President Donald Trump is heading into the 2026 election year vowing to pull out all the stops to promote artificial intelligence — just as American voters are starting to voice some doubts.
All through Trump’s first year back in office, almost everyone had something to say about AI. Economists detailed how it’s powering US growth. White House aides explained why it’s key to staying ahead of China. Stock-watchers cheered a market boom, and fretted about a bubble. Tech geeks speculated about what the bots might one day be able to do.
The president helped fuel the buzz, appearing alongside various tycoons to announce big AI projects. On Thursday, he signed an order seeking to limit states from imposing their own curbs on AI — marking another win for the industry.
“Our administration is committed to total dominance in technology,” he said a day before at a White House event with prominent tech executives. “Right now, we’re leading artificial intelligence by a lot.”
One group that hasn’t gotten much of a hearing above the hubbub is the US electorate. But in last month’s off-year contests there were signs of an AI backlash, one that could amplify concerns about the cost of living and the job-market outlook in Trump’s economy.
At the local level, many voters objected to the spread of data centers, the building blocks of AI’s advance, whose huge demand for electricity is getting linked to bigger household bills. That affordability issue now has political traction. It helped Democrats score major wins in Virginia and New Jersey.
On top of that, there’s the employment risk. Data centers create plenty of construction jobs but not so many once they’re up and running. Worse, there are widespread fears that the technologies incubated there may turn out to be job-killers.
None of this means AI isn’t key to America’s economic future — just that it’s hard to sell as a political priority in the meantime. That’s particularly true for a White House already struggling to convince voters that Trump’s economic policies are working.
Perhaps there’s an echo of the debate over free trade. Economists, executives and investors all predicted long-run benefits, but millions of American voters reckoned they’d drawn a short straw, and the disruption helped bring Trump to power. Now Steve Bannon, one of the populist MAGA movement’s architects, has all but declared war on AI, citing economic, political and even religious reasons to rein it in.
“They are coming at you from every different direction. They want your productivity until they get the robots and then they’ll toss you aside like trash,” the former Trump strategist said on his “Bannon’s War Room” podcast, in a November episode devoted to the dangers of AI.
The White House has pointed to potential productivity gains from AI as enriching workers and businesses. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett — seen as the frontrunner to be Trump’s next Federal Reserve chair — in a recent Fox Business interview said AI would “make a lot of productive workers a heck of a lot of money.”
AI technology will aid, not replace, American workers, according to a White House official who requested anonymity to detail their thinking. Ensuring the US is a leader in AI will help create more employment opportunities and also lower costs for services and goods, further spurring job growth, according to the official. The Department of Labor said it was investing in skills training to help workers benefit from AI and to help fill surging demand for jobs to build out the technology’s infrastructure.
Still, there’s anxiety at the grassroots level — and it’s not only politicians who’ll have to factor that in. There’s been a surge this year in the number of data center plans blocked or delayed by local opposition, according to Data Center Watch, a monitor run by AI intelligence company 10a Labs. Its research identifies $98 billion of investments stymied in the second quarter, more than the total for all previous quarters since 2023.
That’s adding time, uncertainty and political risk to some projects, which investors will likely start to price in, said Miquel Vila, an analyst at the group.
Lordstown in northeast Ohio illustrates the gap between the upbeat talk from the top and anxiety on the ground.
It’s one of five locations where AI infrastructure is being developed as part of Stargate, a $500 billion project announced by Trump in January on his first full day back in the White House.
But not far away, another company backing a separate $3.6 billion data center project is finding that many residents don’t want it — even though the region could use an economic lift, after losing 40% of its manufacturing jobs in the past two decades.
Bristolville 25 Developer LLC wants to build a data center campus on 133 acres of industrially zoned property. The village council is trying to block large-scale data centers because of concerns like rising power costs, water usage and pollution, and Lordstown Mayor Jackie Woodward said four council elections last month hinged on whether candidates opposed such projects.
