AI Is the Democratic Party’s Next Villain

Another very interesting item from my Hoover colleague Andy Hall (Free Systems); a brief excerpt, though you should read the whole thing:

Something is shifting in the Democratic party. A string of primary upsets has fed a growing narrative that the party’s base now rewards a more aggressive brand of economic populism, one aimed squarely at billionaires, corporate power, and the political influence that money buys. And a number of sharp observers, including Jasmine Sun [piece here] and Archie Hall [piece here], have been arguing that this energy may come for AI next, a prediction that draws support from David Shor’s polling showing voters souring on the technology and on the companies building it as part of a broader concern towards what they see as a rigged economy and a hopeless cost-of-living crisis.

But almost all of the evidence behind this narrative describes the mood of the American electorate, and moods are only half of the story. Politicians do not respond mechanically to shifts in public sentiment—they answer to donors, activists, and primary challengers, not just median voters … and sometimes they stake out new positions well before the public asks for them, or refuse to move long after it has. If we want to know whether AI populism is becoming an organizing position of the Democratic party, rather than a diffuse sentiment floating around in polls, we need to measure the politicians directly. We need to watch what candidates actually say when they are trying to raise money, to garner attention, and to win elections.

Fundraising emails turn out to be a remarkably good place to look. Campaigns test these messages relentlessly against open rates and donations, so the language that survives is the language that operatives have learned actually moves their base—a compressed, high-frequency, almost real-time record of what politicians believe their supporters want to hear. Drawing on Derek Willis’s archive of political fundraising emails, we analyzed roughly 280,000 candidate emails sent since 2017 to trace how anti-billionaire populism became a major component of Democratic fundraising rhetoric, and how, more quietly but unmistakably, AI is starting to follow the same path….