Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens will face off August 4th in a Democratic Senate primary where the key issue is apparently fear. Not healthcare fear. Not inflation fear. Fear of data centers.
Data centers. Those buildings full of computers that make your Instagram work. Voters in Michigan are being told this is the hill to die on. AI and data centers could decide who represents them in the Senate. Not jobs. Not roads. Server farms.
Stevens holds an actual House seat. El-Sayed holds a medical degree and a podcast. Both have decided the winning strategy in Michigan is to scare the sh*t out of people about ChatGPT eating too much electricity. Brilliant. Nothing says "I understand working-class concerns" like warning about the carbon footprint of Copilot.
The state gave us the auto industry, Motown, and the complete collapse of an entire city's infrastructure. Now its Democratic primary hinges on whether robots use too much air conditioning. This is what happens when you let people who've never changed their own oil decide what counts as an economic issue.
Somewhere a Ford plant worker is watching these two debate data center energy consumption and wondering if he should've just voted for the guy who promised to bring back jobs that don't exist anymore. At least that was a lie he could understand.
The polling is close. The stakes are apparently high. And the issue is computers getting hot. El-Sayed wants to regulate them. Stevens wants to regulate them differently. The voters want someone to talk about literally anything else.
Michigan deserves better than a Senate race decided by people who just learned what a GPU is last month.
Photo by Jacob Skowronek on Unsplash
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