Today we are releasing The Future Classroom Playbook, the newest installment of the Democratic AI Opportunity Agenda, a series of policy proposals released every few weeks, to refocus the party on AI policies that create more economic, personal, and social opportunity.

The first installment, The Human Advantage Playbook, focused on preparing workers for the AI economy. The Future Classroom Playbook looks to the classrooms where the future workforce is taking shape.

The Future Classroom Playbook focuses on helping students build the human skills that remain valuable as AI improves critical thinking, problem-solving, judgment, oversight, and the capacity to keep learning, and on ensuring every student, regardless of background, has the chance to develop them.

A New Era for the Classroom

AI is already in the classroom, and it arrived faster than schools could respond. During the 2024–25 school year, 85% of teachers and 86% of students reported using AI in some capacity. The question is no longer whether students will use these tools; it is whether schools will teach them to use them well and responsibly.

That question lands on an education system already marked by inequality, which means the same tool can either narrow opportunity gaps or widen them, depending entirely on the policy around it. The risks, including unequal access to AI and digital infrastructure, uneven AI literacy, privacy and cybersecurity concerns, and the familiar challenges of hallucinations, bias, and overreliance, are manageable with policies that target the underlying problems rather than the technology itself.

We have been here before. When calculators were first introduced, many educators worried that they would undermine math education. Instead, they shifted the focus from rote calculation to problem-solving and reasoning. The same pattern has played out with new technologies time and again. The takeaway is to focus on the skills that will matter no matter how technology changes. AI can help students think more critically, tackle difficult problems, and strengthen their judgment. The Future Classroom Playbook lays out the policies that can help schools get there.

Build, Back, and Bypass

Every proposal below is designed to be adaptive and to respect local control over curriculum.

Build new policies lawmakers could create or support to close remaining gaps, following students from K-12 into the workforce. Some require Congress, while others are ready for states and agencies to launch now. The six proposals include:

1. The AI Confidence for Every Student (A. C. E. S.) Initiative to establish AI literacy as a core competency taught alongside reading, writing, and math.

2. The Educator Readiness Program to invest in teachers— funding professional development, peer mentorship, paid time to redesign lessons, etc., prioritizing underserved schools where training gaps are the widest.

3. The Technology for Human Inquiry and Nuanced Knowledge (T. H. I. N. K.) Framework to protect productive struggle and redesign assessment around authentic demonstrations of learning rather than answer-generation.

4. The Credentials, Reskilling, and Apprenticeships for Future Technology (C. R. A. F. T. Act) to build stackable, portable, employer-linked AI credentials through community and technical colleges.

5. The Professional Pathways Program (P³) to widen graduate and professional access to AI skills, prioritizing underserved learners.

6. The Student AI Rights Act to set a federal floor for student privacy, transparency, and human oversight while preserving state and local flexibility.

Back the bipartisan bills already moving through Congress that deserve broader Democratic support— on AI literacy, teacher training, apprenticeships, and college access. Among them are:

• Rep. Andrea Salinas (D-OR-06) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)’s NSF AI Education Act (H. R. 5351/S. 3957)

• Rep. Gabe Amo (D-RI-01) and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA)’s LIFT AI Act (H. R. 5584/S. 4414),

• Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA-08) and Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-MN), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY)’s CREATE AI Act (H. R. 2385/S. 4441),

• Reps. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX-37) and Danny Davis (D-IL-07) and Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Don Wyden (D-OR)’s Tax-Free Pell Grant Act (H. R. 2543/S. 1610), and

• Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN-02) and Sens. Tina Smith (D-MN) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)’s Supporting Apprenticeship Colleges Act (H. R. 4588/S. 2028).

Bypass the responses that appear appealing at first but ultimately leave schools, teachers, and students worse off. Following the foundational principle of the first Playbook to focus regulation on the harm rather than the technology itself, this section highlights several counterproductive reactions:

1. Blanket bans that push AI out entirely and widen the gap in access to AI.

2. Unreliable detection software that often produces false positives and erroneously flags the writing of neurodiverse students and non-native English speakers.

3. Checkbox graduation mandates that mistake exposure to AI for true skill and subject competency.

4. Teacher-replacement schemes that treat teaching as a cost to cut rather than a relationship to support.

5. Vendor lock-in that grants private platforms disproportionate power over curriculum choices and student data privacy.

6. Broad chatbot bans that inadvertently block the everyday tools students use to learn instead of targeting the actual harms.

Preparing today’s learners for tomorrow’s workforce

Every generation faces its own educational challenge. For this one, the challenge is teaching students to think in a world where AI can generate almost anything. AI may make knowledge more accessible, but in doing so it raises the value of the distinctly human skills schools have always sought to build: critical thinking, judgment, and problem-solving. Those capabilities will outlast any particular model or breakthrough.

The best AI policy begins with better education policy. By investing in educators, making AI literacy universal, and protecting students, policymakers can ensure AI strengthens teaching and learning rather than replacing it. The future belongs to the students who can think alongside and beyond the tools they use, and every student should get that chance.

Read The Future Classroom Playbook in full here. New to the series? Start with The Human Advantage Playbook. And watch for the next installment in the coming weeks.

In the wake of our 2024 losses, a repeated refrain of Democratic political strategists and politicians has been that Democrats need to orient our politics around “villains.”

But a new memo from Winning Jobs Narrative Action has a compelling finding: great stories need villains, but the stories are about the heroes.

Or, as the memo puts it, “Star Wars is not about Darth Vader.”

That insight applies to our tech policy too.

I love the original Star Wars trilogy. As a kid, I watched them over and over again. Don’t get me wrong, Darth Vader is a cool villain, but when I played Star Wars games with my friends and cousins, we all wanted to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. Growing up in small-town Iowa, the farm kid from a backwater planet who grows up to be the hero had special resonance.

Even for non-Star Wars fans, the epic adventure hero story is well understood. Harry Potter is about Harry and his friends, not Voldemort. The Lord of the Rings is about Frodo, not Sauron and Gollum. The Hunger Games is about Katniss, not President Snow.

The hero gives people someone to root for. As the WJN Action memo puts it:

Our view is that Democrats should embrace aspirational populism — a people-focused approach that positions working people as the heroes of the story, centers their goals and aspirations, names the obstacles standing in their way, and offers tangible solutions that will equip them with the tools and opportunities to build a good life.

In WJN’s testing, aspirational populist messages outperformed adversarial populist alternatives by an average of 43 percent across taxes, energy affordability, and housing affordability.

That is exactly the lesson Democrats need to apply to tech.

I Have A Bad Feeling About This

Too much Democratic technology policy over the past several years has been focused on making Vader the main character. Especially following Trump’s inauguration with many tech executives prominently positioned on the dais, the loudest Democratic story became about “Big Tech oligarchs.”

Senator Warren focused on “Big Tech as the villain” narrative, saying “Big Tech billionaires have a front row seat at Trump’s inauguration. They have even better seats than Trump’s own cabinet picks. That says it all.” Journalists at left-leaning outlets started referring to them as “broligarchs” and made them the central characters in the villain story.

WJN Action’s memo calls this “adversarial populism,” and argues against it:

Presently, too many Democrats rely on adversarial populism, a villain-focused approach that puts bad actors at the center of the story instead of hardworking Americans. While this approach can pinpoint pressing problems and call out those who benefit from them, it is often counterproductive — framing voters as victims rather than heroes and failing to offer a positive, forward-looking vision for the future.

When our story becomes a crusade against tech companies and tech leaders, voters hear a party more interested in punishing villains than creating opportunity. With tech, this is especially problematic because voters generally have a positive view of tech companies, so even if their CEOs can act like cartoon villains, a policy centered around punishing tech companies is doomed to fail.

That is the limitation of the Warren/Sanders style of anti-tech populism. Elizabeth Warren helped define the modern Democratic antitrust fight around breaking up major tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Bernie Sanders recently released a report titled “The Big Tech Oligarchs’ War Against Workers.” Working families are demoted from heroes of the journey to the victims in a story about the villains you should fear.

Again, actual villains are a necessary component to the aspirational populism narrative. There are scams to stop, children to protect, privacy abuses to prevent, fraudsters to punish, and market abuses to police. But adversarial populism underperforms because the narrative is negative, hostile to business, and too focused on punishment instead of the working people Democrats are trying to help.

On tech, Democrats should ask a different question. Instead of “How do we punish the broligarchs?” we should ask, “How do we make sure working people can use technology to build a better life?”

Do. Or Do Not. There Is No Try

That is why the Jon Ossoff and Ruben Gallego style of populism is more promising.

Ossoff is not soft on addressing potential tech harms. He has pressed Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, and X over online child exploitation and backed legislation like the REPORT Act, Kids Online Safety Act, and COPPA 2.0. He has also taken on overdraft fees, warning Georgians about “exorbitant fees” if a checking account is accidentally overdrawn.

Ossoff is framing these policies as a families-first story. The hero is the parent trying to keep their kid safe online. The hero is the worker trying to avoid getting nickel-and-dimed by a bank. The villain matters only because he is standing in the way of normal people trying to live decent lives.

Gallego offers an even clearer example. When I heard him speak at WelcomeFest in Washington DC, I was struck by how he spoke from his experience talking to constituents, telling their stories. He naturally understood that those constituents were the main character in the story and their framing was far more persuasive than citing statistics.

He talks about crypto as something that caught the attention of young Black and Latino men in his working-class Arizona district. As he put it, if constituents are interested in a new technology, “then you should show interest in it too.” He has called for rules that provide consumer protection, but also argued that the United States should seek a “first-mover competitive advantage” and bring “money,” “brain power,” and “business” here.

Gallego’s famous “big-ass truck” line gets at the same point. “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck. There’s nothing wrong with that,” he said. “You get your troquita, start your own job, and you’re going to become rich, right?”

While the real-life version may not be quite as dramatic as saying that you can get an X-Wing, save your friends, and help destroy the evil Empire…but you can see the aspirational populism rhetoric at work.

Mark Kelly’s AI for America roadmap is another version of the same politics. His plan asks AI companies to be “good partners” and invest in workers, the economy, and America’s energy future, but the point is not to punish AI. It is to make sure “this powerful technology benefits all Americans, not just a few big companies.”

The hero in Kelly’s story is the worker who needs new AI skills, the apprentice learning a trade, the community college student training for semiconductor jobs, and the community that wants data centers to bring reliable power, clean water, and good jobs instead of higher bills. His roadmap backs AI literacy training, bootcamps, union apprenticeships, community college credentials, public-private partnerships, domestic supply chains, and clean energy infrastructure so America can lead in AI while workers and communities share in the gains.

Voters do not want Democrats to tell them their aspirations are embarrassing, selfish, or insufficiently progressive. And while Gallego and Kelly in particular have compelling and inspirational personal stories, voters don’t want to be told that they are the victims and only the heroic leader can save them. They have seen that mentality from Trump and we should not try to recreate it.

Voters want a party that understands why a new technology, a better job, a small business, a pickup truck, a house, a career path, or an investment opportunity might represent freedom and dignity; in other words, a party that will give them the opportunity to be the main character in their own journey.

Democratic tech policy should not be a Vader story. It should be a Luke story.

Today, Chamber of Progress is launching The Human Advantage Playbook, the first in a series of proposals that make up our Democratic AI Opportunity Agenda.

Over the coming months, we’ll publish practical policy ideas for how Democrats can meet the opportunities and challenges of the AI era. Each installment will focus on a different issue — from preparing workers for an AI-powered economy to expanding access to AI, supporting community-centered infrastructure, and building effective safeguards against misuse.

The Human Advantage Playbook begins with a straightforward premise: policymakers do not need to predict which jobs AI will reshape to help workers succeed in whatever future arrives.

AI anxiety is really about preparedness

The public conversation about AI and work tends to fixate on a single question: which jobs will disappear. But the more pressing near-term dynamic is that AI is transforming tasks faster than it is eliminating jobs, and the anxiety voters feel is less about any one occupation than about whether they will be prepared when the change reaches them.

The Playbook’s answer is not to forecast every labor-market outcome. History shows that predicting future job trends usually misses the mark. The safer route is to invest in policies that make workers resilient across a range of plausible futures, whether AI primarily augments jobs, transforms them, or displaces them.

This is both a pro-worker and pro-innovation plan. It rejects the false choice between slowing progress and leaving workers to absorb disruption alone, and instead favors policies that advance innovation and economic opportunity together.

As AI grows more capable, the most valuable human skills become more important, not less. AI changes comparative advantage, which means public policy should invest in the capabilities that become more valuable as the technology improves: judgment, adaptability, creativity, relationships, and continuous learning. The goal is to strengthen those human advantages so that workers benefit from AI rather than compete against it.

Build, Back, Bypass

At its core, The Human Advantage Playbook asks policymakers to do three things: Build, Back, and Bypass.

Build identifies the new policies Congress could create to close remaining gaps, organized around five pillars:

1. Workforce Investment: A First Job Act to expand apprenticeships into white-collar occupations where AI is automating many of the entry-level tasks that once launched careers.

2. Mobility: A Portable Security Act to attach benefits and credentials to workers rather than jobs, making it easier to change employers or move across state lines.

3. Human Value: A Care Corps to expand training and career pathways in caregiving and other people-centered professions.

4. Measurement: An Occupational Data Modernization Act to create an AI at Work Dashboard tracking hiring, displacement, and task-level change in near real time.

5. Funding: A Workforce Modernization Act to reauthorize Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) funding around employment and wage outcomes.

Back highlights the bipartisan bills already moving through Congress that deserve broader Democratic support — on AI skills, apprenticeships, employer-led training, workforce data, and responsible AI governance. Among them are:

• Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ-05)’s AI Workforce Training Act,

• Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-CA-16)’s Supporting Knowledge through Industry-Led Learning (SKILL) Act,

• Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)’s American Apprenticeship Act, and

• Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)’s Workforce Transparency Act.

Bypass names the proposals that are unlikely to help workers and, in some cases, would undercut the gains AI creates: AI dividend schemes that treat income replacement as the answer to a question about work itself, robot and token taxes that penalize a foundational input across the economy, directionless training programs disconnected from employer demand, and blanket restrictions on AI deployment that target the technology rather than the harm.

Looking ahead

We cannot predict every occupation AI will transform, but we can prepare workers to succeed regardless. If policymakers get this right, the AI era can become a story of broader opportunity rather than one that widens the divide between those who benefit from technological change and those left behind.

