AI is the Democratic Party's Next Villain

We analyze roughly 280,000 candidate fundraising emails to trace the rise of anti-billionaire populism in the Democratic party and see how it is slowly merging with a new kind of anti-AI populism.

Something is shifting in the Democratic party. A string of primary upsets has fed a growing narrative that the party’s base now rewards a more aggressive brand of economic populism, one aimed squarely at billionaires, corporate power, and the political influence that money buys. And a number of sharp observers, including Jasmine Sun [piece here] and Archie Hall [piece here], have been arguing that this energy may come for AI next, a prediction that draws support from David Shor’s polling showing voters souring on the technology and on the companies building it as part of a broader concern towards what they see as a rigged economy and a hopeless cost-of-living crisis.

But almost all of the evidence behind this narrative describes the mood of the American electorate, and moods are only half of the story. Politicians do not respond mechanically to shifts in public sentiment—they answer to donors, activists, and primary challengers, not just median voters…and sometimes they stake out new positions well before the public asks for them, or refuse to move long after it has. If we want to know whether AI populism is becoming an organizing position of the Democratic party, rather than a diffuse sentiment floating around in polls, we need to measure the politicians directly. We need to watch what candidates actually say when they are trying to raise money, to garner attention, and to win elections.

Fundraising emails turn out to be a remarkably good place to look. Campaigns test these messages relentlessly against open rates and donations, so the language that survives is the language that operatives have learned actually moves their base—a compressed, high-frequency, almost real-time record of what politicians believe their supporters want to hear. Drawing on Derek Willis’s archive of political fundraising emails, we analyzed roughly 280,000 candidate emails sent since 2017 to trace how anti-billionaire populism became a major component of Democratic fundraising rhetoric, and how, more quietly but unmistakably, AI is starting to follow the same path.

Some quick caveats on the data before we dive in. Not all politicians send fundraising emails, and not all those that do are captured in this data, particularly for periods of time in the past. To remind you of this, I try to use the phrase “email-active members of Congress” where relevant. Moreover, to make our analyses make sense, I subset the data to partisan senders, and the classification process by which I do this is imperfect.

2025: the year Dems’ billionaire-bashing went supernova

Let’s start by simply tracking how often fundraising emails mention billionaires—and if you’re wondering, you can assume that essentially all mentions of billionaires are negative, as I’ve verified along the way.

For most of the past decade, anti-billionaire language was a niche product. Democratic emails invoked billionaires in the mid-single digits through 2017 and 2018, spiked briefly to around 14 percent during the Warren and Sanders primary surge in 2019, and then settled back down—through the entire Biden presidency, the billionaire appeared in roughly one of every twenty to twenty-five Democratic fundraising emails, barely more than in Republican ones.

Then came January 2025. In the weeks after an inauguration that seated tech CEOs in the front row and the dizzying drama of Elon Musk’s ill-fated DOGE experiment, billionaire mentions in Democratic emails quadrupled, peaking above 20 percent of all emails sent and holding around 15 percent ever since. Anti-billionaire fundraising tactics are now a mainstay of Democratic messaging.

To give you some texture, here are some examples of real 2025 emails that major Dem figures sent about billionaires.

Which Democrats lean hardest into this economic populism? To find out, I compared each member of Congress’s emails against how progressive their voting record is. (One wrinkle: the standard way of scoring voting records mistakes some of the most progressive members — like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar — for moderates, because they sometimes vote “no” on Democratic bills in protest. I use a newer method that corrects for this.)

There’s a clear pattern: although the entire party has a proclivity for bashing billionaires, it’s the left flank of the Democratic party that is mentioning them at the highest rates, on average. But it’s also interesting to see Hakeem Jeffries, the Dems Minority Leader in Congress, looking most like the Progressives in his billionaire bashing, too.

Dems billionaire bashing is fusing into AI-bashing…but only slowly

Even in 2026, with AI dominating the business press and creeping into the polling, only about 0.7 percent of Democratic fundraising emails are substantively about it—less than 1 out of every 100 fundraising emails. As a share of what campaigns actually talk about when they ask for money, AI remains a rounding error. Exactly what this means is tricky. Maybe the AI emails are rare but dramatic. But more likely, it indicates that candidates are not yet focusing on AI as a message for their donors.

