I wasn’t sure how to back up this headline when I started this piece; I just wanted to write about the fact that Democrats flipped at least seven Senate seats, enough House seats to reach what NBC projects will be at least 258, and five governorships across the United States in last night’s midterm elections, a thunderously loud repudiation of Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and their awful, anti-American leadership over the past couple years.
Seven Senate seats! North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, and Maine. Kansas. South Carolina. Susan Collins finally found out what concerned voters look like. Democrats took governor’s seats in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, and Nevada. NBC says 258 House seats would be the party’s biggest total since 1993. Alaska and Mississippi’s Senate races are still too close to call; Mississippi was separated by a few dozen votes when I last checked. A few dozen votes! In Mississippi!
I could just write “wow” a hundred more times and go eat breakfast.
But it turns out there are some real tech-world takeaways. One quick hit before I start my list: Kudos to The New York Times and Apple News for some very impressively well-done Live Activities last night: I had real time counts of the Senate and House results on my Home Screen, with occasional result “headlines” dropping into the views as well. It was great.
But now, the real world impact on the tech space:
1. The AI industry’s donations didn’t work
The AI industry spent this cycle trying to do exactly what the crypto industry did in 2024: spend unthinkably huge gobs of money, bully politicians into line, and buy a Congress that wouldn’t regulate it.
Molly White, who has been tracking this money at Citation Needed and her Tech Influence Watch site, tallied roughly $250 million in crypto and AI super PAC spending across 171 races heading into Election Day. AI PACs alone accounted for $79 million across 68 seats.
The clearest test was South Carolina, a state Trump won by 18 points. Building the Future, a group linked to the similarly-named Leading the Future — the AI super PAC network bankrolled by Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI president Greg Brockman — spent $4.8 million backing Republican Darline Graham (who took over the seat after her brother Lindsey’s death). Graham lost to Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who campaigned on protecting kids online and called for a two-year moratorium on new data centers in the state.
And the money that wasn’t spent tells you even more. The Intercept reported last week that AI PACs spent $50.7 million in the primaries, but only about 5 percent of their direct spending went to contested general-election races. Leading the Future was sitting on $34 million and spent just $7.4 million in the general.
That’s probably because a Data for Progress poll found about three-quarters of voters in Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio were less likely to back a candidate known to have AI super PAC support. “Their donors don’t want to be associated, their candidates don’t want their support,” said Shaunna Thomas of the Guardrails Alliance.
Process that again: The AI industry raised a nine-figure war chest to spend on this election, and then discovered its endorsement was radioactive.
To be fair: the AI money did score some wins. It knocked out Alex Bores, the New York assemblymember who wrote a state AI safety bill, in a June primary. It backed Jared Moskowitz, who held his Florida seat, and Byron Donalds, who won Florida’s governorship. But those are the exceptions in a night where AI was about as helpful to most candidates as Donald Trump was, which is to say… not.
2. The tech billionaires wasted a smidgen of their money, too
It wasn’t just the PACs. Politico tallied famed Nazi saluter Elon Musk spending roughly $224 million backing Republicans in Texas alone. To be clear, last night in Texas, Democrats won nearly every statewide race, James Talarico beat Ken Paxton by about 10 points, and Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott, a sitting governor who started the year with more than $100 million in the bank. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz gave $116 million, mostly to Republicans. OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife Anna gave $50 million, mostly to the GOP.
Forecaster Logan Phillips told Fortune: “I think this might just be the biggest defeat for big money in politics in American history.”
Musk’s response, posted around 1 a.m.: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”
I strongly encourage Elon to go take care of them personally.
I’ll note the one place billionaire money looks like it did work: California, where Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Patrick Collison, and others spent more than $340 million fighting Prop 40, a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires’ wealth. It was trailing 57–43 late last night.
3. Crypto’s “army” lost its rematch
Remember 2024? Fairshake spent $40 million to unseat Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, and the industry crowed about it. Cameron Winklevoss said at the time: “This is what happens when you mess with the crypto army.” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said: “DC received a clear message that being anti-crypto is a good way to end your career.”
They won the battle, but not the war. This year, Brown ran again, against appointed Sen. Jon Husted, and per Citation Needed, crypto PACs poured roughly $64 million into the race, about a quarter of all crypto and AI super PAC spending nationwide. Brown won anyway. He’s going back to the Senate.
DC has received a clear message, Brian Armstrong. And they sent you one now, too.
4. Data centers are now a voting issue
An NBC exit poll found 56 percent of voters said AI or data centers were a “crucial or major factor” in their congressional vote. That’s… a lot of voters. Brown made AI data centers and rising electric bills central to his campaign. So did Hinojosa in Texas and Rebecca Cooke, who flipped a Wisconsin House seat.
And at the local level it was a rout. The Washington Post counted at least 29 jurisdictions that passed bans or restrictions on data centers. Stateline found exactly one measure, in North Dakota, that went the builders’ way. In Ohio, which already had 125 local moratoriums, at least 14 more municipalities passed bans or restrictions. In Nottingham, New Hampshire, a one-year moratorium passed 90 percent to 10 percent. Imagine getting 90 percent of Americans in any town to agree on one thing. That happened in Nottingham.
This matters for the tech world in a very practical way. Texas, Ohio, and Georgia hold a big chunk of the country’s data center pipeline, and all three just elected Democratic governors, two of whom (Keisha Lance Bottoms and Amy Acton) have called for pauses on data center construction. Evercore’s Sarah Bianchi told NBC that “2027 is shaping up to be a turbulent year as developers will be forced to adapt to a shifting policy landscape.”
I don’t think the AI companies are necessarily villains for building data centers. I do think they act like bullies, and that they spent two years acting like the people living next to those data centers — and paying higher electric bills because of them — didn’t get a say. Turns out they get a vote. And wow, did they use it.
So what does it all mean?
For two years, the biggest names in tech made a bet. They bet that if they lined up behind Trump, spent enough money, awarded him fake trophies, and scared enough politicians, they could write their own rules and avoid real regulation.
Jon Ossoff, in his victory speech, went after the “titans of Silicon Valley [who] dig bunkers for themselves.” Democrats attacking tech billionaires for their crappiness is mainstream. And it’s a winning campaign message in Georgia.
I love technology. I write about it every day. I think AI tools can be genuinely useful, and I can demonstrate ways some LLM-based tools have benefited my life. But the industry’s politics — the super PACs, the Delaware shell companies, the nine-figure checks to (and from) a man who has spent years doing real harm to people like my nonbinary kid — those were rejected last night, loudly, in red states and blue ones.
The tech industry should take the hint. Build things people want, in places that want them, under rules voters get a say in. That isn’t anti-tech. That’s democracy, and last night, it worked.