Read The Human Advantage Playbook in full here. More installments of the Democratic AI Opportunity Agenda are coming soon.

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Hope Ledford serves as Director of Civic Innovation Policy at Chamber of Progress, where she leads the organization’s work on autonomous vehicles, workforce, delivery, the gig and sharing economies, and other emerging consumer technologies.

In his recent article for The Argument, Milan Singh wrote about the findings of their tech and politics polling, concluding that anti-tech populism isn’t actually popular. At the same time, he provided several examples of the left wing of the Democratic party bashing tech companies in service of their political agenda. Why are they doing this?

Digging into The Argument’s polling data helps to illustrate why the populist left wing of the party is using such unpopular messaging. The anti-tech populists are falling victim to the Democrats’ Tech Brunch Bubble: the mistaken belief that the concerns of the party’s most vocal white, progressive faction – a faction overrepresented within the Democratic staffer class – are shared by the broader electorate.

The Staffer Class Is Not the Democratic Coalition

The professional Democratic party that fills the ranks of campaigns, Hill offices, advocacy organizations, donor briefings, consultant meetings, and progressive policy organizations is a curated selection of people that can feel representative of the party but is not representative of the Democratic coalition. They are highly educated, very liberal, and disproportionately white. They also have enormous influence over what Democrats say, which ideas get treated as respectable, and which fights become litmus tests.

Data for Progress surveyed more than 3,500 political elites (including government officials and influential professionals such as lobbyists, media figures, judges, military officers, scientists, and business leaders) about 10 policy proposals. Because these elites help shape, implement, and communicate public policy, their views are important to democratic decision-making. The survey also asked likely voters the same questions, allowing for a direct comparison of policy preferences between political elites and the public.

The staffer class comes in greater contact with the opinions of white liberals in the party than they do with Black or Hispanic Democratic voters, who are typically more conservative. So a brunch-table consensus inside the professional staffer class in DC can easily be a minority view even within the broader Democratic coalition. When staffers and elected officials on the left flank of the party develop a consensus that a tech company (or the tech industry) is bad, that consensus can travel quickly through Democratic politics and will start to show up in talking points, oversight letters, hearings, platform fights, and campaign rhetoric.

The Brunch Bubble is reinforced in elite institutions, especially within the Capitol. Congress remains disproportionately white: Pew found that 74% of voting members of the 119th Congress are non-Hispanic white, compared with 58% of the U.S. population. Hill staff are even more concentrated. The Joint Center found that nonwhites are 42.9% of the U.S. population but only 21.6% of top House staff; in the personal offices of white Democratic members, just 18.7% of top staff aren’t white, even though those districts feature an average nonwhite population of 43.1%.

The Argument polling fielded between May 29 and June 3, 2026, which surveyed 3,008 registered voters across the nation. Response to: Which of the following categories would you say best describes your views and ideology?

The Argument survey found that very liberal voters are only about one in eight registered voters, while Harris voters are 23% very liberal and 34% liberal. Pew similarly finds that a comparably small share, 8% of registered voters identify as very liberal, while Democrats are far more moderate than many professional Democrats assume: 45% of Democratic voters identify as moderate, compared with 16% very liberal.

None of this means white liberals are monolithic, and it certainly doesn’t mean they’re the enemy. Having worked on multiple Democratic campaigns, served as an appointee in two administrations, and attended plenty of DC brunches, I am really just describing myself and my friends.

What it does mean is that as we sip our bloody marys through DC-approved paper straws, we must be very careful not to mistake the demographics and ideology of agenda-setters within a narrow slice of the party for the views of a winning coalition.

Tech Skepticism Is Strongest Among White Voters

The Argument’s May 2026 survey gives Democrats a specific warning about technology. The survey of over 3,000 registered voters shows that white voters are generally more skeptical of major tech companies than any other demographic.

Net Favorability crosstabs from The Argument polling fielded between May 29 and June 3, 2026, which surveyed 3,008 registered voters across the nation.

Some examples:

• OpenAI is net favorable overall, but white voters are much less positive than Black, Hispanic, or Asian voters: 35% of white voters view OpenAI favorably, compared with 46% of Black voters, 42% of Hispanic voters, and 51% of Asian voters.

• Google is broadly popular, but white voters are roughly twice as unfavorable as Black and Asian voters: 19% of white voters view Google unfavorably, compared with 9% of Black voters and 9% of Asian voters.

• Amazon is the most telling. Voters overall view Amazon favorably by 62% to 19%. Black voters view Amazon favorably by 71% to 8%; Hispanic voters by 65% to 19%; white voters by 61% to 21%.

• Very liberal voters hold by far the most negative views of tech companies, with only Google and Apple having positive net favorability.

A recent Citrin/Politico poll of California voters shows a similar story. Proposals to ban young teenagers from social media have become popular among Democratic politicians ranging from Gavin Newsom to Rahm Emanuel. One might think this idea is broadly popular - but when asked their opinion of proposals to ban kids under 16 from social media, white voters were the most supportive racial group (48%), while support from Hispanic voters (43%), Black voters (41%) and Asian Voters (37%) was lower.

It’s possible that Hispanic, Black, and Asian voters are more focused on increasing access to technology than in any proposals that would decrease access.

Following a Biden-Harris Administration that often treated the tech industry as the enemy, Politico’s 2024 post-election analysis showed that Harris saw a significant drop in turnout among Black and Hispanic voters – key constituencies within the Democratic coalition that cost her the margin she needed for victory in key battleground states. In discussing the drop in turnout, the article quotes Kevin Olasanoye, the executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia:

“We missed something here, everybody did. What we were talking to voters about, they told us with their votes that those were important, but they wanted something different. People have the right to feel like we let one slip away here. Legitimately.”

Democrats ought to consider whether that misalignment extends to how we approach technology policy.

Building a Pro-Innovation Democratic Agenda

People like things that work. They like Amazon because packages arrive quickly, prices are often low, returns are easy, and small businesses can reach customers. They like Google because it helps them find things. They like Microsoft because it helps them work. They are optimistic about AI because they use the technology and see it provide them useful information for their work and personal lives. And they’re interested in policies that expand access to tech jobs and opportunity.

A winning Democratic tech agenda should start by understanding the views of the Democratic coalition beyond the loudest white, progressive voices. Democratic staffers should bring The Argument’s poll results to their next brunch (and to their day jobs) and debate how to deliver on what the median voter wants from technology: lower costs, better jobs, safer kids, more convenience, stronger communities, better health care, more opportunity, and an America that can compete and win on the international stage.

As U.S. Trade Representative under President Biden, Katherine Tai made a 180-degree turn in our digital trade strategy; going from an Obama-era approach of defending the U.S. tech sector against foreign discrimination to an approach of tacitly endorsing other countries’ anti-US protectionism.

Now Tai wants Democrats to carry on the same failed digital trade strategy she oversaw. It is time to turn the page.

Tai’s Approach

As USTR, Tai’s argument was that because Congress and regulators were debating privacy, competition, AI, and platform power at home, U.S. trade policy should stop pushing traditional digital trade rules abroad. In October 2023, USTR withdrew support at the WTO for proposals on cross-border data flows, data localization, and source-code protection. The agency said it needed “policy space.”

That move broke with Obama-era practice, which was also largely followed by Trump’s first term approach. It also spilled into the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, where the Biden Administration backed away from key digital provisions in the very region where the United States most needs to offer an alternative to China’s model of digital control.

This was nominally done due to the unsettled nature of U.S. policy, but it served the interest of the anti-tech faction of the Democratic party. Elizabeth Warren had been warning that digital trade rules were a “Big Tech” backdoor around regulation, and progressive lawmakers later thanked Biden and Tai for suspending parts of the IPEF digital text and withdrawing WTO positions.

But the Biden Administration tech regulation and digital trade policies were a flop. The digital deficit created from failing to defend tech companies from targeted international regulation hurt the American economy, alienated the tech sector, and did not win political support from voters.

Unfortunately, Tai doesn’t see those failures. Earlier this year she launched a new nonprofit organization, the Coalition for New Trade, which rolled out a 2026 Trade Policy Agenda.

Democrats should focus on digital trade policies that recognize and reinforce the success of the American tech sector, which is by far the most successful and innovative in the world. But Tai’s digital trade proposals turn that principle upside down, making America less able to defend and export the tools created by our world-leading tech sector.

Proposals Are Not Laws

Tai’s arguments and actions as USTR operate from a strange premise: because her allies in the U.S. Congress have introduced bills aimed at large tech firms, U.S. trade negotiators should stop defending those firms abroad.

But bills are not laws. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Open App Markets Act, and federal privacy proposals generated debate, but they did not become the governing framework of the United States. The fact that Congress is considering various tech regulations does not mean the executive branch should invite Europe, Canada, India, or anyone else to impose discriminatory treatment on U.S. companies.

America’s global tech leadership did not happen by accident. It happened because our system has gotten the regulatory balance and investment right compared to other countries: open markets, deep capital pools, world-class universities, strong speech protections, flexible labor markets, and enough regulatory breathing room for companies to build products people around the world actually want to use. Democrats should be proud of this innovation legacy, it was largely our party that built it. We should be willing to defend it on the global stage.

Limiting Free Data Flows Benefits China

Tai’s digital trade agenda also argues that concerns over privacy, authoritarian governments, and AI should make policymakers skeptical of “free data flows.”

This is the wrong lesson. Digital trade rules do not mean lawless data flows. The digital trade chapter of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) includes commitments on personal information protection and online consumer protection, while cross-border data rules can be paired with exceptions for legitimate public policy objectives.

The global AI race makes it even more important that we don’t use our own trade provisions to hobble American innovation. On the international stage, the AI race is not being fought among dozens of equal competitors, it is effectively a race between the United States and China.

If the United States steps back from writing digital rules, China will not politely pause its own project. Beijing already blocks many U.S. digital services behind the Great Firewall while nurturing domestic champions. A world of data localization and digital sovereignty sounds neutral or even ideal. In practice, it gives China and other authoritarian and protectionist governments more tools to exclude American firms and entrench their own models.

Tai’s digital trade agenda points to China as an example of a country that has worked to rein in its tech sector, stating, “Even the PRC has recognized the threat that large technology companies can pose to government itself and acted to constrain that power.”

To state the obvious, we should not be looking to China for regulatory and governance guidance. The PRC also recognizes the threat to their government from a free press and freedom of speech for its citizens, and exercises a high degree of control over commercial activity as a mechanism of control in an authoritarian state.

Democrats should want the opposite: exporting democratic technology rules. That means privacy, security, transparency, interoperability, and competition principles that reflect open societies. Our digital trade rules should reflect this desire.

The Tax Story Gets It Backwards

Tai’s digital trade agenda also criticizes technology companies for opposing foreign digital services taxes after Congress failed to enact the OECD tax deal, stating:

It is also clear that large technology companies are using their leverage to press for precisely the types of deregulatory outcomes 1990s-era trade agreements were designed to facilitate. Having taken no action to shepherd the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development tax deal through the Senate, which would have averted the imposition of digital services taxes on those companies, they now continue to press for, and are succeeding in getting, trading partners to stand down from their taxation efforts.

The OECD process was designed to create a global solution and remove unilateral digital services taxes. The agreement was negotiated with the support of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and major U.S. technology companies supported the agreement because they preferred a uniform global framework to a patchwork of country-by-country taxes aimed largely at them. “I think they’re going to be telling members of Congress that they like this agreement and they can live with it,” Yellen said of the tech companies. “When you have businesses supportive, rather than lobbying against something, I think that will be helpful.”

But when Congress fails to complete the process, U.S. officials do not have to shrug as trading partners impose discriminatory interim taxes.

No Democratic administration would accept a foreign tax specifically designed around Boeing, Caterpillar, or Hollywood exports. Tech should not be treated differently just because an anti-tech political faction dislikes the companies within the United States.

Defending U.S. Firms Is Not “National Champion” Policy

The agenda’s most revealing complaint is that the U.S. government treats technology companies as “national champions” and that “efforts to regulate these companies in the United States have been thwarted by their sheer wealth and power.” This framing is meant to make ordinary trade enforcement sound corrupt and comes straight out of the faculty lounge populist playbook. Tai says:

The U.S. government effectively treats these companies as if they are national champions. However, tariffs to support monopolists’ goals is precisely what Adam Smith decried in the Wealth of Nations, and what drove Gilded Age trade policy in the United States.

But defending U.S. companies from foreign discrimination and targeted regulation is not the same as giving them immunity at home. The European Commission’s first Digital Markets Act (DMA) gatekeeper designations were Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft – five American companies and one Chinese company. No European firm made the initial list. While that does not prove bad faith, it is clearly an indication that European regulations are good at destroying the vitality of the tech sector and it is exactly the kind of pattern U.S. officials should scrutinize.

The same is true for digital services taxes. USTR has repeatedly treated discriminatory digital services taxes as legitimate trade concerns, including under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Defending market access is a classic function of trade policy.

Regulation by Americans for U.S. Companies

The U.S. tech sector is one of the country’s great strategic assets. The digital economy adds nearly $5 trillion in value to the U.S. economy, over 28 million jobs, and digital services are central to America’s export strength.

U.S. trade agreements should defend the interests of America’s most important global industry. This is the point of trade policy – not a scandal.

Democrats should improve both domestic tech regulations and digital trade rules where they need improving: privacy protections, cybersecurity, AI accountability, labor impacts, and consumer safety. But ceding our role in defending U.S. interests on international digital trade agreements would tell every trading partner that America is no longer serious about defending its own innovators.

The better path is clear: regulate real harms at home, fight discrimination abroad, and export democratic rules for the digital economy.

Voters are not irrational for worrying about AI. They are seeing powerful tools that can write, code, design, synthesize information, and manage workplaces, while requiring increasing capacity and infrastructure to handle the workload.

Democrats can and should take those concerns seriously while being optimistic about innovation and without assuming that there is a zero-sum choice between embracing technology, a modern workforce, and environmental protection.

But credibility matters. Democrats cannot build a serious AI agenda while making unserious arguments about the infrastructure AI requires.

The latest example came when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held up jars of brown water during a hearing, saying the water came from Morgan County, Georgia, near a Meta data center, and calling for a moratorium on data center construction along with investigations into data centers and water quality.

Residents deserve clean water. Any specific complaint deserves testing and remediation if issues are found. But a jar of dirty water is not a hydrogeological study, and seeking a viral moment in a hearing is not real evidence of a new data center causing groundwater pollution.

