AI turns corporate power into a populist test for Democrats

AI becomes the target

The backdrop is a widening gap between corporate gains and workers’ share of the economy. By mid-2026, wages accounted for 52.9% of the total US economy, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When the measure began in 1947, the figure was above 65%. The remainder goes to investors, business owners and corporations as profit.

AI could widen that divide further. Its development may generate billions for the people financing it while reducing the number of jobs and weakening real wages. That possibility gives an abstract technology debate a direct political charge.

The public is already hostile to the infrastructure required to build AI:

The distrust is not limited to the technology itself. It is tied to a wider list of advantages that wealthy corporate interests are seen as buying from politicians:

That is why data centers have become such an effective political symbol. They consume large amounts of energy and water, while the gains appear to flow upward. The more interesting question is not whether AI will attract investment. It is whether ordinary workers will see any meaningful share of the value created.

Trump changes the alignment

The argument presented by Robert Reich is that Donald Trump and his administration have made corporate self-interest unusually visible. Companies can build energy- and water-intensive data centers while, according to Reich, funding Trump’s political committee, paying for construction of his ballroom and praising him publicly.

In this telling, Trump has exposed the limits of several older defenses of corporate power: “corporate social responsibility,” philanthropy and the idea that wealth will eventually trickle down. The claim is not simply that corporations are rich. It is that corporate leaders are prepared to sacrifice workers’ interests for more billions when the political system allows it.

That perception is beginning to affect party identity. In a recent NBC poll, 54% of Americans agreed that nothing in politics and society really matters because powerful people will do whatever they want.

A Times/Siena poll last week asked likely voters which party was better described as “elitist.” Republicans led Democrats, 43% to 33%. That result marks a notable shift from the familiar political map. For decades, Democrats were more readily associated with corporate power, while Republicans directed populist anger toward immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, Black and Latino Americans, “communists,” Muslims, “woke” leaders, coastal elites and other designated enemies.

Trump’s version of populism may therefore be producing an unintended result: corporate elites are increasingly perceived as Republican allies rather than Democratic ones.

The opening Democrats may avoid

The Democratic Party has an older precedent for reclaiming economic populism. Ninety years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans before his 1936 reelection that they were confronting “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, war profiteering.” Americans, he said, had learned that a government controlled by organized money was as dangerous as one controlled by an organized mob.

Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a few other Democrats have continued attacking wealthy corporate elites. Most Democrats, however, have focused their populist criticism on Trump rather than on the companies benefiting from the political system.

The party now faces a choice that is more practical than ideological. AI offers a concentrated target: a powerful industry, unpopular infrastructure and a plausible connection to job losses and weaker pay. My guess is that this is exactly why some Democratic political consultants are advising candidates in difficult districts to avoid discussing AI. Politico reports that they fear well-funded pro-AI groups could spend heavily against them in the final weeks before the midterm elections.

That caution may protect individual candidates. It also leaves the field open to Republicans and to figures such as Sanders and Bannon, whose opposition to AI infrastructure can otherwise look like an unlikely alliance.

The announcement is quiet about the question that matters most to workers: what guarantees, if any, connect AI’s promised economic gains to better jobs, higher wages or public benefits. Without an answer, opposition to data centers can become a proxy for a much larger revolt against concentrated wealth.

Reich, a former US secretary of labor, emeritus professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Guardian US columnist, argues that the stakes extend beyond the Democratic Party. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is being published in the United States and the United Kingdom.

AI is giving American populism a new object of anger, but it is also forcing Democrats to choose between challenging corporate power and protecting access to its money.