Anti-AI ads air in more than 70 federal races since 2025
WASHINGTON — Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, has joined Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in calling for a halt to new AI data center construction, putting him on the same side of the issue as progressive Democrats in a cross-party campaign and at odds with his former boss. The Wall Street Journal described the alignment as a “horseshoe” coalition uniting the populist flanks of both parties against an industry central to U.S. artificial intelligence development.
Trump has pushed back publicly against local resistance to data centers. “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,” Trump wrote on social media Monday, according to the Journal. His administration has pursued an AI strategy that preempts state regulation of the industry — a policy Bannon has rallied grassroots support to fight.
Bannon said in an interview that he now spends 75 percent of his time fighting AI’s expansion when he isn’t recording his “War Room” podcast. “If we don’t get this right, none of that other stuff is going to matter,” Bannon said. “I have not seen any issue in modern American life at the populist level that unites disparate elements of our country more than this.” He said he can no longer tell whether attendees at the data-center opposition events he follows are Trump supporters or Sanders fans.
Sanders, the independent Vermont senator who caucuses with Democrats, has pitched the issue to religious conservatives as a question about what it means to be human, citing AI’s deeper implications. “Politics is always a situation where you make strange coalitions and different coalitions every day,” Sanders said in an interview. “But on this issue, I think many of the right-wing people have the same concerns that I have.” Sanders’s federal bill to impose a moratorium on new data center construction has no Senate co-sponsors, according to the Journal. Ocasio-Cortez’s House version has 14 co-sponsors, all Democrats.
The backlash is reshaping campaigns. Ads that cast data centers or AI in a negative light have run in more than 70 U.S. House, Senate and gubernatorial races since 2025, the Journal reported, citing transcripts collected by AdImpact. The messaging extends beyond federal contests — anti-AI ads or ads promising action on data centers have appeared in at least 50 state legislative races, an Arizona mayoral contest and a Colorado county-commissioner primary. In the race to succeed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, both leading candidates have run advertisements criticizing aspects of data center development.
Governors who praised data centers a year ago are now retreating. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, one of the country’s longest-serving Republican governors, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, have paused or restricted new approvals, according to the Journal.
Federal legislation has stalled beyond the Sanders-AOC moratorium. A separate bill from Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, would create a new tax on AI companies; it too has no Republican co-sponsors. Bipartisan measures addressing data center power consumption, chatbot usage and chip-export restrictions have advanced partially in Congress but have not become law, the Journal reported.
Surveillance concerns have drawn bipartisan attention to AI camera maker Flock Safety. The company’s license-plate reader cameras, marketed as tools to deter and solve crimes, have drawn calls for oversight from progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and conservatives including DeSantis and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. Ad volume focused on the company has surged, the Journal reported.
Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist and co-founder of data-mining firm Palantir who donated to Trump and backs an industry super PAC, told Fox Business that the administration and tech industry needed to stand up to “crazy populists.” He labeled them the “BBC” — Bernie, Bannon and the Chinese Communist Party. “All those people want to ban data centers and they want America to lose,” Lonsdale said. “We have to make sure the BBC radicals lose.”
Montana Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy offered a parallel critique from the right. “First they killed our timber mills, then our mines, then our factories—now data centers. Every good-paying, middle-class employment powerhouse has been systematically murdered by globalist and communist lobbying in America,” Sheehy said recently on X, according to the Journal.
Megan Romer, the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, acknowledged the unusual nature of the coalition. “Just so you know we’re not friends, you can’t sit with us, but we can agree on this one,” Romer said.
Former National Economic Council director Gene Sperling, who advised the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations, said the backlash had become a “kitchen-table” political issue. “I’m not sure if there’s a more bipartisan issue today than the backlash against unregulated AI data centers,” Sperling said, according to the Journal.