Data centers are not new. They have powered email, websites, payments, search, cloud services, and streaming since the commercial internet took off in the 1990s. The United States already has over 3,000 fully operational data centers. If data centers were producing a national groundwater contamination crisis, the evidence would not be hiding in one viral hearing prop.

The problem is that these bad arguments can make Democrats easy to dismiss as not serious about AI and its potential. Democrats are viewed as the party that trusts and relies on science evidence to make informed decisions, and relying on poorly reasoned and easily refutable arguments about the environmental impact and water usage of data centers undermines their strength in this area. If Congressional Democrats want to earn the trust of voters to be put in charge of the regulation of an incredibly important emerging industry, they need to be able to clearly tell the difference between evidence and vibes.

Polling shows that people are especially worried about utility bills and energy demand. The energy question is where Democrats have the biggest opportunity. Ratepayers don’t want to be stuck with the bill for infrastructure built to serve tech companies, but the solution is to work with the AI companies to make sure they don’t have to, which requires good faith engagement with the companies themselves.

Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and others are making extraordinary and increasing capital expenditures because compute is central to their business models and strategies. By building strong working relationships with the tech industry, Democrats will have the leverage to pass legislation and establish voluntary commitments to secure power rates for large-load customers that protect household consumers, community benefit agreements, transparent water reporting, transmission investment, and new clean power and storage. As the chart shows, power is a small fraction of the future cost of the AI buildout, so earning the goodwill of Democratic politicians by making clean energy investments that benefit communities is very much in their interest.

For Democrats, jeopardizing a $7 trillion five-year investment in American communities and the opportunity to vastly improve our green energy infrastructure is not worth the political points that can be scored with unscientific and easily-refuted claims of environmental harm.

The cooperative approach has the advantage of being good politics. Chris Gibbs, chair of the Ohio Democratic Party’s rural caucus, states it well in an interview with the Washington Post:

“There are folks that believe that if the Democratic Party would become a party of no data centers that a Democratic Party could … run the table,” Gibbs said that would be shortsighted, however, and that the better path is to help communities strike better deals with tech companies so they benefit more financially from the centers’ presence.“Just to be the party of ‘no’ all the time I don’t think is good for the Democratic Party’s future,” Gibbs said.

Climate Power and Blue Rose polling found voters oppose data centers powered by fossil fuels but support clean-energy-powered data centers by a wide margin.

Research on AI Data Centers, Costs, & Pollution Blue Rose Research | Climate Power February 2026

Navigator found that a “protect consumers and our environment” frame significantly outperforms a “slow or stop construction” frame.

Some companies are already moving in this direction. Microsoft has said communities should not face higher power bills or tighter water supplies because of AI infrastructure, and has outlined commitments around full electricity costs, water use, property taxes, local jobs, and workforce training. Google is also making voluntary commitments to take the protection of water supplies seriously. Democrats need to make sure that we are the ones earning those commitments and holding companies accountable to their promises.

Environmental protection is a key area of alignment between tech CEOs and Democrats, and working with companies to promote clean energy production can serve as a reminder of the party that is most aligned with their values on environmental protection. Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and the Bezos Earth Fund are high-profile examples of tech founder institutions focused on clean energy.

Democrats do not need to flatter billionaires to enlist private capital to help build the clean power, storage, and transmission Democrats and Silicon Valley leaders have wanted for decades.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have pushed Democrats toward abundance politics that asks whether government can actually build what it promises: homes, transit, clean energy, infrastructure, and opportunity. AI infrastructure should be part of that same test. Democrats can insist on environmental standards and consumer protections while demonstrating that we can be the party that can build.

The point is to be serious about AI. Serious about its potential and serious about addressing legitimate concerns.

Addressing those concerns while being the party of innovation requires credibility. When Democrats lean on shaky claims and viral theatrics, they weaken their ability to win the real fights.

Over the past few months, a handful of Democratic policymakers have staked out an anti-AI resistance on the left – embracing ideas ranging from data center moratoria, to nationalizing frontier AI labs, to taxing AI innovation.

These Democrats have staked out a strategy of halting AI development. But the reality is that many Democratic policymakers are more interested in harnessing AI to create more opportunity, more access, and more justice. They aren’t sure about the best way to do it.

We Democrats are the party of embracing technology to improve society, not stopping it. We’re the party of Al Gore helping lay the groundwork for the Internet, of Bill Clinton helping connect classrooms, of Barack Obama using technology to modernize government. Our party’s history includes a long list of leaders stepping up in uncertain times to make sure that more people benefit from technological progress.

But the public discourse around AI policy has become too small and too dark.

On one side, some AI boosters focus strictly on deployment timelines and the need to innovate quickly with little to no regulation. This approach inadvertently overlooks the practical realities of how these tools can actually augment human capability or at worst, lead to displacement with no safety net.

On the other side, some critics are bogged down by existential anxieties and defensive policy postures that treat technological progress as an inherent threat to working people, rather than an opportunity for shared growth. This side often argues from an unstated assumption that our future is inevitable.

Like most things, the truth and possibility lies somewhere in between. AI can be broadly beneficial to society, but policymakers need to take steps to make sure that happens.

Democrats Leading on AI Opportunity

Fortunately, some Democrats are not waiting for a perfect consensus; they are already working through the hard tradeoffs in public and taking on the governance challenge head-on.

Rep. Ted Lieu brought his technical fluency and a focus on guardrails in his leadership of the House Bipartisan Taskforce on AI in 2024 and brings his expertise in his current role as Co-Chair of the Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy. Rep. Lori Trahan has taken on a leadership role in forging a bipartisan AI governance legislation focusing on frontier model safety, accountability, and protecting workers. And Rep. Sam Liccardo proposes using evolving federal safety standards and liability incentives to reward safer AI development without slowing innovation.

There is no fully settled or unified Democratic party AI doctrine, but we see the beginning of something more useful: a Democratic AI agenda that is pragmatic, pro-worker, pro-innovation, and serious about accountability. That is exactly the posture this moment requires.

With Democrats poised to make potential gains in Congress this November, our party must seize the opportunity to craft a policy that expands AI opportunity for all Americans. The policy choices we make today will not just regulate a new suite of software; they will shape opportunities for generations to come. With the right governance, political investments, and regulatory structures in place, AI can be a middle-class project.

The Democratic Instinct: Pragmatic Optimism with a Backbone

Democratic lawmakers don’t need to reinvent their core values to meet this moment – they just need to apply them. In fact, Democrats have most often led regulation when old laws stopped fitting new realities: whether that meant dealing with growing mass unemployment, the lack of civil rights in a national economy, a developing telecommunications ecosystem, or a nascent internet ecosystem.

Most school-aged children can cite President Franklin D. Roosevelt who led our nation out of the Great Depression or President Lyndon B. Johnson who signed the historic Civil Rights Act after speaking out against the ills of segregation, employment discrimination, and state-level voter suppression. The latter’s lasting effect continues to be the basis for how many seek justice against inequitable and unfair impacts.

We can also look back to the “Atari Democrats” of the 1980s, who recognized that the transition to a high-tech, information-based economy was inevitable. They understood that the role of government was to facilitate the microchip revolution with smart governance and to ensure that American workers were educated, equipped, and empowered to lead it. For them, economic growth and labor protections were not mutually exclusive—they were codependent.

And Democratic leaders have led the nation through tectonic economic shifts by regulating with a backbone while fostering innovation. President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first major overhaul of U.S. communications law in 62 years, that fostered market competition and deregulated the U.S. broadcasting and telecommunications industries. That same year, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) co-authored a provision that still protects the freedom of expression of U.S.-based users online by protecting the intermediaries we rely on – the subsequent passed law is credited for the survival of a burgeoning internet.

Previewing the Path Forward

To capture this opportunity, we will release over the coming months a new Democratic AI Opportunity Agenda: a series of policy proposals to re-focus our party on AI policies that create more economic, personal, and social opportunity for Americans.

Every few weeks on this substack, we plan to unveil a policy proposal laying out our vision for a pragmatic Democratic AI policy agenda. Our hope is to help Democratic lawmakers who seek to actively shape AI innovation rather than let it shape us.

These essays will cover a range of topics within the AI innovation discourse, from what our workforce looks like in this transformative era, to how data center development can be community-centered, to what expanded access to AI can look like, to what smart governance looks like to crack down on AI abuse – and many others.

All of our proposals will reflect four core values:

• Empowering People

  • Ensuring workers, students, families, and small businesses have the skills and tools to benefit from AI rather than be acted upon by it

• Market Balance

  • Promoting innovation and competition while preventing a handful of firms from capturing all the gains

• Proactive Trust

  • Setting clear rules, enforcing accountability, and confronting abuses before they erode public confidence

• The Public Good

  • Using AI to strengthen public institutions, improve services, and restore trust in public bodies

We will highlight pending or potential legislation as models Democratic leaders can look to, as well as lay out what proactive ideas to pursue and what legislative pitfalls to avoid. In some cases, legislation may not exist and we will focus on providing an outline for what potential policy proposals could look like.

Our Future is not Set in Stone

At its heart, this series is an invitation to look at the future of AI with pragmatic optimism rather than apprehension. The path forward has not been set in stone. Rather than stepping back out of uncertainty, this is a prime moment for thoughtful, forward-looking leadership.

By leaning into the core values of opportunity and fairness, we have the unique chance to channel the AI technological wave to support a stronger, more resilient middle class. We believe it’s possible to have an AI landscape where innovation thrives, the workforce is empowered, and the benefits of progress are shared across our society.

Today we are releasing a report that we’ve been building for the past seven months on the virtual pages of this substack: a comprehensive look back at what the Biden Administration got right and wrong on technology and innovation.

The report is called “Democrats’ Techlash Trap” and I hope you’ll check it out here.

This report is vital to understanding where the party has shifted from being the party of innovation, and the political consequences of that shift.

One of the key things I set out to accomplish with this report was understanding exactly why so many leaders in the tech industry turned against Democrats during the Biden Administration. So over the past several months, I discussed this project with people who had close-up and behind-the-scenes perspectives on the Biden Administration’s approach to technology policy, including former administration officials, industry advocates, and Silicon Valley leaders.

The next era of politics will be shaped by artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, clean energy, crypto, defense innovation, autonomous systems, digital services, and global technology competition. Democrats cannot lead that era while fighting the people and companies building it. We do not need to choose between accountability and optimism. We can protect consumers, enforce the law, and address real harms while still being unmistakably pro-innovation.

But in order to embrace a tech-forward future, Democrats have to understand how and why we took a turn against tech in the Biden era - and what it cost us. We can’t chart out future without fully understanding our past.

The Party of Innovation

The report begins by reminding Democrats who we used to be.

From the Atari Democrats of the 1980s to the Clinton-Gore technology agenda to the Obama era, Democrats built a durable identity as the party of technological progress. The Atari Democrats argued that emerging industries and knowledge workers were central to economic growth. Clinton and Gore turned that vision into policy, expanding R&D, supporting the internet economy, and helping build the conditions for a historic tech boom.

Obama deepened the relationship by using digital tools in his campaigns, creating new technology roles in government, and bringing tech talent into public service. With the New Democrats Coalition in Congress came a new Democratic identity: An optimistic one that believed technology could make government work better, create jobs, and strengthen American leadership.

The Road to the Techlash

That tradition started to crack after 2016. Hillary Clinton’s loss shocked Democrats, and many looked for explanations outside the party’s own strategic failures. Facebook, Russian disinformation, and Cambridge Analytica became convenient villains and laid the foundation for a belief that technology platforms had betrayed Democrats.

At the same time, foundation-funded post-neoliberal economic thinking gained influence among party elites. A critique that began as concern about inequality and market power increasingly hardened into skepticism toward technology itself. The result was the “techlash trap”: Democrats stopped treating platforms as tools to compete on and started treating them as adversaries to be punished.

The irony is that while influential parts of the party drove the techlash forward, Democratic voters themselves never became broadly anti-tech.

What Biden Got Right

Despite my criticisms I want to be clear: it is vital not to flatten the Biden record to a pure anti-tech story.

Some of the administration’s strongest accomplishments came when the tech-friendly elements of the Administration led the way. The CHIPS Act, clean energy deployment, electric vehicle supply-chain strategy, international digital tax diplomacy, defense innovation, and the early crypto executive order all showed that Biden often had the right instincts to advance innovation and national competitiveness.

The CHIPS Act implementation effort receives special attention in the report because the Commerce Department succeeded by bringing private-sector expertise into government over the objections of Elizabeth Warren and outside groups. When Democrats combine public purpose with people who truly understand technology and markets, they can deliver a major administration victory.

Biden’s Closed Door Policy

However, too much of the administration moved in the opposite direction.

Instead of recruiting technologists and business leaders, Biden’s team often treated industry experience as a political liability. Progressive pressure over the “revolving door” made officials wary of hiring people from technology companies or even meeting with industry leaders. The result was a reflexively closed-door posture when dealing with tech executives: fewer conversations, less expertise, slower execution, and a growing sense in Silicon Valley that Democrats no longer wanted to listen.

By seeking to manage the left-wing faction of the party, the coalition managers Biden put in charge of building the Administration’s tech policy team ended up unresponsive to the politics. Voters want leaders who understand business and the economy; they do not reward an administration for insulating itself from the people building the future.

Faculty Lounge Populism

“Faculty lounge populism” describes how Biden’s tech regulation agenda was driven by elite academic theories and activist priorities – rather than the concrete concerns of voters. Biden-era tech regulators focused too heavily on abstract fights over mergers, targeted advertising, crypto enforcement, and anti-corporate symbolism while voters cared more about privacy, security, scams, prices, and practical consumer protection.

The critique is not that regulation is wrong. It is that regulation should solve problems people actually feel - an especially important lesson as inflation ramped up and became the dominant issue on voter’s minds. Biden’s regulatory teams too often conflated headline-grabbing lawsuits with a governing agenda that would resonate with consumers.

The Digital Deficit

Some might ask, what were the costs of Biden-era tech hostilities?

The Biden Administration’s anti-tech elements limited the government’s ability to maximize the societal benefits that American technology could deliver. The “digital deficit” showed up in several ways: failing to defend U.S. technology companies against discriminatory foreign regulation, allowing Obama-era digital government modernization efforts to languish, missing the chance to build a national tech jobs strategy, and moving too slowly on life-improving technologies like autonomous vehicles and drone delivery.

