Trump + AI = Blue Tsunami
The Bulwark · C · trust 51/100
It doesn’t take super intelligence to realize the GOP is screwed.
William Kristol , Andrew Egger , and Jim Swift October 1 Upgrade to listen 13 minutes 546 275 46 The more things change, the more they stay the same. Yesterday, Trump dusted off his old attacks against former Fed Chair Jerome Powell: “He should be forced to resign, IMMEDIATELY! If he doesn’t resign, he should be sued, at the highest level, by the United States Government, for either corruption or incompetence.”
It’s all great news for new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh: He hasn’t been able to lower interest rates yet, either, but for now, Trump seems content to keep blaming Powell. Happy Thursday .
(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) Ride the Wave, Baby! by William Kristol
It’s not just that a new Quinnipiac poll shows only 34 percent of voters approving of Donald Trump’s job performance, with 61 percent disapproving. It’s that Quinnipiac has Democrats leading by 12 points on the generic congressional ballot. This is up from 7 points in Quinnipiac’s survey two months ago.
Yes, this poll is something of an outlier. The FiftyPlusOne polling aggregator shows “only” about an 8-point generic ballot lead for the Democrats. But even that’s a ten point swing from 2024, when Republicans won the national vote for the House by 2.6 points. A 10-point swing would be a wave that puts lots of districts and states in play. A 14-point swing, which is what Quinnipiac implies, would be a tsunami.
And I’ll note that Quinnipiac has been on the money before. Their poll in late September 2024 had Trump leading Kamala Harris by 48 percent to 47 percent. I remember seeing those numbers and hoping against hope that they were wrong, that surely Harris had at least a narrow lead. But they were right.
Just as notable as the generic ballot in Quinnipiac’s poll this week was what it found about voters’ views on how our government should deal with the challenge of artificial intelligence. The results were, to say the least, lopsided.
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“Seventy-one percent of voters say they are more likely to vote for a political candidate who supports stricter guardrails for AI development,” compared to 16 percent who preferred a candidate who supports expanding AI development. Even Republican voters preferred stricter guardrails, by 52 percent 29 percent.
What’s more, 79 percent of respondents said that with respect to AI, they think safety is more important than staying at the forefront of innovation. Only 15 percent thought the opposite. Again, even Republicans prioritized safety over innovation, by 62 percent to 32 percent.
Voters seem to have noticed that the Trump administration doesn’t agree with them. Only 25 percent support the president’s handling of the issue, while 58 percent disapprove. And that disapproval has started to spill over to his party. Forty-two percent now prefer the Democratic party on AI, while 29 percent prefer the Republican party. Only three weeks ago, by contrast, a New York Times /Siena poll found basically no gap between the two parties on the issue.
I’ll add that this survey was in the field over the weekend, before Tuesday’s White House lunch for the tech oligarchs. There Trump confirmed he was going to do nothing to pause or safeguard or regulate developments in artificial intelligence.
But Trump did issue an executive order rebranding “Artificial Intelligence” as “Super Intelligence.” The order celebrated the fact that these technologies are “transformative” and will allow us to do “what was previously impossible.” But aren’t “transformative” technologies that allow the “previously impossible” the kind of thing that requires some oversight by government, and some guardrails that depend on more than the goodwill of tech oligarchs?
Apparently not. Indeed, it turns out that the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” released after the lunch of the AI oligarchs was drafted by . . . the AI oligarchs. As Semafor reports :
The idea for what became President Donald Trump’s Tuesday pact with the AI industry came from a conversation between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and House Speaker Mike Johnson at last week’s state dinner . . .
Zuckerberg spoke to Johnson—whom he was seated next to at the dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping—about regulatory concerns around AI . . . The Meta CEO then talked to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about crafting a set of principles that tech executives could use at their next meeting with Trump . . .
Zuckerberg then circulated a draft ahead of Tuesday’s meeting between Trump and AI executives. Huang played a role gathering support for it among the administration’s guests . . . Eventually Trump himself released the document as a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” outlining broad principles for self-regulation.
That story apparently comes from a single source, so it’s possible there’s more to it than that—but it certainly looks like the “White House” executive order was drafted by the AI firms. Trump merely signed it.
It was nice of Trump to throw the glitzy lunch for the AI guys and sign off on their no-safeguards policy. It should make it even easier for Democrats to say for the next month that Trump and his party are bought and paid for big AI.
Maybe the tsunami Quinnipiac forecasts will turn out to be about right.
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