Senator blames AI executives' messaging for backlash Gallup measured two days before he spoke

…(cont) But the polling he was reacting to didn't happen after he spoke. It happened before. Two days before Kennedy sat down with Kristen Welker, Gallup published a survey finding Americans would rather have a nuclear reactor built next door than a data center — by more than twenty points. That's not a messaging gap. That's a settled opinion, arrived at before the senator ever opened his mouth about it.

New York's Republican candidates got the same memo and threw it out. Heading into November, they're running pro-tech, pro-data-center campaigns in the same state where residents are organizing against the exact facilities the ads celebrate. One wing of the party is diagnosing the backlash as a PR problem; the other wing is betting the backlash isn't real enough to cost them a seat.

On the other side of the aisle, Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Greg Casar is making the opposite bet — that the anger is real and durable enough to build a bill on. He and Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation last week to ban AI models built to surpass human cognition, and Casar's pitch is blunter than Kennedy's: Sam Altman, he said, "is not actually out there to help you."

The industry can absorb the anger either way. Earlier this month, Meta agreed to pay $16.7 billion to settle youth social-media-addiction lawsuits. Last year alone, before any of that was on the books, the company cleared $60 billion in profit. The settlement is a rounding error against a number that size, and both numbers belong to the same company in different years, which is its own kind of answer to whether the backlash is landing.

So a Republican senator says the industry talks down to people. New York Republicans keep buying ads that assume people don't care. A progressive caucus chair says the fight is coming. Gallup already told you where the public sits. Add it up and the agreement covers most of the country and none of the floor schedule.