It will be another five weeks before we can say what it means, but there has been a significant shift in public opinion in the country this fall.
In some respects this has been a matter of things going from bad to worse for Republicans, with an increasing number of races falling into the competitive category ahead of the November elections, and President Donald Trump’s favorability rating falling last week to the lowest level in either of his terms.
But there are a lot of countercurrents in our politics these days, starting with the public’s well-documented disillusionment with the Democratic Party. Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report said recently that the election looks more like a “red undertow” than a “blue wave.” Opposition to Trump, not affection for Democrats, is what’s behind the numbers, he argues.
The statistician and analyst Nate Silver, who these days publishes the online newsletter Silver Bulletin, argues that forecasters are being too cautious considering the factors at play this year, and Democratic gains could be even greater than predicted. On the other hand, Silver notes that Democrats have massively outperformed in red states, where white working-class voters and Hispanics are falling away from Trump, while their poll numbers have been relatively tepid in blue states. The places where Democrats are doing best, he says, are “where polls have most overestimated Democrats in recent years.”
The changing outlook for the midterm elections isn’t the only reason, or even the most important reason, to argue that there has been an important shift in public opinion. No campaign polling numbers have changed as dramatically as attitudes about data centers and artificial intelligence. From a murky subject on which both parties struggled to define a position at the beginning of the year, this has become the emergent issue of the 2026 campaign.
To be clear, the intertwined issues of inflation and the war with Iran matter more in this election than the threat of AI destroying the world, or a data center being built down the street. But the president clearly indicated the sensitivity of these issues when he informed the United Nations General Assembly in a speech last week that the United States will no longer use the term “artificial intelligence” but will instead call it “super intelligence.”
“The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake,” Trump said. “It is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports.”
It turns out that the terms “artificial intelligence” and “super intelligent” have both been used in technical circles for quite a while, and already have widely understood meanings. Super intelligence is, or was until last week, the concept of an artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence, not AI itself. Even so, the State Department has put out an order to use the new term, Mark Zuckerberg has embraced it, and Chinese President Xi Jinping said he “respects” the name change.
Whatever we call it, the data centers that make it possible have become a flashpoint that crosses normal boundaries. Self-identified MAGA Republicans are the only group polled in which a majority say they wouldn’t mind a data center in their community. But it’s a bare majority of 53 percent.
Trump has warned that local communities which reject data centers would “end up being backwards and poor.” Last week, Palm Beach County, the president’s voting home, passed a one-year moratorium on the construction of data centers.
Or information campuses, as we may soon be calling them. Whatever terms we use, these are issues that will be with us long after this year’s elections.
