that we reimagine the entire system, how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future,” Newsom said.
The order also directed the statewide expansion of Engaged California, a digital platform initially built to coordinate recovery after the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, to gather public input on AI’s workforce impact.
Newsom’s order came on a day of unusual contrast in AI policy. President Trump pulled the plug the same afternoon on a planned federal AI executive order that would have created a system for the government to vet powerful new AI models before public release, telling reporters he did not like what he was seeing in the draft.
| PUBLIC OPINION SNAPSHOT 71% Americans who oppose the construction of an AI data center in their local area, per a Gallup poll published May 2026. Data centers have now surpassed nuclear facilities as the most-opposed local infrastructure in national surveys. |
Sanders Proposes Structural Redistribution
On Capitol Hill, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) moved further still. In a New York Times guest essay published June 1, Sanders announced plans to introduce the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, legislation that would impose a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of major AI companies, specifically naming OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI as targets.
The proceeds would be deposited into a publicly held fund giving ordinary Americans direct ownership stakes, voting rights and board representation in the companies building the technology. Tech layoffs in 2026 have already surpassed 142,000, with companies including Meta, Atlassian and Cloudflare explicitly citing AI investment as the reason for workforce reductions.
“Since A.I. is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity,” Sanders said.
The proposal drew swift criticism from across the ideological spectrum, with some analysts noting that Democrats hold the minority in both chambers and that the bill faces long odds. Critics at Reason magazine argued that Sanders fundamentally misunderstands the economics of AI wealth creation. But the proposal also had notable precedents from within the industry itself: both OpenAI and Anthropic have separately floated sovereign wealth fund concepts in their own policy papers, and OpenAI published a proposal in April calling for a public wealth fund that would give Americans an automatic stake in AI-driven growth.
The same week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts published a piece in Time laying out why AI wealth should be taxed, further signaling that the left is coalescing around redistribution as the conceptual framework for AI governance.
Republicans: Accelerate, With Caveats
Republicans have broadly adopted a hands-off approach to AI regulation, aligning with the Trump administration’s posture of prioritizing development speed over consumer and worker protections. The White House’s AI Action Plan established an executive order early in the administration limiting state regulation of the technology, a move that Silicon Valley largely welcomed.
But even within that framework, dissenting notes have emerged. Vice President JD Vance, speaking at the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony last week, expressed caution about how AI might erode human judgment on the battlefield.
“As AI transforms the battlefield, in some ways positively, in some ways not, I ask that you be jealous and selfish about your role as the decision-maker in warfare,” Vance said.
The remark was notable precisely because it came from within an administration that has otherwise resisted placing guardrails on AI. It suggests that even Republicans who support rapid development are beginning to grapple with the technology’s implications for human agency and accountability in consequential decisions.
NBC News political analyst Amy Walter noted that serious candidates for 2028 will need “easy-to-understand frameworks” for their approaches to AI, able to tell voters not only where they generally stand but whether each new advance in technology and each new policy proposal fits with their plan. “A candidate’s ability to adapt on the fly to significant, fast-moving blips on the electorate’s radar is a major tell for how they might deal with crises as president,” Walter wrote.
A Political Landscape Without a Map
The political challenge is compounded by the speed of change. By the time the 2028 campaign reaches its peak, the AI landscape will look nothing like it does today. Models that do not yet exist will be in daily use. Industries that are currently stable may be in freefall. New applications of the technology may create anxieties that today’s policymakers are not even thinking about.
“It should be clear to anyone paying attention to polling or even just vibes that there is a lot of voter-level concern about AI and costs,” one Democratic strategist told NBC News, declining to speak on the record.
What is clear is the broad direction of the electorate. A 2026 assessment by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that grid systems powering much of the Pacific Northwest, Midwest, Texas and East Coast could enter high-risk territory as soon as 2028 or 2029, with data centers identified as the primary driver of projected demand increases over the next decade.
The Ipsos polling firm found in May that more than half of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their community, while 65 percent said they worried about data centers’ energy consumption and 61 percent expressed concern about their environmental impact. Only 27 percent believed data centers would contribute significantly to economic growth in their area.
Those numbers suggest an electorate that has absorbed the promise of AI without being convinced that its costs and benefits are being distributed fairly. For the candidates now staking their positions, the question is not whether AI will be central to 2028. It is whether any of them will have a credible answer for what to do about it.
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