Sound technology policy feeds directly into good governance, and Democrats are clearly the party most closely associated with government solutions. A party that wants to make government work cannot afford to be indifferent or hostile to the digital economy.

Lose-Lose Politics

Anti-tech populism was sold within the Biden Administration as helping Democrats reconnect with working-class voters. This simply failed.

Non-college voters did not come back, while many parts of the tech community shifted rightward or disengaged. Young men, many of whom use, build, invest in, or aspire to work in technology, increasingly experienced Democrats as the HR Department party of restrictions and scolding. Democrats gave up an advantage on innovation without gaining a new coalition in return.

The path forward is a Democratic reset: rebuild relationships with innovators, recruit people who have built things and understand innovation, defend American tech leadership abroad, modernize government, connect workers to tech jobs, and tell a story of progress that is optimistic, practical, and grounded in Democratic values.

The techlash trap was built over years. Escaping it will take work. But Democrats can once again be the party of innovation.

Polling shows that voters are uneasy about the AI boom, but the internet can distort scale. Online, it can feel as though data centers and AI are the only things happening in politics. This should serve once again as a reminder that social media is not real life.

Online discourse and Congressional offices are dominated by highly-educated, tech-savvy professionals who spend all day sitting at a computer. These are exactly the people who you would expect to care the most about AI - they use it professionally, and the most likely to have it disrupt their work and professions.

But the campaign and Congressional Staffer Class is not at all representative of the American electorate. As of 2024, about 36% of Americans who are 18 or older have a bachelor’s or advanced degree. For most people, AI issues are not top of mind and they do not anticipate that it will dramatically change their lives.

David Shor’s Blue Rose Research found that AI has risen in importance faster than any issue over the past year, but it still ranks only 29th out of 39 issues. Cost of living is at the top. In Blue Rose’s 2024 retrospective, Shor highlights that voters are considering AI as part of a broader economy that they view as rigged, or not working for them. In voter’s minds, AI is a subcategory about their concerns about the cost of living or jobs.

Before Democrats build their campaigns or legislative strategies around opposition to AI, it is important to put the issue into perspective. Pew found that among Americans they polled about the benefits of AI, their overwhelmingly most popular answer was “Medium” with “Not sure” outpolling “Low” and “Very low.”

Of those ranking the benefits as low or very low, job loss was cited as the reason by only 7% of respondents. This is not the kind of national hot button issue to center in a political agenda.

Despite this polling data, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed an AI Data Center Moratorium Act that would pause AI data-center development until national safeguards are in place on safety, workers, electricity prices, communities, and the environment. The left wing of the party may think that “No new data centers until every federal guardrail is settled” sounds responsible, but in reality it means waiting for a federal consensus that will never arrive.

In practice, an anti-AI posture feeds into the narratives about Democrats that helped make Biden and the party brand so unpopular. We are the nanny state scolds, we are anti-business and innovation, and not focused on the issues that voters care about most.

Democrats need to be able to respond to real concerns and issues around AI implementation, but starting from a position of banning data centers puts Democrats in a bad negotiating position with AI companies to implement and adhere to voluntary standards and puts Democrats out of step with voters who are generally supportive of American innovation.

Fortunately, the more moderate elements of the party are not following Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez down this path. Even as he argues that Democrats should tune out the threats from political spending groups looking to avoid AI regulation, Democratic political strategist Rob Flaherty shoots down the idea of an AI moratorium:

Moratoria on AI are profoundly ill-advised. Whatever we do, the technology is coming, and it could be genuinely and positively transformative. Right now AI is set to be used by a handful of billionaires to further entrench their wealth – either because they run a frontier lab or they run a company that will benefit from “efficiency.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. We should utilize this technology to ensure that it benefits all of us in myriad ways. Everyone talks about cures for cancer, but imagine something even bigger than that: a world where huge productivity gains enable everyone to lead better, more fulfilling lives. That’s only going to happen if we institute rules of the road.

Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor in my home state of Iowa, is a useful example for how the party should handle the issue on the campaign trail. As state auditor, Sand discussed using AI in auditing to save time and let staff focus on higher-value analysis. But his public campaign priorities don’t focus on AI or data centers at all. They are built around growing Iowa’s economy, strengthening public education, lowering costs, improving health, and restoring accountability in government.

That emphasis fits Iowa. Donald Trump carried the state by about 13 points in 2024, and Iowa has a lower share of adults with a bachelor’s degree than the country overall. A campaign in that environment cannot be optimized for white-collar internet discourse. It has to speak to people who are asking whether their bills are going up, whether their kids can find good jobs, whether government works, and whether politicians are focused on ordinary people. And it is working. Sand is leading in the polls against his most likely Republican opponent.

Democrats especially must be careful not to turn regulation into an anti-innovation brand. Voters are not anti-science or anti-technology. A 2025 Science Coalition poll found that 74% of voters support federal investment in scientific research, and 85% say it is important for the United States to lead the world in science and technology.

The right message is not “let the AI labs do whatever they want.” It is also not “freeze the future until Congress reaches bipartisan consensus.”

The right message is not an AI-exclusive message at all. Build what improves people’s lives, drive down energy costs with greater production, and use AI now to make government faster, better, and more accountable.

CNN’s recent article on Lina Khan and the 2028 Democratic field makes a provocative claim: Democrats with presidential ambitions are calling the former FTC chair as they search for a new economic message. But the article’s own evidence that this is happening is thinner and more revealing than the headline suggests.

The piece reports that Khan is receiving outreach from Democrats eyeing future campaigns and that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is sharing her contact information with presidential hopefuls. But when the article turns to actual 2028 figures, the support becomes much more ambiguous. Even the candidates voicing support for Khan provided statements about governing better and supporting workers that weren’t really about her or her regulatory policies at all.

The clearest praise for Khan in the CNN story comes from Warren and Bernie Sanders, but neither is a likely 2028 presidential contender.

Beyond the headline however, the article quotes several Democrats, including likely 2028 hopefuls, expressing skepticism about Khan’s approach.

During the last presidential campaign, Maryland Governor Wes Moore said “I think we have to” when asked if Kamala Harris should shift her regulatory views away from Khan’s. Asked about Kahn more recently, a spokesperson for Moore said that he “doesn’t have thoughts about her one way or the other.”

In casting doubt on Khan’s proposed solutions, Rahm Emanuel put it this way:

“Rather than say ‘Lina Khan,’ which has its own explosion, the guiding light should be where Teddy Roosevelt was more about regulation and Woodrow Wilson was more about breaking out: that spirit is important, and that mindset.”

Rep. Josh Gottheimer voiced a worry about further alienating the innovation and growth voters within the Democratic party:

“You may fire up some portion of the base, but you’re also going to alienate a lot of people who, while they want competition and success for everybody, they also believe that you can start a business and be successful in America.”

The real question the 2028 Democratic hopefuls need to ask themselves: Should they look to the architects of Bidenomics to map a winning way forward for Democrats?

Data for Progress’ post-election report found that inflation and cost of living were the top issues in the election, that voters were deeply dissatisfied with Biden’s economy, and that Harris struggled to separate herself from Biden’s legacy on economic issues.

WelcomePAC’s Deciding to Win report similarly argued that voters see Democrats as not sharing their priorities. Voters viewed Democrats as insufficiently focused on cost of living, the economy, health care, taxes, immigration, and crime, while too focused on issues that rank lower in salience. It also found that highly educated and affluent Democrats prioritize issues differently from working-class voters, including placing relatively less emphasis on cost of living, gas prices, border security, and crime.

That analysis should make Democrats wary of confusing elite anti-corporate theory with working-class politics.

The Biden tech regulatory approach of “faculty lounge populism“ and anti-corporate politics rooted in academic theories about power and concentration, but often disconnected from immediate consumer needs. Biden’s tech regulators elevated fights over mergers, targeted advertising, and anti-bigness theories while voters were asking for affordability, privacy, security, scam prevention, and government competence.

The Biden administration already tried a version of this politics. It appointed Khan at the FTC, Jonathan Kanter at DOJ Antitrust, and other post-neoliberal regulators who treated corporate power as the central economic story. Yet the promised political payoff did not arrive.

Anti-tech populism became lose-lose politics, straining and breaking relationships with innovation-economy allies without winning back working-class voters. Public postmortems point in the same direction: voters wanted lower prices, practical economic management, and a party that shared their priorities.

We can’t count on the anti-corporate regulators of the Biden Administration to learn these lessons and pass them on, as Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen pointed out on X:

In the context of the collapse of Spirit Airlines, former Biden officials were using the same lines about corporate greed instead of reflecting on the wisdom of preventing a merger on their watch.

Democrats do not need more anti-tech regulatory crusades. Voters judge economic policy by whether it improves their lives. Lower prices, safer products, faster services, better jobs, stronger privacy, fewer scams, and a government that works are tangible elements of an economic policy that voters will support.

CNN’s article reveals a party still searching for economic identity. Democrats are right to be wary of just rallying around Biden’s economic agenda for the next four years, even as a vocal set of activists, intellectuals, and elected officials who want them to, but to win Democrats need to build a more consumer-focused cost of living agenda that learns from where Biden fell short.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving faster than almost any other issue, and the pressure on lawmakers to respond is mounting. The good news is that Democrats aren’t starting from scratch. Across both chambers, members have introduced legislation that points toward a serious, worker-first approach to AI, focused on training, education, research infrastructure, and better data on how AI is actually affecting jobs.

But alongside that real progress, some ideas gaining traction on the left would either fail to deliver for workers or actively undermine the gains AI could produce. Getting the future of work right means doubling down on what’s already working and steering clear of proposals that miss the mark.

Where Democrats are making strides

1. Job-connected training

The bipartisan AI Workforce Training Act, led by Representative Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ-5), recognizes a simple yet important reality: most training decisions happen inside firms rather than in government programs. By offering tax credits to employers that invest in AI-related career development, including accredited courses, workshops, in-house training, and practical skills like data literacy and prompt engineering, it pushes companies to upskill their own workers rather than replace them.

Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D-AZ) AI for America roadmap complements this with calls for apprenticeships, community college credentialing, and employer-provided training, along with expanded individual training accounts that put upskilling resources directly into workers’ hands.

2. AI education

Bipartisan efforts like the NSF AI Education Act, introduced by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Representative Andrea Salinas (D-OR-06), seek to expand access to AI training and scholarships, particularly for those traditionally excluded from the tech industry.

Senators Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), and Adam Schiff (D-CA) have also introduced legislation, the Workforce of the Future Act, which would authorize up to $160 million in Education Department grants to expand access to AI education, including teacher training and recruitment.

Recent proposals from Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR-01) emphasize a “human-centered” approach to AI education, including investments in teacher training to equip educators to bring these concepts into the classroom.

A bipartisan bill led by Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Literacy in Future Technologies Artificial Intelligence (LIFT AI) Act, further builds on these efforts by focusing specifically on K-12 AI literacy. This legislation would support National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to develop AI curricula, expand professional development for educators, and promote hands-on learning to help students understand and use AI technologies responsibly.

3. AI research infrastructure

Recent bipartisan efforts from Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and John Hickenlooper (D-CO) propose expanded federal investment in AI research infrastructure, including testbeds, standards development, and public-private partnerships to accelerate deployment. This is a foundation that future job-quality initiatives can build on.

4. Measuring AI’s impact on jobs

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have pushed to strengthen the way the Department of Labor tracks AI’s impact on the workforce, including improvements to core datasets such as the Current Population Survey and the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Their proposed AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act (S.3108) reflects a broader effort to expand reporting on hiring, job loss, and direct displacement due to AI to better understand its labor market effects.

Taken together, these efforts show that Democrats are already beginning to build the infrastructure for a worker-first AI agenda. The task now is to expand on them – and avoid the traps that could hinder their impact.

Avoid policies that miss the mark

Democrats should steer clear of policies that promise more than they deliver:

Income replacement over work

While some propose universal basic income (UBI) as the primary solution to AI-driven job loss, this overlooks the core goal of economic policy: increasing access to meaningful, well-paying jobs. Recently, Elon Musk publicly called for “universal HIGH INCOME“ through federal checks as the solution to AI-driven unemployment. The idea is gaining traction among many Democrats, too, in the form of an “AI dividend.”

New York House candidate Alex Bores’s proposed “AI Dividend“ would trigger direct payments to Americans once AI “meaningfully displaces” workers, funded by taxes and equity stakes in AI companies. Former Harris deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty made a similar case in the New York Times, calling for an “AI dividend modeled on Alaska’s oil dividend” and arguing that “the basics of middle-class life can’t depend on having a traditional job.”

Both proposals treat income replacement as the answer to a question about work itself. Bores softens that premise with “insurance policy” framing, while Flaherty states it outright. Either way, the conclusion gives up too much, too early, accepting a future in which most Americans lose access to meaningful work, and the government’s role narrows to distributing the proceeds of a shrinking job market.

The case for income replacement also rests on a shaky economic premise. Flaherty’s framing also treats AI as a zero-sum transfer of wealth from workers to capital, ignoring that technologies have historically reshuffled labor rather than destroying it in aggregate. It also ignores consumer surplus: AI already provides inexpensive tutoring, coding help, medical information, and translation to people who could never have afforded those services before.

As Gene Sperling argues, replacing work with income support neglects the need to improve wages, job quality, and mobility, potentially accepting a future with limited opportunities for contribution. Although transition-based income support is helpful, the main focus must be on actively expanding and shaping job opportunities instead of substituting for them.

The robot tax trap

Another approach gaining traction is to tax AI or automation directly. Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has long backed a “robot tax” on companies that replace workers with automation, and Bores’s and Flaherty’s dividend proposals share the same basic premise: fund payouts through taxes on AI companies. But that same logic would have called for taxing tractors, washing machines, ATMs, and self-checkout kiosks. Each displaced jobs. Each also made the economy more productive and created new ones.

Leaning on an “AI tax” to fund healthcare, housing, and childcare deflects from the real reasons those sectors are broken: restrictive zoning, provider consolidation, licensing barriers, etc. These problems long predate AI and require direct supply-side fixes.

Research on automation taxation finds the same pattern: higher costs, firms relocating to friendlier jurisdictions, slower productivity growth, and no clear gains for workers. The better move is to shape where AI gets deployed, steering it toward uses that support workers rather than replace them.

Retraining without a destination

Standalone retraining programs, disconnected from real hiring demand, have a persistently weak track record. Programs that measure success by enrollment instead of employment, lack employer coalitions, or fail to track wage outcomes tend to produce weak results. This is a fixable problem, and aligning training with real jobs is one of the highest-impact changes policymakers can make.

