A.I. Is Now a Major Election Issue: As Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s newly elected Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, put it, “People really effing hate data centers.”

The New Yorker Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Getty

Story by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

August 9, 2026

This summer, as the ideologically fractious Democratic primaries begin to recede and the politically pivotal midterm elections edge nearer, candidates and voters alike have had their attention drawn by vast, humming edifices newly constructed on the outskirts of towns. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public-health official who finished a deft insurgent campaign by becoming Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, sounded a theme that helped decide primaries in his state and in Kansas last week. “People really effing hate data centers,” he said.

That kind of consensus is rare in politics right now. About seventy per cent of Americans, including sixty-three per cent of Republicans, oppose building the hyper-scale centers that power the A.I. boom in their area, according to Gallup, but more than four thousand centers have been built across the country, and about four thousand more are planned. Politicians, first from the left and then from the center and the right, have spent the past few months hastily distancing themselves from them. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a federal moratorium on new data centers in March, and the pragmatic governor Kathy Hochul enacted the first statewide one in New York in July. The rallying cries against A.I. can themselves sound a bit as if ChatGPT wrote them. “It’s time to press control-alt-delete to put a stop to this A.I.-data-center crisis,” a closing ad for Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who is the front-runner in this Tuesday’s primary for Wisconsin governor, announced. Still, when something is this unpopular, blunt talk can work... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/17/ai-is-now-a-major-election-issue

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Don’t just blame Trump [and Republicans] – Democrats paved the way for this campus crackdow. Both parties are responsible for the mess facing Columbia and other institutions

‘Virtually every aspect of the Trump administration’s posture rests on track laid by the Biden administration and the Democratic party.’ Photograph: Dana Edwards/Reuters

Musa al-Gharbi  

"... Even before Trump had a chance to weigh in, Joe Biden immediately characterized the protests at Columbia as “antisemitic” and declared that “order must prevail” on college campuses. Democratic lawmakers put aggressive pressure on the former Columbia University president Minouche Shafik to crush the protests. She ultimately did so with the assistance of New York City’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams (who justified his clampdown via evidence-free statements that the protests were driven primarily by “outside agitators”). Trump celebrated the pictures and videos of students getting roughed up by the NYPDand, upon Trump’s reclaiming the White House, the justice department interceded on behalf of Adams – making his criminal investigation go away in apparent exchange for the mayor adopting a more aggressive posture on immigration – a move that critics claim is a quid pro quo.

In a similar vein, it was Biden who enshrined the IHRA definition of antisemitism into federal guidance, despite the definition’s author repeatedly describing it as a “travesty” to use this definition to regulate speech and behavior. Building on Biden’s introduction, Trump is poised to sign a bill that would implement this same definition into federal anti-discrimination law – and in the meantime, he’s insisting Columbia and other schools adopt this definition in their own codes of conduct. NYU and Harvard have already taken this step, overriding concerns by civil rights and civil liberties organizations – from the ACLU, to Fire and the AAUP, to Israeli civil rights groups – who stressed that IHRA’s definition is extremely vague and provides strong leeway for institutional stakeholders to censor most critical discussion of Israel, Zionism or Judaism more broadly, by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Likewise, before Trump called upon Columbia to put its Middle East studies programs into receivership, New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, took the extraordinary step of demanding that the City University of New York eliminate a job posting for scholars who study Palestine. This is the same type of overreach Trump is exercising at Columbia – politicians setting the agenda for what can be taught and who can be hired – justified on the same grounds.

The Democrats will not save colleges and universities. They have been key partners and pioneers for all of the actions currently being undertaken by the Trump administration in this domain...."  READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/26/universities-columbia-trump

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