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EK Ezra Klein Columnist at The New York Times and co-founder of Vox, writing mainly on American politics, party strategy, and polarization, with a growing focus on AI policy...

“I was surprised in the exit polling how important people said AI was to their vote. So 56% said that artificial intelligence in data centers was a crucial or major factor in their vote. 57% said AI would do more to hurt society. 24% said it would help society. 76% opposed a data center in their community.”

Hard Fork (NYT) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“I was surprised in the exit polling how important people said AI was to their vote. So 56% said that artificial intelligence in data centers was a crucial or major factor in their vote. 57% said AI would do more to hurt society. 24% said it would help society. 76% opposed a data center in their community.” — Ezra Klein, Hard Fork (NYT)

Context

Asked what happened to the tech right in the midterms, Klein cites exit-poll numbers showing how much AI and data centers weighed on voters, making the backlash concrete.

Listen to the episode → More from Ezra Klein → More Tech Strategy & Big Tech quotes →

Transcript

Hard Fork (NYT) Around 00:29 into the episode
Speaker 1

…and provision. And now it feels like it's all fallen apart. Both of you guys are close observers of the tech industry, and I wanted to see how you would characterize what happened this week to this growing conservative movement of leaders. Ezra, what do you think happened to the tech right?

Ezra Klein

Well, it attached itself to Donald Trump. And this is a place I think where at least in part, their success became a failure. The tech right is not the reason Trump layered the world in tariffs. It is not the reason that he went to war in Iran, but it is at least part of the reason why he has a hideously unpopular position on AI. And I was surprised in the exit polling how important people said AI was to their vote. So 56% said that artificial intelligence in data centers was a crucial or major factor in their vote. 57% said AI would do more to hurt society. 24% said it would help society. 76% opposed a data center in their community. So you're dealing with an issue that people were both in a kind of direct and vibesy way, actually like taking into account. And Trump, because in this period, he has been really bought in on like the David Sachs, Jensen Huang, you know, Mark Andreessen, et cetera, view of the world. His view and the Republican Party broadly view on data centers was let them rip, build as many of them as you…

Speaker 1

Yeah. I mean, let me ask the chicken and egg question. Is AI getting dragged down by Donald Trump and the tech right? Or is this that AI just has naturally bad politics and its association with these figures is dragging them down?

Ezra Klein

I think it's a mistake to think that the only reason we regulate things is to slow them down or to stop them or because they're bad. You regulate things to put them within a like a trustworthy, semi, at least semi-democratic container, such that people can make peace and have confidence in their…

Erin Griffith

that's like been the whole point of this like rightward shift, right? Is like all the tech guys are so excited to be able to not have to actually care and like soft pedal things and sell them to people, right? Like, hasn't that just been the gleefulness of this like kind of Trump 2.0 tech right…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Hard Fork (NYT)

“Of the sort of 45 gigawatts or so of total energy that's supposed to come online next year, 10 to 15 gigawatts of that could now be in danger of not coming online because it's in Texas, because they all expected that the moratorium that was put on for building data centers in Texas up through the elections would just be removed… This is going to slow down a lot of the AI development. This is going to make compute capacity much more constrained and ergo much more expensive.” — Erin Griffith, Hard Fork (NYT) “The problem with the tech industry is right now, they are all in, no pun intended, on something people increasingly don't think they want. And that's not a messaging problem… Even when you hear them talk about the world they're trying to get to, this world where human beings are the well-kept pets of these super intelligent AIs, that world sucks. People don't want that world. That's not an inspiring vision… There are too many people in Silicon Valley building towards a future that, if it goes well, if you're not in the existential risk scenario, people don't want that future either.” — Ezra Klein, Hard Fork (NYT)