A group of Democrats, concerned their party is not moving quickly enough to address voter anxiety about artificial intelligence, has started a political action committee aimed at spurring a response to the issue.
The organization, called Tomorrow Together and led by Democratic campaign veterans spanning the ideological wings of the party, is starting with more than $10 million raised from party donors and A.I. safety advocates, according to its leaders.
Tomorrow Together says it will aid midterm House candidates in swing states who support child-safety and data-privacy regulations as well as limits on the construction of data centers. The organization says it will also invest in polling.
“When it comes to A.I., Democrats are behind,” Karthik Ganapathy, a founder of the PAC, said in a statement. Democrats have been cowed into silence by the tech industry, he added, warning that the party’s approach “won’t even get us through this election cycle, let alone the next one.”
Mr. Ganapathy, a former aide to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, founded the group with Rob Flaherty, who was a deputy campaign manager for former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign. In interviews, they said artificial intelligence was on track to be the defining issue of the 2028 presidential election.
Mr. Ganapathy and Mr. Flaherty differ on many policy issues. They first got to know each other while arguing on social media in 2016, when Mr. Flaherty was working on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and Mr. Ganapathy was on Mr. Sanders’s team.
But they said they were united by a sense that the party’s leadership was falling short on A.I., which has emerged as a rare topic that unites Democratic and Republican voters.
“Comrade Karthik and old centrist Rob can get along together in harmony on this issue,” Mr. Flaherty said in an interview, adding, “Republicans are already competing to be the party that wins on A.I. Democrats need to as well.”
Americans across the political spectrum are uneasy about A.I.’s impact on jobs, energy costs, education, mental health and global cybersecurity. Polls show that far more voters are concerned about A.I.’s growing role in daily life than are excited about it, and most believe the risks outweigh the benefits.
Democrats and Republicans appear to be roughly equally concerned.
Although states have started to pass a patchwork of A.I. regulations, efforts to create federal guardrails have been halting. Polls suggest voters do not know which party to trust.
Mr. Flaherty predicted that the A.I. boom would lead to “unprecedented wealth concentration” and widespread unemployment.
“The pitchforks are going to come out at some point,” he said.
The post ‘Democrats Are Behind’: PAC Wants Party to Catch Up on A.I. appeared first on New York Times.