“I don’t have the money to pay a bigger electric bill or bigger water bill,” Richard Coe, a 78-year-old Lordstown retiree, told the council at a Nov. 3 meeting. “So I would appreciate that our council members take that into account.”
In letters to village officials, attorneys for Bristolville outlined benefits that the investment would bring, including more than a million dollars a year in state and local income tax revenue, plus millions in property taxes. Bristolville has also offered $10.8 million for water infrastructure upgrades, as well as contributions to a community fund for facilities like an event center or pickleball court. The venture would employ an estimated 1,600 workers during peak construction, and then 120 full-time employees with an average wage of more than $84 per hour.
That’s not enough permanent jobs to justify the impact on the community, said Lordstown Council President Robert Bond. “We don’t see the advantage tying up large industrial acreage for 120 jobs.”
Among leading Republicans, it’s state governors who are most worried about an AI backlash, according to one Trump adviser who says the party wants to “win the AI race” but hasn’t really figured out what that means. Concerns at this stage are more focused on electricity bills, which threaten to become a benchmark affordability measure like gas-pump prices have traditionally been, than the risk to white-collar jobs.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who earlier this year intervened to preserve an exemption from state sales taxes for data centers, isn’t among the doubters. He says rising electricity prices are “a legitimate discussion,” but doesn’t think local opposition will stunt the industry in Ohio. “We believe that data centers bring other business, that they bring other jobs into the state,” DeWine says.
Back in Washington, the Trump administration seems chiefly interested in ensuring AI companies keep expanding — since that’s what is powering the economy and equity markets. Trump this week granted permission to Nvidia Corp. to export its high-end H200 chip to China, bypassing national security concerns that had previously loomed large.
Many analysts calculate that the AI boom accounted for more than half of US GDP growth in the first six months of 2025, and see that trend continuing when third-quarter numbers come out.
The big tech companies, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Oracle Corp. — have tripled their capital spending, which will likely exceed $500 billion in 2026 according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Many of these companies donated to Trump’s presidential inauguration, or his new White House ballroom, or both.
There’s consensus on Wall Street that AI has driven most of the gains on the S&P 500 this year — but disagreement over whether that’s pushed the market into bubble territory. Lenders who funneled cash into the data-center rollout have begun to seek hedges. Oaktree Capital Management LP’s Howard Marks plunged into the debate this week, calling the AI risk to employment “terrifying.”
Economists are scouring the data — which is patchy, thanks to the long government shutdown – for early signs of where the AI economy is ultimately headed, for better or worse. That could show up as faster productivity growth, or AI-driven job cuts, or strains on the electrical system, though it’s likely too soon to be sure.
In both political parties there’s a sense that more thought-out AI strategies will be needed – but neither of them has one right now, according to another Trump adviser, who calls AI a “political football.”
Leading Democrats like Virginia Senator Mark Warner and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg have cited the need for lawmakers to respond faster to the pace of change without offering much in the way of policy proposals. Democratic candidates who won governorship contests in Virginia and New Jersey promised steps to shield households from higher power prices driven by data centers.
In the coming weeks, the White House is expected to release a much-anticipated executive order on expanding the US electric grid. It will include measures focused on bolstering transmission capacity and enhancing grid technology, according to a person who’s been briefed on drafts.
Politically the message is far simpler: The administration is trying to show it’s doing all it can to boost power output in the hope of bringing down prices. And it’s redoubled the effort after Democratic ballot wins in November, amid expectations that data centers will consume more energy and keep pushing electricity prices up.
Gene Sperling, a former National Economic Council director and adviser to former President Joe Biden, sees a similarity with the 2024 election campaign. Biden and then his deputy, Kamala Harris, campaigned hard on the big-money investments in electric cars and clean energy their policies had delivered. But voter anxieties about the cost of living helped swing the election to Trump.
There might be a lesson there on AI for Republicans heading into 2026, Sperling told Bloomberg TV. “You would let people know, ‘Hey, we want to lead in AI, we want to beat China,’” he said. “But we also want to do it in a way that you’re not seeing people make hundreds of millions of dollars while your electricity costs are going up.”