The risks of getting AI policy wrong are clear. Poorly designed policies could allow AI to deepen insecurity, widen inequality, and slow innovation, all without making workers meaningfully better off. That would be the worst of both worlds.

Democrats have a real chance to shape how AI transforms work, but only if we resist the temptation of easy answers. The goal shouldn’t be to replace work with checks or to slow progress with taxes. It’s to build an economy where more people can contribute, adapt, and get ahead. That means doubling down on what works, and having the discipline to walk away from what doesn’t.

Hope Ledford is the Director of Civic Innovation Policy at Chamber of Progress, leading work on autonomous vehicles, the gig and sharing economies, workforce issues, delivery, public safety and parking technology, and telemedicine.

Over the past year, AI has risen in importance faster for voters than any other issue. There’s an opportunity for Democrats to lead on building a future that is inclusive and prepares our current workforce for what comes next. And Democrats have confronted technological transitions and economic disruption before:

• FDR’s New Deal helped the country recover from the economic collapse of the Great Depression, which left millions of workers unemployed, by building the country’s safety nets.

• JFK’s Manpower Development and Training Act created the first federal programs to retrain workers displaced by machinery.

• LBJ’s Economic Opportunity Act built pathways into the workforce through job training and education after postwar prosperity failed to reach millions of Americans.

• Clinton’s Workforce Investment Act created a nationwide system of job training and career centers to help workers respond to the changing demands of the new economy.

• Obama’s Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act opened new pathways as globalization and automation hollowed out manufacturing communities.

• Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act invested directly in domestic technology manufacturing to keep American workers competitive in the AI era.

Each time, our party’s task was not to resist change but to ensure that the gains were widely shared. This moment is no different.

Here are seven concrete ways Democrats can lead and shape how it shows up in the economy and at work:

1. Incentivize investments in job-connected training

Most training decisions occur within firms rather than in government programs, which means the most effective lever is to shape what employers already do. Democrats should build on this reality by incentivizing employers to implement short, employer-linked programs such as apprenticeships, with clear hiring commitments, wage benchmarks, and transparent outcome reporting.

Lifelong learning accounts, funded by contributions from workers, employers, and government, can support continuous re-skilling as job demands evolve. Tax incentives should reward employers who invest in paid training time, redesign jobs to improve quality, and pass productivity gains on to workers. The goal should be to steer AI adoption toward better outcomes.

2. Expand access to AI education

Workforce programs too often prepare workers for abstract skills rather than specific labor market openings. Preparing workers for an AI-driven economy will require renewed investments in education and training.

At the K-12 level, there is growing momentum to treat AI literacy as a foundational skill alongside reading and math, with a growing focus on ensuring that schools in lower-income communities are not left behind. However, the Trump administration’s closure of the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology has weakened the federal government’s ability to support this work, limiting access to resources schools rely on.

Community colleges will also be central to this effort. They serve a large share of students, including adult learners and career changers, and are well-positioned to offer short-term, job-connected AI programs aligned with local demand.

3. Direct job growth toward high-human-value sectors

As Gene Sperling argues, the measure of a successful AI-driven economy is not based on productivity alone. It is also one that expands economic dignity, which he defines as the ability to earn a living, contribute to society, and find purpose in one’s work. This requires actively guiding the labor market toward roles that are both economically valuable and socially meaningful, especially in sectors defined by the relational, judgment-intensive, and fundamentally human work that AI cannot replicate, and where America’s labor shortages are most severe and consequential.

The U.S. currently faces a growing shortage of nurses and care workers as demand rises with an aging population, while a long-standing shortfall of home health aides is already straining access to care. Childcare systems are also under pressure, with staffing declines and persistent shortages limiting supply and raising costs for families. At the same time, teacher shortages remain widespread, especially in high-need subjects and regions. These are not isolated issues but structural gaps in the care economy, and they will deepen without targeted workforce investment.

This presents a clear opportunity. AI-driven productivity gains can reduce administrative burdens, including paperwork, scheduling, and documentation, that drive burnout and attrition in care roles, freeing workers to focus on the human work that drew them to these fields in the first place. Paired with training pipelines, wage support, and workforce incentives, this approach creates a viable path for redirecting displaced workers toward roles that are not only in demand but meaningful – exactly the kind of economy Sperling’s vision of economic dignity demands.

4. Create an ARPA-AI Jobs Initiative

Democrats can take a more active role in shaping how AI is used by launching an ARPA-style initiative focused on job-enhancing innovation. ARPA, or Advanced Research Projects Agency, refers to a model the federal government has used for decades to fund high-impact, experimental projects with clear goals and strong accountability. The most well-known example is DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which helped drive breakthroughs like the internet and GPS by funding ambitious, outcome-oriented projects and rewarding what works.

Democrats can apply the same logic to AI and work. An ARPA-style initiative could fund real-world deployments that show how AI can improve jobs, not just replace them. This includes targeted tax credits for companies that raise both productivity and job quality, competitive grants for local governments that develop replicable workforce models, and demonstration projects in sectors such as care, manufacturing, logistics, and education. Public procurement can reinforce this by awarding contracts to vendors that deliver measurable gains for workers.

5. Put targeted guardrails on algorithmic management

AI is reshaping how workers are hired, evaluated, and managed, often leaving them with little recourse or transparency. Democrats do not need sweeping regulation to address this. But the party must be careful not to over-index on regulation without a parallel job strategy. Proposals that focus primarily on restricting AI deployment, increasing compliance burdens, or slowing rollout miss the bigger picture. Without a clear agenda to improve jobs, regulation alone does not deliver better outcomes for workers.

What is needed instead are targeted protections that safeguard workers while preserving room for innovation. Workers will want mechanisms in place to understand how automated decisions will impact them and what their options are should their role be affected. Policy can also set transparency and safety standards for productivity quotas and workplace monitoring systems, especially when these systems risk pushing workers toward unsafe or unreasonable conditions.

6. Make economic security portable

When benefits and credentials are tied to a single employer, workers bear the full cost of labor market volatility – and so does their willingness to take the kinds of risks that a dynamic economy requires. Democrats can make it easier for workers to navigate a faster-changing labor market by ensuring that economic security follows the worker, not the job.

Portable benefits enable health care, retirement savings, and training support to follow workers across employers and work arrangements. Expanding work-sharing programs can help employers reduce hours rather than cut headcount during periods of adjustment, keeping workers connected to their jobs.

Licensing reciprocity and streamlined credentialing also help reduce barriers to mobility across states. A more portable system makes change more manageable and the broader economy more adaptable.

7. Measure what is actually happening

Good AI labor policy depends on good data. For too long, policymakers have been guessing about how technology affects jobs. Democrats should establish a federal-state collaboration to develop a quarterly “AI at Work” dashboard that tracks shifts in tasks, wage trends, hiring patterns, and job displacement in real time.

Improved measurement would enable earlier identification of emerging disruptions and more precise responses, serving as an early warning signal rather than a lagging indicator. Without better measurement, policy will continue to chase headlines instead of evidence.

Democrats have a real opportunity to shape what the next era of work looks like.

These ideas are a starting point.

Done right, AI can be a force multiplier for the important work humans undertake. Taking over routine and administrative tasks frees workers to do more of what only humans do well. This is how human-centered AI adoption can drive better jobs, higher wages, broader opportunities, and a stronger sense of economic dignity.

But this story is still being written. As we learn more about how AI transforms jobs, tasks, and industries, the policies we adopt today must also adapt.

This is not a choice between embracing technology and protecting workers. It is a chance to do both and prove, once again, that the party that built the middle class can advance and reshape the next one.

The Democrats’ post-2016 “techlash” turned a historically pro-innovation party into Biden Administration governance that relied on novel regulatory ideas, was risk-averse about losing the left wing of their governing coalition, and often came across as culturally scolding about the technologies that shape daily life and high-wage jobs.

To the Democratic party’s credit, most people are looking forward to our future instead of back on our past. Which raises the question - why bother to look back at the Biden Administration’s tech policies at all?

We can’t move forward without understanding where we went wrong.

It is important to understand how far we have come from the tech-optimist strategies that worked well for President Clinton and President Obama. We are using the same playbook that alienated working class voters and opened up a 31-point gap in the presidential candidate preferences between young men and women.

The core governing lesson is pragmatic: Democrats win and govern best when they are the party that makes things work by modernizing government services, building opportunity pipelines into the tech and tech-enabled economy, defending U.S. innovation in global competition, and regulating for concrete consumer outcomes (privacy, security, scams, affordability) rather than ideological posture.

Learning from Past Success

Democrats have had a long arc of success by leaning into tech optimism from Atari Democrats to Clinton/Gore to Obama, and the party’s recent anti-tech turn was an avoidable break from a winning tradition.

Post-2016 scapegoating of Facebook and “do something about Big Tech” politics encouraged hostility toward the very digital tools Democrats used to dominate during elections and weakened Democrats’ online competitive edge.

President Biden ran for president very much on the theme of normalcy after four years of Donald Trump and on his key role in shaping the Obama presidency. But once Biden was elected, the staffing choices driven by a desire to avoid conflict with Senators Sanders and Warren, along with their affiliated outside organizations drove “purity test” staffing norms, shutting out key private-sector and technical expertise even when voters broadly value business experience in government.

The anti-tech regulators of the Biden Administration practiced a form of “faculty lounge populism” that was intended to win back working class voters by applying novel antimonopoly and consumer protection theories to the tech industry, but the approach backfired. Instead, focusing regulators on niche fights over mergers and ads rather than bread-and-butter consumer protection, the Biden Administration created a lose-lose politics that alienated tech allies without winning back working-class voters.

Technology policy is most durable politically when it is genuinely pro-consumer and pro-safety. Democrats across the country should campaign and govern on the promise of safer roads through autonomous vehicles, cheaper and faster deliveries with drone technology, and lower costs through increased efficiency.

Lessons for Politics

While Democrats are poised to make significant gains in the midterm elections, the prospect of an overwhelming blue wave is still tempered by the enduring unpopularity of the Democratic brand, with just 28% of Americans holding a positive view of the party.

Democrats can help shed their image as being out of touch on economic issues and far-left scolds, by taking some specific actions.

First they can focus on embracing tech that lowers costs and saves lives in economic messaging. The lowest-hanging fruit here is to embrace the deployment of AVs and new rules that make it easier to get them on the road. This is a pro-tech, pro-safety message that is aligned with much of the emerging Democratic coalition, may require taking on unions seeking to protect their narrow member interests. As fewer unions are endorsing Democratic candidates and using their organizing power to help them win, there is an opportunity to appeal to a broader base of support, which includes everyone interested in safer roads and neighborhood streets.

Second, Democrats should reject the disproven notion that “anti-tech populism” is an effective blue-collar turnout strategy. The party will need to recruit candidates with strong working-class credentials and ideas, and embrace policies that are popular with the median voters of their districts and states. There is no shortcut to wrestling with hard questions of culture, identity, and economics by just blaming “oligarchs or Big Tech”. It just doesn’t resonate with voters.

Similarly, there is no substitute for leadership in crafting the guardrails for kids’ use of social media, the building and implementation of data centers, and establishing clear rules for cryptocurrencies that embrace the technology while helping to eliminate scams. The key here is that all of this work will be far more effective when working with the technology companies and people with industry expertise to encourage best practices, understand tradeoffs and unintended consequences, and maximize the benefits for society.

Lessons for Governance

Staff for competence: normalize private-sector and technical expertise as a governing asset

A key lesson from the Biden Administration is to build a “Democratic talent pipeline” for appointments that includes experienced technologists alongside staffing from think tanks, law firms, and academia. In the face of left-wing critics, the Biden Administration did bring in the experts they needed to implement the CHIPS Act, which is likely to remain as a key legacy of effective governance and economic policy from the Administration.

Democrats should create clear norms for balanced engagement (meet competitors and critics, publish calendars, enforce recusals), rather than treating meetings themselves as corrupt.

Embracing expertise has a political payoff as well. Voters see business experience as a positive credential for governing the economy.

Make “government that works” a flagship: modernize federal digital service delivery at scale

The key contrast of the Obama and Biden Administrations was the extent to which IT modernization focused on service delivery, not procurement theater. Following the healthcare.gov rollout debacle, the Obama Administration focused on expanding and protecting digital service teams; scaling proven systems quickly; aggressively retiring high-risk legacy systems; and using funding vehicles like the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) with milestone-based oversight. While many of the same tools and teams remained in the Biden Administration, there was no senior-level White House push to make progress and these efforts languished.

Build a real tech jobs strategy that matches the actual labor market, not a nostalgia economy

In the modern U.S. economy, putting tech-enabled services and digital skills at the center of workforce policy. Every administration provides hollow promises of revived American manufacturing in sectors that are not feasible. If the promises are not hollow, the policies, such as massive tariff disruption, are worse than doing nothing.

Alongside a manufacturing strategy, an administration should have a clear technology policy to train and equip American workers for the most dynamic sector of the economy. A strategy should be focused on apprenticeships, community college pathways, portable credentials, and placement partnerships with employers, link broadband expansion to workforce pipelines, and support regional tech hubs so opportunity is not geographically gated.

Compete globally and deliver locally: defend U.S. digital exports while accelerating life-improving tech deployment

A future Democratic administration should treat the American tech industry as the major advantage in global competition that it is. The US lead in venture capital and technology startups gives us a security and prosperity advantage over the entire world and helps to cement our status and the global leader.

We must treat technology and innovation as strategic national assets in diplomacy and trade and push for non-discriminatory application of rules like the EU Digital Markets Act and sustained digital trade engagement. Allowing Europe to write the rules for American tech undermines our strategic advantage and hurts American companies.

Democrats do not have to choose between accountability and optimism. Democrats can be tough on real harms (fraud, privacy violations, unsafe products, abusive market conduct) while still being unmistakably the party of innovation, opportunity, competence, and state capacity. A tech-optimistic party is a key part of the playbook for rebuilding durable Democratic governing majorities, and governing effectively when we are in control.

The anti-tech populists gained traction during the Biden years by effectively turning an intellectual critique into governing leverage, by aggressively engaging in intra-party Democratic battles over administration staffing, legal enforcement, and the shaping of policy.

But Democrats have misread the movement if they assume its leading figures and the advocacy ecosystem around them are invested in helping Democrats win elections.

Their own statements, coalition choices, and self‑described missions point to a different priority: winning victories for their pet causes, imposing Democratic purity tests, and even embracing Republicans in the name of “horseshoe politics”.

