The midterms were, as advertised, a blue tsunami. The economy, the Iran war, and Trump himself did most of the damage. But inside the wave was another verdict: the American voter does not like AI.
The numbers are lopsided. In NBC’s exit poll, 56% called AI and data centers a crucial or major factor in their vote for Congress, and 76% opposed a new data center in their own community. Voters went against data centers in 40 of 41 local ballot measures across 10 states. And the presence of America’s 989 billionaires has provided fuel for a socialist youth movement.
Here’s the awkward part. Those voters are your employees, your customers, the people at your water cooler.
And here’s the twist. The same voter who says no to AI in public keeps saying yes to it in private. Self-reported use of tools like ChatGPT rose from 48% to 56% in three months, and opposition softens when voters see direct benefits in their daily lives. The anger isn’t really aimed at the tool. It’s aimed at what the tool has come to stand for: billionaires, rising power bills, and a pink slip.
On billionaires? They’re the Faustian bargain of American capitalism; society benefits from the innovation, but their creators really benefit. As in the Gilded Age, the backlash is part of the plot, but won’t stop the building of the new machine.
And data centers? The new refineries will get built somewhere, somehow, whatever the polls say. And even if they stall, there’s already more AI on the shelf than most companies know how to use (for now the bottleneck isn’t the technology but management).
So how do you lead? Three moves:
Don’t argue with the electorate. Name the fear, and be specific about what your firm will and won’t do with AI.
Make the benefit local. As a manager, what can you most impact? How your people experience AI. Aim it at their drudgery, not their jobs. The data back you: in October, AI created far more jobs in the US than it destroyed.
Keep building. The constraint was never the technology. It’s management. Firms that wait for the polls to improve will find their competitors didn’t.
Voters didn’t reject the future. They rejected a future done to them. Your job is to make it a future with them.
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