“Data centers become this proxy for all things AI, right? Where everyone seems to want guardrails. And then from the public standpoint, what is the closest tangible thing you have other than the bot in your phone? It's the data center that's being built down the road. Here's something I can do about my nervousness around AI. I can vote against this data center.”
WSJ's Take On the Week · October 2026
Talking about local pushback against data centers ahead of the midterms, the strategist argues that voters treat the nearest data center as a stand-in for AI as a whole. She says moratoriums tend to end in renegotiated terms rather than cancelled projects, and calls guardrails a positive for markets.
Transcript
…reports looking at ways in which policy should be managed or changed. And on the back of that, you get volatility around that sector. But in our view, that could potentially be a really attractive entry point, given that it's not truly altering that long-run cycle, the economic cycle behind it.
…the signal element of it. And in a Democratic-controlled Congress, it can last for a while because you'll get the House and then the Senate agreeing, but you're saying ultimately, it's unlikely to change policy trajectory. So, maybe weakness for a sector would be a buying opportunity in that case.
Right, exactly. And, you know, the sectors that have really run up right now, you have to take that into account. I know there's lots of different reasons for watching that, you know, for how hot things have been, but that also essentially adds what we call policy headline volatility, right? So, your policy risk, because essentially, people are looking for that signal of when things have gotten too toppy. And so, there could be a more knee-jerk reaction when the broader cycle is actually not done. For example, AI regulation seems like one. I mean, beyond the data center issue, there's been a lot of talk about what, you know, how are we going to make sure that AI doesn't kill us? And an AI czar has been appointed, Jay Clayton. So, you know, and Democrats, I think, are probably on the fly trying to figure out, I don't know, maybe you know more about this. What is our view? What is our stance on AI going to be? Do you think AI regulation favors Democrats or Republicans yet? Or is there one party that sort of stands for that more than the other? I think there's this, you know, a misunderstanding or a conflation of ideas where data centers become…
That's interesting because those are things that you could cast on the one hand as like, oh, okay, the government's regulating this right now. It's putting some limits on what people can do. And so you think, oh, that might be bad for that. But you're saying that in the long run, that kind of lays…
Right. And when you think about when regulation comes in and if it is stifling, generally speaking, that's later in the life cycle of that technology, right? Or of that business. And so this is when you're starting something brand new, everyone has to agree, right, to what the rules are, right? How…
I do want to ask you a little bit about on the data center point. Just you've been on the road, you've been in different states. I'm sure you've talked to a lot of either voters and all kinds of people. Is there a constituency for sort of, is there a pro-data center constituency remaining? Because…
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