It’s time for Democrats to understand that these people do nothing to help Democrats win and build lasting governing majorities.

Incredible Influence and Access, Without Providing Support

Start with Matt Stoller, the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) research director profiled by Politico. The profile centered on Stoller’s willingness to praise and boost Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s anti‑monopoly agenda when Hawley was already radioactive to much of the Democratic coalition over Hawley’s actions around certification of Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election and the January 6th riot at the US Capitol.

Politico described Stoller as “known for” a dogmatic trust‑busting worldview so urgent that “nearly any other cause or political relationship should be sacrificed” to it. And the profile reports Stoller’s ideal political end state as one where opponents compete to “out‑anti‑monopoly” each other to the point that “burning nominal allies” is portrayed as an acceptable price of movement success.

The extremely online Stoller was open about his admiration for Hawley, praising him on X even as the Biden Administration was coming to power. This should have caused Stoller’s Democratic allies to be extremely wary of his political instincts and goals. Instead, he was embraced. His 2023 Politico profile states:

Stoller also holds remarkable sway in Biden’s Washington. Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who until recently served as Biden’s point person on competition in the White House, says Stoller — who, per Wu, maintains a “direct line to the White House” — helps Biden avoid something that has plagued past Democrat presidents: Crafting good policies no one understands.

Despite this lack of investment in Democrats’ success, the Biden Administration embraced Stoller’s group. It also hosted a December 2021 “town hall” featuring top National Economic Council officials Brian Deese and Bharat Ramamurti alongside Wu. The Biden White House treated this movement as a partner: Lael Brainard, as NEC Director and chair of the White House Competition Council, delivered prepared remarks at AELP’s Anti‑Monopoly Summit and thanked the organization for bringing key constituencies “to the table.” The 2024 version of the event featured Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter as the Keynote Speaker.

The Anti-Corporate Watchdog that Only Barks at Democrats

Jeff Hauser’s Revolving Door Project (RDP) fits the same pattern through a different policy lens. Hauser has embraced Senator Warren’s argument (updated from the Reagan Administration) that “personnel is policy,” making appointments and ethics rules the main battlefield for structural change.

Hauser’s approach is explicitly comfortable with creating friction inside the party: a profile in The Forward noted that his combative style annoys some fellow Democrats, but he accepted that as the cost of enforcing his worldview about conflicts and corporate influence.

A Democratic operative put it this way to Politico:

“While Democrats spent the past four years organizing to beat Donald Trump, Jeff was instead out there doing opposition research on potential Democratic appointees for a then-fictitious administration.”

That posture is visible in Hauser’s relationship with Gary Gensler. In a 2021 statement, Hauser had “applauded the nomination and confirmation of Gary Gensler,” then publicly castigated him for choosing “a paradigmatic Wall Street attorney” in Alex Oh as SEC enforcement director and demanded the SEC chair “do vastly better.”

RDP and a coalition of progressive organizations sent a letter to Gensler demanding that the highly-respected Oh, with both government and private sector experience, be forced from her job. Within days of being announced for the role, Oh resigned, specifically citing the “distraction” she would cause because of the pressure from these outside groups.

Hauser does not use language of a party‑adjacent group prioritizing his goals within the coalition, rather he uses the language of an umpire grading Democrats in power against an activist rubric and broadcasting the grade. By his own scorecard, he said Biden had earned a “C” compared to Trump’s “F.” Yet, since Democrats are the only ones listening to his grades, he focuses his time and energy on attacking Democrats; creating an entire website attacking Biden’s Commerce Secretary Gina Riomando for being willing to meet with and hire tech expertise to implement major initiatives like the CHIPS Act.

These elite populists used their influence to pressure the Biden Administration and helped steer Democrats toward a brand of anti‑tech politics that often read as out-of-touch, niche, and electorally misaligned. I have described this Biden‑era approach as “faculty lounge populism” rooted in elite academic and nonprofit networks, casting Big Tech as the villain while assuming ordinary voters shared the same priorities.

When Kamala Harris became the nominee, Hauser used his influence to try to shape the campaign in the interest of his organization:

“It’s an obvious missed opportunity to make some noise in a populist way amidst a populist moment,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of Revolving Door Project, a progressive watchdog. “I think she is ceding that populist energy to [Donald] Trump, and it’s an enormous miscalculation.”

This campaign analysis rings hollow when voters viewed Harris and the Democratic Party as too left-wing on economic and cultural issues, and too focused on holding positions that are popular with elites, but not everyday voters.

Democratic Politics Should be Led by Those With a Stake in Their Success

The Biden Administration too often treated anti-tech advocates as an auxiliary to their efforts to build a strong and effective party coalition. Democrats must realize that they are a movement with its own agenda and scoreboard, with very little interest in Democratic coalition needs or focus on winning elections so that their allies can govern instead of imposing purity tests on the party out of power.

Third Way’s poll of Democratic primary voters clearly shows that the left wing of the party is by far the least willing to compromise for the sake of winning and getting things done. At the same time, they only make up a tiny fraction of the Democratic Party. The “socialist” and “progressive” categories only make up 17% of the Democratic electorate, while the “liberal” and “moderate” make up 77% of the party.

Stoller’s willingness to build a bipartisan “realignment” around anti‑monopoly politics, even if it meant praising Hawley and “burning nominal allies”, makes it abundantly clear and should lead those of us with a vested interest in revitalizing the party to keep him on the sidelines of that effort.

The anti-tech, anti-business movement is not going away, but rather than hand them the keys to campaign and govern, Democrats should ignore them and utilize the expertise of the national leaders of American innovation. It is what voters want and will help Democrats win and govern effectively.

Jim Messina, the longtime Democratic strategist who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, argued in a recent article that Democrats are developing a major relationship problem with young men as we try to regulate emerging technologies they like.

As they see Democrats try to enact bans and tech regulations, many young men increasingly experience the party as the “scolding” side of politics, functioning as the HR department of American life intent on seeking to critique, regulate, or restrict their lives. That perception is leading to resentment and has real political consequences.

Between 2020 and 2024, Democratic support among men aged 18–29 fell sharply and the youth gender gap widened significantly, representing a shocking 31-point difference between young men and women. This is even greater than than the 18-point gap between voters of all ages, indicating that the issues behind the divergence are especially resonant with young men.

Comparing the overall vote count makes the shift between 2020 and 2024 look even worse since turnout was lower overall in 2024. Joe Biden received roughly seven million more votes for president than Kamala Harris did four years later. Given that young people are less likely to show up to vote, alienating a younger demographic has serious electoral consequences.

This shift could come to represent a structural change in the Democratic coalition and it coincides with a period when many of the most visible cultural and political fights centered on technology. The technology angle is crucial because young men disproportionately live in and build the digital economy.

The Gender Divide on Tech

Cryptocurrency is the most stark example of the gender divide, with 42% of men aged 18–29 have used, traded, or invested in crypto, compared to just 17% of women the same age. While the gender divide is not nearly as stark, about half of young adults use TikTok daily, placing the social media platform near the center of their social and cultural lives.

So when politics turns to regulating or banning these technologies, it is personal to young men. Messina’s analysis on this is right. If one party is associated with using your favorite apps and the other with banning them, the emotional alignment is obvious even with a limited understanding of policy and regulatory particulars.

Biden Sought to Regulate Digital Life

The Biden Administration clearly became associated with regulatory posture hostile to technology. In 2024, President Biden signed legislation requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest or face a potential U.S. ban. While this was not strictly a ban, the action was widely framed in public debate as an attempt to “ban TikTok.”

At the same time, the administration pursued aggressive regulatory approaches toward cryptocurrency through agencies like the SEC, and issued a sweeping executive order on artificial intelligence focused on safety, oversight, and risk mitigation. Even before addressing the nuances of whether these policies are well-designed or useful, the protection and safety framing strongly reinforces the nanny party perception.

Polling shows that voters perceived that shift clearly. In 2024, 60% of Democrats said the government should do more to regulate tech companies, compared to just 45% of Republicans—a notable divergence from 2020, when the parties were roughly aligned.

More detailed polling shows the same pattern across specific technologies: Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to support increased regulation of AI (72% vs. 52%), social media (51% vs. 33%), and cryptocurrency (62% vs. 41%). Even beyond regulation, Democrats are more supportive of restricting online content and support government limits on false information online.

Taken together, this creates a coherent perception: Democrats are the party that wants to manage, moderate, and regulate digital life.

Tech Is Often Where Young Men Work

That perception that Democrats are anti-tech is especially damaging with young men because for many, technology helps shape their identity and is tied to their career aspirations. The tech industry remains heavily male-dominated. Men make up roughly 74% of workers in computer and mathematical occupations, and about 77% of computer science bachelor’s degrees go to men.

If Democrats are seen as hostile to tech and innovation in the name of safety and protection, it challenges young men’s livelihoods. The Democratic politics of scolding is then both cultural and economic push away from the party.

Innovation and Democratic Values Can Go Together

Importantly, none of this means Democrats should abandon their values or even regulation. Americans of all ages, genders, and political stripes have concerns about the future of technology and don’t want to see crypto scams. We certainly do not want politicians using shady crypto deals to line their own pockets.

However, there is a way to pursue tech sector regulation that is from a pro-innovation perspective. One that encourages and fosters the industries where young men spend their lives and generates national prosperity, but establishes clear rules of the road within the industries.

There is also evidence that pro-innovation framing could help Democratic politicians. Polling on crypto policy, for example, shows that voters respond more positively to candidates who emphasize fostering innovation alongside reasonable rules, rather than restrictive enforcement alone. Given the strong male skew in crypto participation, this kind of positioning could disproportionately resonate with young men.

Messina’s prescription follows naturally from this data: Democrats don’t need to become anti-regulation, but they do need to stop sounding anti-technology. The goal should be competence, not condemnation. Protect consumers without belittling them. Address harms without implying that participation itself is suspect.

I would argue that the opportunity is even greater. Third Way published “Young Men In 2025: Not Sold On Trump, Alienated By Democrats” based on extensive focus group research. The key takeaways are that men are looking for:

From the memo, young men are looking for:

• Economic opportunity + ability to provide

• Respect and recognition (not being talked down to)

• Validation of masculinity and traditional roles

• Cultural moderation and less judgment

• Authentic, plainspoken leadership

• Simple, concrete policy messaging

• Substance over pandering

Notably, the 3,200-word memo does not include the words “innovation”, “technology”, or “crypto.” The focus is on cultural issues, but a Democrat adopting a pro-technology and innovation posture would help address nearly all of these issue areas and can be a key part of the playbook for winning back the votes of young men.

In the 2020 Democratic primary, voters treated Joe Biden as the moderate choice.

And then Biden governed as something else. Especially at the regulatory agencies responsible for regulating technology companies, Biden installed a team that was intent on implementing a populist agenda on technology that pitted the administration against Silicon Valley.

Their theory was that this anti-tech posture would be very popular, especially with the working class, and would rebuild a strong foundation of support under Biden and the Democratic Party.

When this agenda turned out to not move the needle and Biden became less popular, especially with the very working class voters the Biden team was expecting to win back, the far left came up with a cope: the anti-tech push would have been popular if it had better marketing and had Harris not run away from it when she replaced Biden as the nominee in the 2024 election.

The essential myth of the 2024 cycle is that real anti-tech populism has never been tried.

In reality, we know that the Lose-Lose Politics of anti-tech populism caused voters to see both Biden and Harris as too far to the left, and it should be rejected as a political strategy as Democrats revise their national brand to be more popular and win nationwide.

Bidenomics: Party Unity Through Populist Economics

Once in office, Biden moved quickly into an economic program much more explicitly left-leaning than the Obama Administration. A key element of this economic and regulatory posture focused on anti-tech populism.

This governing turn was largely driven by who shaped policy and what intellectual tradition they represented. Biden’s economic team elevated figures closely linked to the Warren-style “corporate power” critique: the White House named Bharat Ramamurti as an adviser for strategic economic communications. Ramamurti’s Roosevelt Institute bio notes he previously served as “the top banking and economic policy advisor for Senator Elizabeth Warren” and ran a “Corporate Power” program.

And Biden’s anti-tech posture was embodied most clearly by his choice to elevate Lina Khan as FTC chair. Just a few months into his presidency, Biden has assembled what WIRED magazine called a “Big Tech Antitrust All-Star Team”.

Tech regulation: From Antitrust to Anti-Bigness Politics

Bidenomics showed up very clearly in tech and competition policy. Biden issued and executive order to launch a “whole-of-government” competition agenda aimed at “overconcentration, monopolization, and unfair competition.” Under his appointees at the regulatory agencies, enforcement escalated into marquee actions: DOJ sued Google for monopolizing ad-tech markets and Apple for monopolizing smartphone markets.

By design, this push did not focus on traditional consumer-welfare antitrust policies intended to drive down costs for working families, it looked much more like “big is bad.” But part of the challenge that the Biden Administration had in selling this concept is precisely because they were using anti-monopoly arguments and agencies as a mechanism to try to address the size and power of tech companies, which is something else entirely.

While opinions varied widely about whether this highly-visible and aggressive use of regulatory agencies was a good idea, there was little doubt that it was taking place. The major cases brought against Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta prompted breaking news headlines, industry insights, legal analysis, and press releases.

This is far from an area of the Biden Administration that was kept quiet or swept under the rug. Khan herself made the case that her tenure at the FTC made big, visible changes on tech regulation:

“I think our record speaks for itself, I think all of the ways that we are delivering enormous benefits for the American people speaks for itself, and I’m just enormously proud of the just win after win that we’ve been able to deliver for the American people.”

The Cope: Biden Administration Didn’t Sell the Policy

In spite of the high profile lawsuits and cult celebrity status of Khan, the argument among the anti-tech advocates outside of the administration is that the Biden Administration is not really marketing their positions clearly enough for the public to understand.

Matt Stoller, the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project, argued that despite having the right policies and instincts in at the regulatory level, the Biden Administration was “incoherent” in making the case for itself as an explanation for a poll showing a 59% disapproval rating for Biden’s handling of the economy.

On an anti-trust case, he took issue with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre not articulating a price-fixing critique.

In a subsequent tweet, he writes, “Jean-Pierre is just insanely bad at the job.”

