{"slug": "how-to-build-a-pro-ai-majority-before-we-squander-americas-future", "title": "How to build a pro-AI majority — before we squander America’s future", "summary": "New York Gov. Kathy Hochul's first-in-the-nation moratorium on large data centers shows that artificial intelligence has a politics problem, with seven in ten Americans now opposing a data center in their area, up roughly 30 percentage points in under a year. A pro-AI majority can be built by reaching technological optimists who haven't yet extended that optimism to AI, according to polling from Echelon Insights. The key is a positive narrative that AI spreads capability downward, benefiting the least experienced workers most.", "body_md": "Gov. Kathy Hochul’s first-in-the-nation moratorium on large data centers carries one big lesson: Artificial intelligence has a politics problem that no amount of lobbying will fix.\n\nAI is one of the most valuable technologies ever to emerge, yet it’s increasingly [losing the political battle](https://nypost.com/2026/07/18/us-news/hochul-backed-data-center-ban-to-satisfy-dsa-for-re-election-bid/) for public support.\n\nWithout that support, America will squander its huge advantages and [fail to benefit from what it’s built](https://nypost.com/2026/07/19/opinion/data-center-debate-has-one-winning-argument-sheer-panic-and-it-will-backfire/).\n\nThat’s why AI’s advocates need to consciously cultivate a pro-AI majority — and fast.\n\nThe polls tell the story: New Yorkers backed a data-center moratorium by better than two to one in last month’s Siena survey.\n\nNationally, seven in ten Americans now oppose a data center in their area, which is up roughly 30 percentage points in under a year.\n\nHochul, in other words, isn’t defying public opinion; she’s following it.\n\nThe risk of course is that more restrictions could be coming, including punitive taxes, permitting refusals and local vetoes — all aimed at the most consequential technology of the era.\n\nBut good news: The raw material for a pro-AI majority exists.\n\nAssembling it, though, requires thinking differently about political coalitions — because AI doesn’t divide the country along party lines.\n\nRecent polling from Echelon Insights maps the coalition.\n\nTwo groups form its natural base: Young, tech-enthusiast voters and optimistic center-right Republicans together represent about 30% of the electorate.\n\nAdd college-educated suburbanites who like technology but remain lukewarm on AI specifically, and it reaches roughly 42%.\n\nThe swing bloc is the largest group of all — younger, mostly female voters who are skeptical of AI but not committed against it.\n\nWin a share of them, and a majority is in reach.\n\nThe key point here is that a pro-AI majority coalition can be built without flipping outright opponents.\n\nIt’s about reaching technological optimists who haven’t yet heard a reason to extend that optimism to AI itself.\n\nGiving them one requires a better story than Silicon Valley boosters have provided, and a positive narrative that counters opponents’ doomsaying.\n\nThe honest story happens to be the best one: AI spreads capability downward.\n\nThe research is remarkably consistent.\n\nFor example, customer-service agents using an AI assistant resolved 14% more issues per hour — but the gain was 34% for the least experienced workers, and nearly zero for the stars.\n\nStudies of writers, coders and consultants find the same pattern: The biggest boost goes to those starting furthest behind.\n\nIn practice, that’s a Queens contractor getting a lawyer’s help with a payment dispute for the price of a monthly subscription.\n\nIt’s a bodega owner with a bookkeeper that never sleeps, or an immigrant with an idea building a software program that once required a funded engineering team to produce.\n\nAI is the most powerful solvent yet invented for erasing the barriers to starting things.\n\nCall the resulting agenda “diffusionism,” with the goal of getting AI’s capabilities into as many hands as possible.\n\nThe point is not just economic growth, but the broad distribution of capability itself.\n\nMost of the current AI debates begin by asking who will capture the returns from AI, and how those returns should be redistributed.\n\nBut a society can’t redistribute prosperity it never generates.\n\nA diffusionist message speaks to every group the coalition needs — markets and initiative for the right, access and broken gatekeepers for the center-left, and a renewed sense of personal agency for the young.\n\nDiffusion runs on physical things: chips, electricity and, indeed, data centers.\n\nWhich brings the argument back to Hochul, because the [grievances behind her moratorium](https://nypost.com/2026/06/02/us-news/albany-democrats-poised-to-impose-1-year-ban-on-new-ai-data-center-construction-in-ny/) are politically potent.\n\nYet her ban answers none of those grievances.\n\nIt builds no power plants, lowers nobody’s utility bill and creates not a single job.\n\nWorse, it [sends the industry’s billions](https://nypost.com/2026/07/14/us-news/hochul-orders-election-year-pause-on-new-large-scale-data-centers-to-power-ai-in-ny/) to Virginia, Ohio or Texas.\n\nThe correct response is a deal: [require data centers to pay for the power](https://nypost.com/2026/05/22/business/data-center-debacle-roiling-midterms-as-ai-may-have-to-pay/) they consume or to generate their own, deliver visible benefits to host communities, and fast-track the new energy generation the grid needs anyway.\n\nThe deeper opportunity, though, is political, and it’s sitting unclaimed.\n\nMore and more politicians are lining up to run against AI.\n\nThe first leader to run *for* something instead — for the contractor, the bodega owner, and the founder; for cheaper power and broader access to the most capability-enhancing tools ever built — will find the largest bloc of persuadable voters in America waiting.\n\nHochul is betting that the backlash is where the votes are, through November and beyond.\n\nBut her pause expires within a year.\n\nThe politics of what comes after will belong to whoever has built the majority by then.\n\n*Jesse Arm is the vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute, where Sean Speer is a technical writer. **Adapted from City Journal**.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-to-build-a-pro-ai-majority-before-we-squander-americas-future", "canonical_source": "https://nypost.com/2026/07/22/opinion/how-to-build-a-pro-ai-majority-before-we-squander-americas-future/", "published_at": "2026-07-22 09:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-22 09:30:14.853460+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Kathy Hochul", "Echelon Insights", "New York"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-to-build-a-pro-ai-majority-before-we-squander-americas-future", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-to-build-a-pro-ai-majority-before-we-squander-americas-future.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-to-build-a-pro-ai-majority-before-we-squander-americas-future.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-to-build-a-pro-ai-majority-before-we-squander-americas-future.jsonld"}}