Lawmakers are going home to face AI-skeptical constituents as the GOP puts the industry’s biggest booster front and center in midterm messaging.
Republican lawmakers are returning home to face AI-skeptical constituents as their party continues to place President Trump, the party’s biggest AI booster, front and center in midterm messaging.
Republicans who have cleaved to Trump through disruptive tariffs and an unpopular foreign war must now find a middle ground between their president, who dismisses AI skeptics as “backwards,” and their own voters, a majority of whom are wary of AI innovation and opposed to data center construction in their communities.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have introduced a flurry of bills to address concerns about data center–driven increases in utility prices and AI safety concerns, but neither party has reached consensus even among its own members about the size and shape of either regulatory framework. With the House in recess until after Election Day, bipartisan consensus seems a long way off.
In the meantime, voters are being bombarded with doomsday headlines and looking to their representatives for solutions.
“They feel like they’re being forced down their throat,” Representative Scott Perry, a Republican in a competitive race in Pennsylvania, told National Review, describing his constituents’ feelings toward data centers. “Folks that are building them or running them . . . are not being truthful about what they’re used for, and they feel like they’re going to — and rightly so, to a certain extent — make their electricity bills go up.”
The debate around AI took on a more urgent tone this week after the leaders of several leading tech companies came out in favor of regulation and predicted dire consequences if their calls went unanswered.
President Trump was unmoved. “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” he wrote on social media earlier this week. Trump has previously said that “the only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.”
Some Republicans joined Trump in responding to the tech leaders’ calls for regulation with skepticism, arguing that industry incumbents were demanding red tape and issuing doomsday predictions in a bid to stifle competition. But other, more populist Republicans who have proven Trump’s most loyal allies are firmly on the other side of the issue.
“We might want to be on the side of voters, just a thought,” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri told reporters. “And we might want to protect our local communities. I think what people really want is they want to have control. Local voters want to have control over what comes into their community. They want to be able to vote on it.”
Hawley added that farmers in his state have reacted with concern about companies building data centers on land that they could try to cultivate.
“While I was home this last month, we had the Missouri State Fair, and farmers are absolutely apoplectic about losing prime farm ground in Missouri,” he told NR.
While Republicans deliberate, Democrats have been quick to feed into voters’ AI fears.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at a Thursday press conference that there was “an existential situation” that Congress had to face on the technology.
“What are Republicans doing? They’re running away from their responsibilities here on Capitol Hill,” he said.
Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this month canceled the final two scheduled weeks of legislative session before the midterms, as well as this past Thursday’s session, making Wednesday the House’s last day until after Election Day. Johnson told reporters this week that the House has sent many pieces of legislation to the Senate, which the upper chamber has not taken up, and that it “feels like a fruitless exercise for the House to do everything and wait upon the Senate.”
Meanwhile, Democrats in competitive races have been quick to lash out against an increasingly unpopular industry. Representatives Kristen McDonald Rivet of Michigan and Don Davis of North Carolina introduced a bill to exclude data centers from taking advantage of accelerated depreciation and opportunity zones, two tax breaks given to businesses in Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.
“There is no meaningful work right now coming out of Congress to be able to put some guidelines around AI,” McDonald Rivet told NR. “Many people are very frightened of that, and there is an overwhelming feeling, I think, in working families that Washington has just forgotten about them.”
In response, some vulnerable Republicans have tried to address constituent concerns about AI. This week, Representative Mike Lawler of New York partnered with Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey to introduce a bill that would put certain regulations on AI agents. Representative Gabe Evans of Colorado authored a bill that would require states to consider a federal standard that put large energy users (e.g. data centers) on the hook for the cost of the power they consume. It passed the House Wednesday with almost every member voting in favor, but it failed in the Senate the next day when Senator Jon Husted of Ohio tried to pass it by unanimous consent. (Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico objected because the legislation only requires that states consider the standard, rather than requiring them to actually adopt it.)
Even as a significant portion of the caucus looks to respond to demands for regulation, some Republicans are emphasizing the importance of AI innovation to compete with America’s adversaries.
“Everybody back home recognizes that this is not a race we can lose to China,” Representative Zach Nunn, who is in a toss-up race in Iowa, told NR. “And [for] every data center we build here and get permitted in the United States over the course of six months, China is building a mega data center every six weeks. We’re going to lose this race if we don’t recognize that this is also a national security imperative.”
Nunn added that he believes local communities should have power over the building of data centers. “We should not be having federal mandates either way,” he said.
Nunn may be able to convince his constituents of the strategic importance of data-center construction and AI innovation, but he’s facing an uphill battle. Voters, particularly young male voters, are being bombarded with negative information about AI, and much of it is coming from former leaders of the MAGA movement.
“We’ve gotten a president telling us that we’ve got to support data centers being built in our communities,” former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said Thursday in a social media video. “No one wants a data center in their community.” Tucker Carlson also recently hosted AI pessimist Nate Soares, coauthor of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, on his podcast.
But these voices are not unanimous in this posture. Representative Thomas Massie downplayed the salience of AI in the upcoming elections, saying it was not even in the top ten issues voters care about.
“It’s not an issue,” Massie told NR. “Nobody cares. They care that they can’t afford groceries and diesel and a house. They don’t care about AI.”