In this week’s midterm elections, Democrats won back control of both chambers of Congress, with stunning victories in battleground states that have voters and tech critics asking: Was this the AI election?
Artificial intelligence was central to the national conversation during the midterms, alongside concerns about affordability and the Iran war. From data centers needed to power AI to how it’s used in surveillance tech like Flock cameras, many Democratic (and a few Republican) candidates campaigned against AI.
Tech critics were quick to claim success, too. Alan Butler, president of the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, called it “a resounding victory” and said that ”voters made clear in this election that they are sick and tired of big tech companies manipulating them, buying politicians and elections, and surveilling their families and communities.”
Despite tech leaders like Elon Musk pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns, tech critics say voters’ choices show a strong distrust in Big Tech and give the newly elected leaders the necessary momentum for change. But how, exactly, they deliver on those goals remains to be seen — and will have real consequences for tech consumers and companies.
“It is time for lawmakers to get real about reining in unchecked tech power and to hold these companies accountable to the people,” Butler says.
The data center bellwether
More than any other tech issue, data centers took center stage in the midterm elections. It isn’t surprising; these facilities are popping up everywhere and require vast amounts of water and electricity at the expense of nearby communities’ health and environments.
Voters showed their frustration at the ballot box. Across the country, voters rejected more than 40 ballot measures that would’ve supported data centers. It was a rare national consensus on an issue that is usually debated in city councils and statehouses. As such, “action is more likely to come on the local and state levels, at least in the short term,” says Paris Marx, tech critic and host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast.
Governments may continue to adopt moratoriums on new data center construction, like New York’s first-in-the-nation pause implemented earlier this year, as they try to figure out how to mitigate the harms. State and local legislators need to continue setting environmental rules, managing electricity demand and finding real community benefits, Marx says. (OpenAI, for its part, is tackling the issue by renaming data centers as “compute campuses.”)
In many ways, “data centers are a symptom of the larger problem,” says Samir Jain, vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Tech companies are so focused on “winning” the global AI race that they forget (or didn’t prioritize) the impact on everyday people, he says.
But neighbors living next to data centers cannot forget. In that sense, the overwhelming public backlash to data centers and the midterm election results are “a real repudiation of that kind of approach to technology,” Jain says.
It starts with privacy
If the new Congress is going to prioritize technology as part of its legislative agenda, it needs to start with privacy, tech critics and policy experts say.
“To the extent that there’s this emboldened sense that we want to do something to rein in tech companies, consumer data privacy is the way to go,” says India McKinney, director of federal affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Right now, the US doesn’t have any comprehensive federal laws around consumer data privacy. This is a core part of how so many tech companies operate and make money; Meta made its bones by selling Facebook users’ data to advertisers. And so there’s “plenty of room for bipartisan progress on a national privacy law,” says Kinsey Fabrizio, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association.
But we’ve seen very clearly over the past decade that when left unchecked, tech companies can collect and use our data in concerning ways. Despite stalled progress on a national bill in the past, there may be a new push for it, thanks to recent tech headlines. Flock cameras and other automatic license plate readers have sparked immense public concern as many cases show law enforcement officers misusing the tech to stalk and harass people.
Privacy is a major concern with AI, too. “It puts all the more premium on having a privacy bill,” Jain says. AI companies are data-hungry entities that want our data to improve their models. But we have basically no control over what happens to it next, including whether it’s used in AI training or handed over to law enforcement, your employer or data brokers.
Not all tech policy issues would be solved by a data privacy law, but it would provide lawmakers with a foundation from which to tackle other issues. And for US consumers, it may give us back some control over how much information we want to hand over to tech companies. Tech companies operating in countries with data privacy laws, such as European Union members, are often legally required to give users more options, such as opting out of AI training.
It isn’t just major tech platforms; it’s also data brokers that sell data to companies you don’t interact with. That industry is worth more than $277 billion, and it’s the engine behind much of how Big Tech operates.
“If you are mad at this whole surveillance pricing situation where we’re going to charge you more if we feel like you can afford it, that is because of data brokers,” says McKinney. “If you are mad that the federal government can just buy information from data brokers that [it] would otherwise have to get a warrant to get, that’s a data broker problem.”
Jain says one way to think about tech regulation is as a kind of matrix. “There are some basic building blocks that apply across the board for AI, like privacy, that we need to have in place.” But there are specific cases where “we’re going to need additional sector-specific regulation,” like healthcare, he says.
Some states already have data privacy laws. But during the federal government’s last attempt at a data privacy law five years ago, lawmakers couldn’t agree on whether (or how) to let states keep regulating privacy, McKinney says.
And that’s the inherent advantage for things like a federal consumer data privacy law or national AI framework. The rules apply to everyone in the US, so tech companies have to comply, rather than just threaten to go dark in specific states.
“We can’t lead the world in AI and support transformative AI innovation with a patchwork of conflicting state laws that make life harder for startups and small businesses,” Fabrizio says.
A bipartisan lack of trust in Big Tech
While the Democrats will have a firm majority in both chambers of Congress, many of the most contentious tech issues have bipartisan support, tech critics told me. And we’ve already seen how that can result in actionable legislation, such as the Take It Down Act, which passed nearly unanimously in 2025.
This fleeting moment of bipartisan agreement on reining in Big Tech could help lawmakers achieve the elusive task of actually fulfilling their campaign promises. But part of the challenge will be getting lawmakers to focus on real-world harm and basic protections, not whatever dystopian tech prediction is trending that day.
“It’s very likely we’ll see companies continue to push lawmakers to focus AI regulation on so-called ‘existential risks,’ meaning their claims that more advanced AI might kill humanity or end the world,” Marx says, “rather than addressing the impacts of data centers and the present-day harms.”
Those existential risks only serve to make tech companies more powerful. “These elected representatives don’t just have the power to rein in these powerful corporations; they have the obligation to do so to promote the interests of the constituents they serve,” Butler says.
We saw this election cycle how much money Big Tech is willing to spend to try to get its preferred candidates and policies. Elon Musk alone reportedly spent nearly half a billion dollars backing Republican candidates such as Ken Paxton in Texas, who lost by 12 percentage points to Democrat James Talarico. Despite that, most of the tech experts I spoke to said the results showed a real desire from voters to rein in tech companies and the harms they wrought.
But that will depend on how willing the new Congress is to buck Big Tech. “If we have a new electorate that is newly emboldened to stand up to bullies,” McKinney says, “let’s start there.”
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Katelyn Chedraoui