Similarly, Martin Sandbu, an economics commentator at the Financial Times, wrote in his post-election piece:

“There is nothing here to suggest that the policies themselves were not the right ones…Two largely uncomfortable conclusions emerge […] “vibeonomics” undermined economics: those voters tempted by populist economic promises were not being sold Biden’s effective economic populism hard enough to shift the vibes.”

Yet the arguments that the problem was that the public and working class voters didn’t know about what the Administration was up to ring hollow in light of Lina Kahn’s celebrity. According to the American Economic Liberties Project, the Wall Street Journal alone has published 122 pieces attacking Khan’s FTC. Jacobin states that “the spotlight on Khan has been relentless since well before her term as FTC chair began in June 2021.” Khan’s tactics at the FTC led to the resignation of a commissioner, and a prominent Wall Street Journal article giving her reasons for departure.

Fundamentally, the complaints about “bad marketing” are just a cope for the product itself (in this case, Biden’s policy record) being bad. Voters were rejecting what the Biden Admin was selling, and it wasn’t a failure of bad marketing.

After Harris lost, the left denied that their policies had been tried and demanded more populism

Despite rejecting his moderate and return-to-Obama image on economics, when Biden became unpopular, the economic populists just acted as if he had not shifted at all.

Cenk Uygur, founder and host of The Young Turks, leveled this criticism of both Biden and Harris immediately prior to the 2024 election:

When I criticize Joe Biden or Kamala Harris as simple servants of the donor class, a lot of people assume I’m supporting Trump because they think politics is two dimensional. But it isn’t—and until the Democrats figure out that they’re playing the wrong game on the wrong field, they’re going to keep getting surprised by the populist wave Donald Trump has caught.

After Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in 2024, the postmortem from the left was striking: the left wing of the party did not view it as a reckoning for Bidenomics, they simply pretended that Biden had governed as the moderate he appeared to be during the campaign.

There was no acknowledgement that his regulatory agenda was executed by the team that Warren and Sanders picked. To the extent that there is any recognition that Biden governed as a populist, they fault Harris for failing to double down on a populist agenda during her truncated campaign.

Bernie Sanders’ indictment of the Democratic Party after Harris’ defeat was brutal:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power? Probably not.”

Jacobin was even more explicit, claiming Harris “ran away from a winning economic populist message.” They speculated that her campaign messaging and policies were not based on her actual beliefs or out of a desire to move closer to the median voter.

Rather, they write that “perhaps criticism of landlords and price gougers proved uncomfortable for Harris’s big-money backers and top advisors, like her brother-in-law Tony West or former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who have occupied roles as Uber’s senior vice president of policy and chief legal counsel, respectively.

The Nation similarly argued that the economic left was being used as a scapegoat for the loss:

“Why, after every electoral loss, is the left always the scapegoat? It’s easier to blame activists for pushing a progressive agenda than confront the real issue: the Democratic Party has long been shaped by far more powerful forces—corporate interests, lobbyists, and consultants—whose influence has neglected the real crises facing everyday Americans. We see this cycle again and again.”

The Electoral Problem: Harris Was Already Seen As “Too Liberal”

The issue that the populist critique of the Biden Administration and Harris campaign fails to acknowledge is that both politicians were very closely associated with the anti-tech populism that their champions had put in place during the Biden Administration.

We also have evidence that the economic policies were unpopular. By November of 2021, well before inflation hit its peak a year later, 55% of voters disapproved of Biden’s economic performance, which was 6 points more than Donald Trump’s highest disapproval rating on the economy.

Blueprint surveyed 3,262 national and swing state 2024 voters fielded over web panels from November 06 to November 07 and weighted to education, age, gender, race, and 2020/2024 election results. The margin of error is +/- 2.1. The swing state oversample included 1,883 voters.

The Blueprint Poll taken immediately after the election vividly shows that Kamala Harris was viewed as too similar to Biden and too liberal. The lowest-ranked concerns were that she wasn’t enough like Biden and that she was too conservative. Voters’ reality simply does not match progressives’ cope.

While the pundits pushing for Harris to embrace Biden’s economic populist vision or move even farther left, the reality is that she never “shook the Etch-A-Sketch” as Matt Yglesias put it. To voters, her campaign looked very much like a continuation of the Biden campaign and administration policies that she inherited when he dropped out.

As I have written about previously, we know that the Biden Administration version of anti-tech populism simply does not move working class voters toward Democrats.

The issue is not that we didn’t lean in hard enough to tech-bashing and anti-business policies. Biden championed these positions throughout his presidency and when they proved to be unpopular with voters, the populist left just pretended it never happened or we just didn’t explain it well enough.

The Biden Administration’s tech policy appears to have been guided in part by a political theory: that taking a confrontational posture toward the technology industry would help Democrats reconnect with working-class voters who had drifted away from the party. This view reflected a strain of what I’ve called “faculty lounge populism”, a style of anti-corporate politics popular among left-leaning activists, academics, and Democratic staffers that assumed ordinary voters shared the same hostility toward large technology companies.

But the expected political payoff never materialized. Anti-tech populism did not generate gains among working-class voters, while it strained relationships with long-standing Democratic allies in Silicon Valley and parts of the broader tech ecosystem. In venture capital terms, the strategy produced value destruction – burning existing support without generating new political returns. What was intended as coalition expansion instead became lose-lose politics: no new working-class voters gained, and weakened support from allies in the tech sector and innovation economy.

In this series of posts on the lose-lose politics of anti-tech efforts of the Biden Administration, I will look at how the policies meant alienating Silicon Valley without winning back the working class.

The White House made anti-tech policy a working‑class signal

The Biden administration tried to sell novel antitrust crackdowns and “big is bad” policies as a pro‑worker, pro‑consumer crusade based on a type of faculty lounge populism meant to reassure working‑class voters that Democrats would fight corporate power. But the strategy intensified alienation among Silicon Valley executives even as Democrats kept bleeding support among non‑college voters.

The premise of the Biden posture was explicit in the administration’s own language. The White House Competition Council framed market concentration as a direct threat to workers and household budgets, quoting Biden: “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation,” and arguing that reduced competition “drives up prices for consumers and drives down wages for workers.”

The policies matched the message. In Biden’s executive order on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, he explicitly points to “technology developments” as a barrier to unionization, stating:

In the past few decades, the Federal Government has not used its full authority to promote and implement this policy of support for workers organizing unions and bargaining collectively with their employers. During this period, economic change in the United States and globally, technological developments, and the failure to modernize Federal organizing and labor-management relations laws to respond appropriately to the reality found in American workplaces, have made worker organizing exceedingly difficult.

In his New York Times editorial board interview during the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said that he was “not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg”, said that Section 230 (of the Communications Decency Act) should be revoked, and made the case that the technology revolution will require heavy government regulation. Doing this interview is a signature campaign event for any candidate, so you can be certain that these answers were what the campaign thought would be the most compelling to win working class support.

The anti‑corporate/anti‑tech posture was repeatedly framed as a worker‑aligned fight against exploitation and rip‑offs, which is exactly the rhetoric Democrats reached for as their working‑class brand eroded.

Coalition management: progressives up close, unions at the center

Personnel is policy, and Biden’s antitrust staffing was a concession to the party’s left flank. Reuters described Lina Khan’s ascent to FTC chair as a “victory for progressives seeking a clampdown on tech firms,” underscoring that the administration chose a figure celebrated by the left and feared by much of industry. Jonathan Kanter’s confirmation to lead DOJ Antitrust likewise drew praise from the anti-corporate organizations aligned with Senator Warren.

By election season in 2024, the political meaning of Khan’s antitrust project was plain and had became a flashpoint between Silicon Valley and the left wing of the party. The intra-party political fight came at a cost as Kamala Harris looked to take over the reins of a national presidential campaign and formulate a winning message.

Even as voters viewed Harris as too liberal, she was unwilling to signal a shift from the Biden Administration on tech regulation and staffing. It isn’t hard to see why Harris was unable to credibly signal a shift when the left wing of the party is publicly saying they would fight her on if she did. During the campaign sprint to the finish, Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez was warning of an “out and out brawl” if Harris removed Khan.

Before he dropped out, Biden’s team was encouraging him to address his blue‑collar problem by urging him to “pick fights” with corporate “villains” and rely on labor institutions to communicate benefits as they portrayed Biden as unusually pro‑union in symbolism and outreach. They were sure that Democrats could tolerate antagonizing the tech community since it would pay dividends with the working class.

The numbers show the loss: non‑college voters didn’t come back

The core failure of the strategy is visible in the education divide. Juan David Rojas captures the decline in working class support from Obama to Biden and the electoral college hit that came with the loss of support:

Yet despite Biden’s larger 4.5 percent victory, Obama secured 332 electoral votes compared to his Democratic successor’s 306 electoral votes. While it’s technically accurate to describe the discrepancies as an undemocratic feature of the Electoral College, a less flattering reason derives from Democrats’ hemorrhaging of working-class voters. Obama won 51 percent of voters without college degrees, including 40 percent of working-class white voters. In contrast, Biden won 48 and 38 percent of the same groups, with Kamala Harris securing only 45 percent of all non-college voters in 2024.

The slide continued as Harris replaced Biden on the ticket. Pew’s validated‑voter analysis of 2024 shows Trump beating Harris among non‑college voters 56%–42%, while college graduates favored Harris 57%–41%.

Working class voters simply don’t buy the argument that technology companies and corporations are the cause of their economic issues. This is best summed up by Mitch Landrieu, a leader of the extensive election post-mortem conducted by American Bridge, “not one person in all of our focus groups mentioned the word ‘oligarchy.’”

Instead, their surveys found “a candidate focused on taking on big corporations and the wealthy” received 43 percent, while a “candidate focused on fixing the economy so those who work hard can get ahead” earned 52 percent.

Writing for Vox, Eric Levitz says that:

The problem is that voters…do not consider regulating the companies a priority. When Gallup asked Americans what their country’s most important problem was this month, only 1 percent named “corporate corruption” while 0 percent picked “technology.”

Silicon Valley shifted and Democrats paid a political price

While the Biden Administration’s theory that aggressive tech regulation would lead to working class gains at the ballot box backfired, the backlash from parts of the tech community from being targeted became a clear problem. The most obvious issue was Elon Musk choosing to spend nearly $300 million to get Donald Trump elected president. He spent an unprecedented sum of money that bought ads, organizational structure, and paid canvassers to Trump’s campaign.

However, the primary issue is not simply a matter of campaign contributions. After all, Kamala Harris also raised a large sum of money from the tech industry during her 2024 presidential run.

The Silicon Valley loss is the failure to capitalize on voter’s favorable view of tech companies, innovation, entrepreneurship and business success by embracing the most dynamic and successful industry in the country. A campaign season filled with article after article about why the tech community is abandoning your party is bad for general election candidates trying to signal that you are the right candidate to build a prosperous economy.

Venture capital titans Marc Andreessen focused his pro‑Trump arguments on the view that policy under Trump would better serve tech’s future on startups. Democrats had been the party of innovation and progress for a generation. They gave up their advantage on that issue while getting nothing in return.

Why Lose-Lose Politics matters

It is difficult to prove causation in politics: inflation, immigration, culture war dynamics, and candidate‑specific factors moved votes in 2024, but it is clear that the advisors pushing President Biden and his Administration thought that taking on the tech industry would generated a winning issue with working class swing voters, and it is clear that logic was a political loser.

The administration advertised antitrust policies as worker‑friendly populism, yet Democrats failed to regain non‑college voters. At the same time, highly-visible members of the tech world defected – financially, rhetorically, and organizationally – toward Trump and Republicans by painting Democrats as out of touch with the private sector and anti-success. Swing voters took notice and it helped put Donald Trump back in the White House.

What makes this toll increasingly troubling is that much of it is preventable. Autonomous vehicle technology, especially in robotaxis and long-haul trucking, offers a realistic pathway to dramatically reducing traffic deaths. Yet federal policy during the Biden Administration too often emphasized caution and process over deployment, slowing the rollout of technologies that will save lives.

Failure to support the adoption of private-sector innovation in autonomous vehicles was another key element of the Biden Administration Digital Deficit. Life-saving technologies exist, but the Biden Administration refused to move them forward.

And while it may not have similar life and death consequences, the Biden Administration also held back progress in helping consumers by limiting the employment of drone delivery technology.

Human Drivers Remain the Primary Safety Risk

The case for autonomous vehicles begins with a simple reality: humans remain the most dangerous component of the transportation system.

NHTSA research found that the critical reason for crashes was attributed to the driver in 94 percent of cases studied, reflecting the central role of human error in road fatalities.

Human drivers become distracted, fatigued, impaired, or aggressive. Autonomous systems, by contrast, are designed to remain attentive and rule-following within their operating environments.

Secretary Buttigieg correctly identified the problem:

“Just to be very clear, human drivers aren’t just problematic. They are murderous. Forty thousand people a year die in a car crash. And we have been bathed in this level of carnage all our lives. And so we’re a bit like people who grow up in a place that’s experiencing a war, in terms of how normal we think that is.”

Technology is not always the answer to everything. But frankly, it would be hard to do worse than human drivers when it comes to what we could get to theoretically with the right kind of safe autonomous driving.”

What Buttigieg did not do is push his own department to advance this life-saving technology as quickly as possible.

At the end of the Biden Administration Jeff Farrah, who heads the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, said in an interview, “The federal government is the one that needs to lead when it comes to vehicle design, construction and performance, and we just have not seen enough action out of the federal government in recent years.”

Robotaxis Could Have Paved the Way for Autonomous Cars

For robotaxis, the central federal constraint is that the U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) and closely related rules historically presume a “traditional” car with a human driver and associated equipment (controls, displays, etc.). NHTSA itself has acknowledged both that compliant AVs can be deployed under existing rules and that FMVSS modernization is needed for AVs. That is exactly the policy space where a pro-adoption DOT would be expected to deliver: clear, timely, scalable regulatory pathways and updated standards for vehicles built around autonomy. This just did not happen in the Biden Administration.

The Biden Administration DOT did not complete the modernization (or robust exemptions) that would let companies deploy purpose-built driverless robotaxis broadly in the U.S. during Biden’s term. Building a “driver-in” car, then removing the driver will never be the most cost-effective way to deploy this technology, but it is what robotaxi companies were stuck with.

Even as Secretary Buttigieg was saying the right things, NHTSA told Congress in its May 2024 report:

“As the technology develops, the Department and NHTSA will advance their research and policy agendas to identify areas of economic benefit and risk and give workers a seat at the table in shaping innovation to create benefits for workers and prevent workforce disruption.”

