There are few things that seem to unite Americans across party lines these days, but anger over the construction of AI data centers seems to be one of them, at least when you’re talking about the average Democrat and average Republican on the street.
However, more Americans say that elected Republicans want to give the AI industry tax breaks for the construction of data centers, according to a new poll from Politico. And that’s a big problem for the GOP as they’re staring down the prospect of getting a shellacking during the midterm elections in just a couple of weeks.
Politico reports that 47% of Americans believe Republicans are “the party of tech tax breaks,” while just 21% said Democrats wanted to give tax breaks to Big Tech. About one in five of those polled said ending those tax breaks would be their most important issue in November, a shockingly high number during an election when affordability is clearly leading the national conversation.
Much of this perception about partisan attitudes on Big Tech is likely due to some Democrats successfully pulling a 180 on the issue over the past year. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is perhaps the best example of a Democrat who was previously trying to incentivize AI data centers to be built in his state but now speaks out against their potential dangers. Shapiro signed an executive order in August to force data center builders to comply with more strict regulations.
President Donald Trump has been a huge proponent of AI data center construction, writing on Truth Social back in August: “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.”
Later, Trump would admit that while he supports the construction of data centers because he believes it makes communities richer, he wouldn’t want to live right next to one. He’s not alone. More Americans would rather have a nuclear power plant built in their community than an AI data center, according to polling from Gallup earlier this year. A whopping 71% of Americans don’t want them in their communities.
Digging deeper into the polling
Not every American understands the current partisan landscape, however, even as early voting is already underway in many states. And it’s important to keep in mind that a certain percentage of the U.S. population is going to believe anything, regardless of how stupid it might seem. For example, 14% of Americans in another recent Politico poll believe that Elon Musk is a Democrat. Just 59% believe he’s a Republican , while 12% say he’s an independent and the rest don’t know.
Musk donated nearly $300 million in 2024 to help elect Donald Trump and other Republicans to Congress. He’s currently donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help Republicans in the midterms, according to the New York Times, and that’s just to groups that require disclosure of donors. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, so-called dark money is more prevalent than ever and it’s entirely possible he’s donated millions more through entities that aren’t required to disclose who is giving them money.
Musk is arguably the second most powerful person in the Republican Party right now, behind President Trump, and maybe even the most powerful if you look at it from a more long term view. Musk is the one who’s throwing around all the money and he’s much younger than the 80-year-old Trump.
All that being said, most Americans now believe that Big Tech is Republican coded. And that’s obviously the right conclusion, given the way that the industry has been working side by side with Republicans like Trump, kissing the ring every chance they get since he returned to power.
It’s quite a flip from more than a decade ago, when the titans of Big Tech were seen as Democrats, whether it was Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Both were frequently seen around Democratss like Barack Obama in the pre-Trump era, but now it seems they’ll back whichever side will let them continue to amass wealth and power.
They did plenty of that under Obama and they’ve done even better under Trump. After all, Musk recently became the world’s first trillionaire, and if the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs go off without a hitch in the coming months, many more people in the AI space will be swimming in inconceivable wealth.