Even so, the trajectory is steep: that 0.7 percent is triple the share from a year earlier, which was itself well above the year before, and Republicans are tracing the same curve albeit a step behind. The absolute level says AI populism has not arrived; the rate of growth says it may be coming!

Here’s one way to see why it might be coming. In this figure, I compare the fraction of email-active Democrats who mention billionaires, Elon Musk, or AI at least once in a given year. Even though only 0.7% of all Dem emails in 2026 mention AI, nearly 40% of email-active members of Congress have mentioned it at least once. This is similar to the rate of anti-billionaire rhetoric in 2019, when it was already starting to increase. Could this indicate that AI is on its way to be the new kind of anti-billionaire rhetoric? It’s hard to say, but it certainly seems possible, perhaps in one primary cycle’s time.

Like with the billionaire bashing, the anti-AI rhetoric is not even across the caucus. The most left-wing email-active members of Congress mention AI more than twice as much as the median-ish member of the party, and more than ten times as much as centrist Dems do. Elizabeth Warren mentions AI in more than 7% of her emails in 2026.

And what do these AI emails say? Let’s dive into the content a bit. To do that, I read them all myself (there are only 73 total for 2026), and then I asked Claude Fable to read them and categorize them by topic.

63 of the 73 emails frame AI as a threat. And the single largest category, at 26 percent, isn’t jobs, or deepfakes, or chatbots harming kids—it’s AI as an instrument of money, oligarchy, and corruption. Data centers and their energy costs come second, the Trump administration’s use of AI third; jobs and automation, the issue the whole populist-backlash thesis is supposedly built on, runs fourth at only 12 percent!

Democratic candidates aren’t yet running against AI as a technology that is going to put us all out of work, exactly. They are running against AI as the newest thing the billionaires are doing to you.

Here are some examples of what the 2026 AI emails look like. (These are all direct verbatim quotes.)

This is, I think, a key takeaway. AI is currently entering Democratic rhetoric through the anti-billionaire frame—the oligarchy story makes AI legible as a villain to donor audiences, and AI in turn gives the oligarchy story fresh material, a visible new answer to the question of what all that concentrated wealth is building. This mirrors what Shor’s polling finds on the demand side, where he argues persuasively that voters experience AI and the cost-of-living crisis as a single unified threat from a rigged system, rather than as separate issues. The supply side and the demand side of Democratic politics are converging on the same message.

Tech populism tends to wax and wane

Finally, it’s good to place the small but growing anti-AI wave in historical context. When we zoom out and look at tech more generally, we see that Republican anti-tech messaging spiked around 2021 at a peak almost as high as the recent Democrat backlash against Elon. This spike was largely driven by emails fundraising around the issue of “censorship” in social media, which died down over the course of the next several years.

This suggests two possible things to me. First, it may be that parties in opposition to the presidency tend to engage more in this anti-tech kind of populism. And second, we don’t know yet where the Democrats’ anti-billionaire and anti-AI rhetoric is going to go—Republican opposition to social media and “Big Tech” has not really crystallized into a clear policy agenda, and it’s entirely possible the same could happen this time around, too.

Looking ahead

There’s no guarantee that the public’s mood will drive political activity. Politicians have to decide that it’s in their interest to pursue particular ideas, rhetorical strategies, or policies that some people may demand. If we want to understand where new forms of political populism are heading in America—and how they may or may not seize on AI as a key villain in this broader drama—then we need to measure both how voters feel about the economy and AI, and how politicians are speaking about it.

My idea in this piece is that fundraising emails give us useful insight into how politicians are approaching these issues. Emails are sent frequently, they’re relentlessly optimized to drive clicks and donations, and they’re aimed at politicians’ core supporters. So they give us a sense of where the momentum is among each party’s base.

Democratic party emails paint a pretty clear picture: economic populism is widespread, particularly in the form of billionaire bashing; anti-AI populism is much, much smaller, but just starting to show signs of growth. And the way it’s growing matters. AI is not currently entering Democratic rhetoric as a jobs issue or a safety issue—it’s entering as the newest thing the billionaires are building, pushed first by the same progressive members who pioneered billionaire bashing before it conquered the rest of the party.

Today, AI sits in Democratic fundraising rhetoric almost exactly where the billionaire sat in 2019—a message popular mostly with the party’s left flank, and not commonplace in the party as a whole. Whether it follows the same path to widespread party adoption is the question these inboxes will answer first in the coming months and years. We’ll be watching!

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