This “seat at the table” ended up functioning as an organized labor veto over autonomous vehicles. Biden DOT officials signaled in numerous meetings with industry that the Administration would not do anything to cross organized labor, which meant AVs would stall.

Finally, after years in office, the administration’s principal federal framework for AV operations was proposed late, voluntary, and not finalized in time to govern the market – leaving adoption largely to state and local regimes and company-by-company compliance strategies.

Autonomous Trucks Could Have Addressed a Major Highway Safety Problem

If robotaxis represent the most visible form of autonomy, autonomous trucking may represent the largest safety opportunity.

Large trucks are involved in a disproportionate share of fatal crashes. According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, more than 5,000 people die annually in crashes involving large trucks, most of them occupants of passenger vehicles.

In spite of this opportunity, the Biden Administration again held back progress. The Administration denied Waymo and Aurora’s request to use cab-mounted warning beacons instead of human-deployed triangles or flares for stopped driverless trucks. The request had been in the docket since March 2023, so the agency took roughly 21 months to decide. In the denial, FMCSA said the application showed “promise” and that DOT “embraces” innovation, but still rejected the exemption because the data and device details were “insufficient” for a broad nationwide exemption.

This was another missed opportunity for the Biden Administration, but Democrats in the House and Senate can still support the legislative fix. Right now, the legislative language for the surface transportation bill that would resolve this issue has no Democratic co-sponsors.

Delivery Innovation as Stuck in Regulatory Limbo

Autonomous mobility is not the only technology facing a digital deficit. A similar pattern appears in drone delivery services.

During the Biden Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) failed to adopt new rules and regulations to take advantage of drone deliveries, a technology that can make products available to more people at a lower cost. According to the FAA’s own rulemaking committee’s 2022 report, “Notwithstanding these benefits for the American public, current Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations do not enable the domestic UA beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) industry to scale and achieve meaningful results from those benefits.”

The lack of effective rules and regulations meant that delivery providers are left with a patchwork of exemptions and pilot programs.

Although the FAA acknowledged the potential for expanded drone operations—including package delivery—the comprehensive rulemaking framework remained delayed for years, costing Biden a potential win in this area.

The Trump Administration was quick to propose rule changes that the Biden Administration failed to implement. In 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced Part 108, a proposed FAA rule that would transform how businesses obtain permission to fly drones beyond the pilot’s visual line of sight. “In the past, drone operators had to apply for waivers on a case-by-case basis,” Duffy said. “Because of that complication, I don’t think we saw the innovation we should have in America.”

The Cost of Failing to Support Innovation

As I have written about before, the seeds of the Biden Administration “war on tech” were planted in Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, and “Big Tech” has become an easy attack angle for Democratic politicians. While unhelpful, these attacks could be written off as consistent with a general “Big is Bad” mentality and residual anger at Facebook’s role in the election.

However, the failure to seize the opportunity to embrace autonomous vehicle and drone delivery technology told voters that the Democratic party no longer valued innovations that would improve their lives.

The real question for Democrats is whether they will be the party to accelerate the deployment of breakthrough technologies that put American lives and consumer interests first – or continue allowing them to sit on the shelf while we cede the breakthroughs of American innovation to Republicans and red states.

Nothing is clearer in American politics than that voters care the most about jobs and the economy. It is mentioned in poll after poll after poll.

Of course President Biden and his advisors know this and have known it for years. Despite having that knowledge, the Biden Administration focused its national workforce strategy on the narrow segment of the population in manufacturing and private sector unions, even as the share and importance of those jobs in the American economy have receded.

This missed opportunity is especially frustrating when workers across the board viewed tech as an opportunity – another part of Biden’s Digital Deficit.

As Biden took office, tech was in a hiring boom. According to CompTIA, the core US tech workforce reached nearly 6.5 million workers by end of 2024, with a median salary of roughly $104,556, which is more than double the national median wage of $49,500. Even more importantly for the future of the American economy, tech occupation employment is projected to grow at approximately twice the rate of overall employment in the coming decade.

Technology and tech-enabled roles are often well paid, increasingly remote-compatible, and frequently accessible through pathways other than a four-year degree. If your goal is broad-based national prosperity, the technology workforce is one of the most scalable and effective ways to get there.

The Biden Administration clearly understood parts of that story. It backed major efforts to expand broadband access and talked often about innovation. But when it came to jobs—especially in the public narrative of “Bidenomics”—the strategy narrowed to manufacturing and unions, leaving the country without anything like a coherent tech jobs strategy.

The jobs narrative centered on manufacturing and union labor

The Biden Administration “industrial policy” push included the CHIPS Act, Inflation Reduction Act manufacturing provisions, and large sections of the bipartisan infrastructure law, and was almost always framed as a manufacturing revival story, frequently paired with the language of “good-paying union jobs.” That framing was central to the Administration’s branding.

But manufacturing is a relatively small and structurally declining share of U.S. employment. Manufacturing’s share of total jobs peaked around World War II at roughly 38% and has fallen to around 8% over the past decade, while services rose to a little over 86% of total payrolls. That mismatch matters because a jobs message built around manufacturing is, by definition, built around a small minority of the labor market.

The U.S. economy is overwhelmingly services-based and modern services are increasingly tech-enabled.

The union framing was even narrower. BLS reports the overall union membership rate was 9.9% in 2024, and private-sector union membership was just 5.9%.

You can believe strongly in unions and still recognize that a “union jobs” frame speaks directly to a small portion of private-sector workers, especially in the fastest-growing white-collar and tech-related categories.

Broadband investments were real but they weren’t a tech workforce strategy

To its credit, the Administration made a major play on broadband. The BEAD program alone is a $42.45 billion federal effort to expand high-speed internet access nationwide, exactly the sort of enabling infrastructure needed for remote work and digital opportunity to spread beyond coastal hubs.

However, connecting people to the internet doesn’t connect them to quality careers in technology. A national tech jobs strategy would pair connectivity with a talent pipeline: credentials employers trust, portable training pathways, apprenticeships, and job-placement partnerships that explicitly aim to disperse tech employment geographically.

The tech workforce was already opportunity-rich

The missed opportunity becomes clearer when you look at how big tech employment already was. CompTIA’s State of the Tech Workforce 2025 estimates net tech employment (a combined measure including core tech occupations across the economy plus business professionals employed in tech companies) at 9.6 million workers in 2024.

BLS data reinforces the scale and quality of these careers. In its Occupational Outlook Handbook overview for computer and IT occupations, BLS projects about 317,700 openings per year on average from 2024–2034 and lists a median annual wage of $105,990 (May 2024)—far above the median wage for all occupations.

These are jobs that can exist around the country and increasingly accessible through nontraditional education pathways. If your goal is to create opportunity in more places, you don’t have to invent a new industry or force an industry back from overseas. You have to be willing to build and support the workforce that already exists and is projected to expand.

The pandemic tech hiring boom came but federal strategy didn’t follow through

During the COVID pandemic the tech labor market whipped between surge and retrenchment: rapid pandemic-era hiring, then layoffs and hiring freezes across parts of the sector, then signs of stabilization.

That volatility is precisely why a national strategy matters. When an industry grows quickly, especially an industry so central to productivity and service delivery, public policy can help smooth pathways for workers and build durable talent pipelines. But there was no equivalent of “CHIPS-for-tech-workers” or an IRA-scale jobs message for digital services.

Regulation and labor politics got attention; workforce expansion didn’t

The Administration was publicly engaged in labor politics around major employers, including high-profile moments around Amazon unionization efforts. At the same time, the U.S. tech labor market was absorbing the shocks of post-pandemic normalization without a clear national-level plan to sustain or expand the talent pipeline for tech-enabled service work.

Internationally, major U.S. platforms also entered a new compliance era in Europe. The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) was adopted in 2022, entered into force in November 2022, and became applicable in 2023, imposing wide-ranging obligations on designated “gatekeepers.” Europe’s efforts to go after American tech companies was never treated by the Administration as an attack on America’s workers, but that is certainly what it amounted to.

What a real tech jobs strategy could have looked like

The Biden Administration built real assets and made real investments, especially semiconductors and broadband. But it never paired those assets with a clear national strategy to grow and sustain tech employment as a geographically distributed opportunity engine. That blind spot was a strategic miss at a moment when the tech workforce was projected to grow quickly, but also faced clear headwinds from post-pandemic societal changes, rising interest rates, and the drying up of venture capital investment.

This moment came and passed while the economy was, as nearly always, voter’s number one issue and they are optimistic about the role of technology in providing good jobs.

Last week I argued that the Biden Administration’s failure to stand up for U.S. tech leadership on the global stage created a “Digital Deficit.”

There was another aspect of the Digital Deficit: how the Biden Administration largely squandered a digital advantage from the Obama Administration, failing to make dramatic progress on how the government uses tech to deliver services efficiently.

Despite the right rhetoric and some pockets of innovation, the deficit in tech leadership, talent, and strategy opened a vulnerability that ultimately reshaped the governing landscape with Trump’s return to office.

Democrats “Owned” Government Tech Reform

For decades, Democrats positioned themselves not just as defenders of government but as reformers determined to make it work better through technology and management innovation.

In the 1990s, Vice President Al Gore led the Reinventing Government initiative aimed at making the federal government work better and cost less. This effort involved federal workers, private-sector partners, and a focus on streamlining processes, cutting red tape, and introducing technology into how government operated.

The initiative saved billions of dollars, eliminated hundreds of thousands of federal positions through attrition and buyouts, and helped reshape government service delivery. This long tradition of reform helped create a brand identity for Democrats as the party that could manage and modernize government effectively.

What Worked: The Obama Legacy in Government Tech

In the Obama Administration, the federal government made real progress toward modernizing its digital tools and services by building institutions that brought technology talent into public service:

• In 2014, after the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, the White House created the United States Digital Service (USDS), a team of technologists tasked with fixing digital systems and improving citizen interactions with government. By 2024, USDS had worked with more than 30 agencies to deliver better digital services.

• USDS changed how digital services delivery happened in government, embedding teams with existing agency employees, changed hiring practices, and empowered people to make significant organizational change. The origins of the USDS have their own program and history at Harvard, where it is described as a movement

• Alongside USDS was 18F, a digital services unit inside the General Services Administration (GSA) that paired designers, engineers, and product managers with agencies to build, buy, and improve technology for public use. Its practices spread agile, user-centered methods throughout government IT.
  
  Professor Kayla Schwoerer described 18F as “an in-house digital services consulting agency that brought Silicon Valley expertise to government, challenging decades of outdated procurement practices and introducing a radical new approach to building digital public services.”

These initiatives delivered tangible improvements to systems that Americans rely on every day and, along with the Presidential Innovation Fellows program (another Obama Administration initiative), helped create a pipeline for top tech talent to serve the public in meaningful ways.

At the heart of this effort was Jen Pahlka, founder of Code for America and a former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer. Pahlka and her CTO colleagues played a major role in shaping USDS and the broader civic tech movement precisely because she saw deep flaws in how government traditionally operated and knew how technologists could help fix them.

The Biden Administration Tech Modernization Efforts Languish

Stepping into office with the Obama Administration institutions still largely in place, it would have been reasonable to assume that Biden and his senior team would look to reinvigorate this Obama era legacy and double down on efforts to improve government services through modernization and technology.

Early signs from the Administration looked good: President Biden issued an executive order focused on making government services user friendly and accessible, explicitly calling out the role of tech in making this happen.

In practice, however, a lack of strategic leadership and prioritization slowed progress.

• Despite creating ambitious digital policy frameworks and launching initiatives to recruit tech talent, key modernization priorities stalled due to misalignment between U.S. Digital Service, GSA, and the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer — with senior leaders failing to articulate a coherent, unified vision.

• Even as Biden pushed executive actions on issues like AI and digital skills, he never filled a long-vacant Chief Technology Officer role, leaving no single, Senate-confirmed advocate for technology leadership at the heart of the administration. This lack left a vacuum in driving cohesive change and communicating the value of technology to government transformation.

• Talent pipelines frayed. While efforts like a federal “talent surge” for AI hiring were promoted, there were challenges in attracting and retaining top tech experts. Biden’s team fundamentally did not view having experienced Silicon Valley technologists as an asset, and even avoided hiring from industry for coalition management purposes. So they made no effort to recruit and place industry experts in key roles, or rally their expertise to make government work better.

In short, the Biden years saw some good signals and pockets of innovation, but not the sustained strategic push that would fully extend the Obama-era momentum into a durable modernization effort.

This perhaps should not have been a surprise, with tech adoption and modernization never being a top priority of President Biden himself, Elizabeth Warren and her allies creating a revolving door panic that limited tech talent and progressives focused on closing the digital divide around access to broadband, not government services.

What Happened Next: A Political and Institutional Fallout

The costs of this digital deficit became clear once the Trump Administration returned to power in 2025. Instead of building on established digital modernization teams, the new administration reorganized or dismantled them under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE):

• By March 2025, GSA’s 18F unit was shuttered, with layoffs sent in the middle of the night to dozens of digital specialists — signaling a stark departure from the collaborative, mission-driven approach of previous digital teams.

• In late February, more than 20 civil-service technologists at USDS resigned rather than work under DOGE leadership, citing concerns about political interference and lack of needed expertise; a dramatic breakdown of internal capacity to modernize government tech.

The failure of Democrats to sustain and scale digital modernization opened space for an entirely different model of government tech: one that prized destruction over improvement. And when government tech falters, voters notice even if they don’t see the nuance behind the causes.

Why This Matters for Democrats

Democrats are widely understood as the party of government. When government works well, delivering benefits, modern services, and seamless experiences that identity can be a strength. But when services are slow, digital systems obsolete, or experiences frustrating, Democrats pay the price.

A weakened technology backbone in government feeds two political narratives:

• Republicans seize on dysfunction to argue that government is inherently bloated and inefficient, pushing privatization or radical deregulation.

• Democrats, by default, are left defending the status quo and when the public’s experience is poor, that defense feels hollow.

In the era of digital expectations shaped by private-sector experiences, ineffective government tech is a political vulnerability.

Closing the Digital Deficit

Obama’s investment in digital talent and user-centered systems showed what was possible. The Biden Administration’s pause in strategic leadership allowed that advantage to fade. And the resultant political terrain empowered narratives that weaken public institutions and shift power to private markets.

If Democrats want to reclaim the story of effective governance, they must make government tech excellence a core part of their narrative for what governing in a Democratic administration will look like in the future.