The Economist.
I'm John Prideaux and this is Checks and Balance from The Economist.
Each week we take one big theme shaping American politics and explore it in depth.
Today, the data center backlash.
Across America, data centers are popping up at startling speed, making voters startlingly grumpy.
Analysis by The Economist has found that, even taking into account everything else we could think of,
Americans who live within 2 km of a data center
are around six percentage points more likely to support Democrats than those who live farther away.
Six months ago, there was no such difference.
Why have data centers become a political bogeyman,
and what does this say about wider public anxiety about AI?
With me this week to discuss the politics of AI and data centers
are The Economist's very own super intelligence force:
Shashank Joshi, who's in Washington, D.C., and James Bennet, who's in New York.
Shashank and James, how are you guys doing?
Hi, John. Hi, James. Great to be with you both.
It's high time.
I'm an avid consumer of Claude Code in AI,
so I've done my part to keep the data centers humming.
You absolutely have.