Democrats are having a “rebranding” problem. The party formerly known as “The Democratic Party” became so toxic, so out of touch, that party leaders have been desperately casting about, looking for ways to get voters to forget “The Democratic Party” and embrace teddy bears, kitty cats, and other cuddly things.
Not really, but dangling shiny objects in front of voters’ eyes to make them forget Kamala Harris and her radical-left child mutilators has become a top priority for the party heading into the midterm elections in 2026.
It’s beginning to face the fact that being the “Anti-Donald Trump” party just ain’t cutting it. With less than a year to the pivotal electoral contests that will either point to a comeback or a collapse for the Democrats, the party is fractured, disjointed, and at each other’s throats.
What the party needs, say the gimlet-eyed political consultants, is an overarching, unifying theme that can unite the factions and bring about a victory that could sweep the Democrats back into power, where they will promptly take their revenge on Trump, conservatives, and all their other enemies, real and imagined.
Some Democrats think they’ve found that unifying theme: artificial intelligence (AI).
“The contrast is so obvious. On one side, there’s the billionaires, and on the other side, there’s everyone else,” said Lakshya Jain, the co-founder of the polling firm Split Ticket. “I think [Democrats] should be bolder. A lot of tech companies have a lot of power, and they have a lot of capital and economic influence. But politically speaking, you can go a lot harder on economic populism. The public wants to see something bold on costs.”
America has a long, proud tradition of embracing technological change. It’s the secret sauce of American capitalism. When Europeans fought tooth and nail to prevent rapid technological advances in transportation, for example, the United States raced ahead, viewing the locomotive, the steam engine, and the automobile not as threats but as the essential tools of a growing nation.
The American spirit has always been keen to master the new frontier — a lesson Democratic alarmists would do well to remember as they target AI.
To many people who spend their days thinking about how Democrats can energize their base and prove their anti-billionaire bona fides, going all-in on opposing the AI industry is one obvious, winning way to do so. The loosely defined coalition of people calling for this approach includes socialists, independents from rural states and mainstream Democrats who have turned concern about tech into a pet issue, arguing it can form the basis of a new populist brand of politics that has long proven difficult for Democrats to execute effectively and on a large scale — but whose time may have come.
Indeed, the polls are telling Democrats to go all in on generating hysterical opposition to AI.
“Gallup polling showed that 80 percent of American adults think the government should regulate AI, even if it means growing more slowly,” reports Politico. “Pew, meanwhile, ran a study that showed only 17 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years.”
Has America lost its nerve? No, but it’s become cautious about a technology that might raise electricity costs, force millions of workers into unemployment, and alter America in fundamental ways that no one has been able to explain.
“There’s both a political imperative and opportunity for the Democratic Party to take advantage of the fact that the AI billionaires are in bed with the Trump administration,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told Politico.
That’s true to a point. Most mainstream Democrats are bullish on AI but tout the need for some regulation, for instance, to address affordability or intellectual property rights.
That’s boring. To energize the base, populist Democrats want to go full-on, hair-on-fire, opposition to everything about AI, starting with the huge data centers springing up across rural America and going so far as preventing AI from being implemented in any useful way.
Some Democrats believe it may be a way to win back the working-class voters they have abandoned over the last 20 years.
For the past several elections, Democrats have lost, by increasing margins, voters without college degrees. They are increasingly stuck with a white-collar base that disadvantages them politically and makes them seem out of touch in large swaths of post-industrial America. Now, though, white-collar workers are also deeply concerned about AI stealing their jobs. A passionate case against AI not only allows the Democrats to adopt a populist posture on a massive issue, these consultants and pollsters say; it also allows them to loop in their white-collar base to a populist cause.
AI’s successes have already disproportionately affected white-collar work. In May, AI giant Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cautioned that AI could soon eliminate up to 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs. But blue-collar work is at risk of further AI-driven automation, too, and blue-collar workers are already angry about rising energy costs. That both groups can be mobilized under the cause of protecting jobs against AI and lowering energy costs could be a game-changer for Democrats.
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“I think it’s a massive political opportunity,” said Morris Katz, a strategist who has worked with incoming New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. “We’re seeing the ruling class try to, as a final act, make extinct the working and middle class in this country, and we need a politics that’s willing to name a villain … If NAFTA lost us a generation of white working class voters, this is our trade deal moment on steroids.”
Why would the “ruling class” try to “make extinct the working and middle class”? That sort of hysterical nonsense will serve as fodder for the Democrats as they seek to stop AI in its tracks.
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