Jim VandeHei brought up golf courses twice in one hour.
He wasn’t talking about golf. He was talking about data centers — specifically, how much water they use compared to a golf course, and how almost nobody arguing about them online has actually checked. VandeHei built Politico. Then he built Axios. He talks to more AI executives in a month than most senators do in a term. So when Brody Mullins and I sat down with him on The Deciders this week, I expected him to want to talk about the technology. He wanted to talk about the backlash.
“A data center’s become a stand-in for all of artificial intelligence,” he told us. “You really think the average person has sat there and studied whether or not it uses more water than a golf course or not? They just hear it and they have a reflexive reaction to it.”
A week earlier, on The Friday Reporter, Jessica Taylor described almost the same thing from the opposite vantage point. Taylor is the U.S. Senate and Governors Editor at The Cook Political Report, and she talks to more campaigns, in more states, than almost anyone in nonpartisan political analysis. She wasn’t theorizing. She was reporting what she’s actually hearing — unprompted, from voters and candidates in Ohio, Wisconsin and Kansas, where data centers have become a live, organic issue nobody scripted for them.
It’s a fair critique that Washington still treats AI policy as a debate about chips, compute and federal regulation. That was a defensible read in January. I don’t think it is true anymore.
Not a Silicon Valley problem. A Main Street one. A data center is the one piece of the AI economy most people will ever see with their own eyes — the humming building off the highway, the spiked electric bill, the water table nobody used to think about. That makes it the battleground, whether the industry planned for one or not.
VandeHei thinks it becomes a platform: “I think there’s a not insignificant chance that one of the parties — and I think it’d be the Democrats — will call for like literally shutting it down.”
Taylor isn’t waiting to find out if he’s right. She’s already watching it show up on the ground, ahead of anyone’s platform catching up to it.
Two guests. Two shows. One week apart. Neither one used the phrase “sleeper issue.” They didn’t need to.
Keep an eye on Ohio, Wisconsin and Kansas next year. Not because of who wins. Because of what the losing side decides to blame.
Pull Quotes
“A data center’s become a stand-in for all of artificial intelligence. You really think the average person has sat there and studied whether or not it uses more water than a golf course or not? They just hear it and they have a reflexive reaction to it.” — Jim VandeHei, Axios
“I think there’s a not insignificant chance that one of the parties — and I think it’d be the Democrats — will call for like literally shutting it down.” — Jim VandeHei, Axios
“An all-powerful technology with an all-powerful oligarch cannot coexist with people who have deep envy and feel like they’re getting screwed by the system. And that’s where we’re at right now.” — Jim VandeHei, Axios
Takeaway
Washington is still debating AI policy in the abstract — chips, compute, regulation. Voters are already fighting about it in the concrete: the data center down the road. That gap is the sleeper issue of the 2026 midterms.
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Full conversation with Jim VandeHei on The Deciders, and with Jessica Taylor on The Friday Reporter.