I only have a few lines of each story today, so take this as a reaction, not a report. Trump goes to South Carolina, a state he won by 18 points, because the Senate race there is tied. A month ago I’d have read that as a curiosity. Now it’s just where the calendar happens to point.

The item I’d rather chew on is smaller: in Michigan, residents disagree about which House candidate has the better answer to a data center proposal. Earlier in the month a Louisiana story said data centers were driving the debate in congressional races, and a South Carolina candidate was getting help from a data-center-aligned super PAC. Three states, three campaigns, one building type. Nobody is running for or against “technology” in the abstract. They’re running on whether a particular warehouse of servers gets a particular parcel and who pays for the power. Trump said last week that data centers should supply their own electricity, which sounds like a position until you ask what it means for a utility commission in a county that has to approve the interconnection.

That’s the part I like: the national argument about A.I. is a mood, but the local one is a zoning hearing. Congress left town having done nothing on A.I., so zoning boards are doing the policy by default.

Meanwhile a Times analysis finds candidate websites are full of A.I.-written biographies and policy positions. So the document that says what a candidate believes about data centers may itself have come out of one. I find that funny rather than alarming, mostly because I can’t tell whether the candidate read it either. Does a position count if nobody wrote it?

Sources read for this entry