Don’t be fooled by Bernie Sanders — tech won the midterms

Thanks to the loud noises of a few boldface names on the left, Americans are getting the impression that the Democrats of 2026 are the anti-technology party. With the blue team surging into Congress this election cycle, the logical inference is that the tech industry lost big — a huge deal for the many voters who had just about resigned themselves to the idea that technology is the one thing that can’t be stopped in America.

Drawing this conclusion would be a colossal misread of reality, no matter how sensationalist the headlines about draconian tech crackdown plans coming from Bernie Sanders and company.

The left elites do not want to de-technologize our economy, our government, or anything else. They simply want to control the technology — the better to control everything downstream of it.

At the tactical level, Democrats did not win because they ran against tech. At the strategic level, the domestic and international left is more convinced than ever that the only way it can end the Trump era and re-establish itself as the ruling elite is by wielding technology with renewed force.

First, the ground truth. As observed by Adam Kovacevich, the tech-optimist Democrat who founded the Chamber of Progress and came from Google’s public policy shop, AI and data centers ranked a distant 19th among issues in a New York Times/Siena survey. Democrats in gubernatorial contests who didn’t support data center bans performed better than those who did. And almost all Democrats Kovacevich defines as “pro-innovation” have won their races. (So far.)

The exit polls tell the same story. Almost 40% cited the economy as their top concern; nearly a third cited the “state of democracy.” The rest prioritized immigration, health care, foreign policy, and crime.

Now, one could argue that all these priorities have to do with tech in some sense. Tech has largely eaten the economy. Tech is reworking our form of government. Tech is what’s behind the intense push to fill out well-paying jobs with skilled immigrants. Health care is rapidly being technologized. Foreign policy is already dominated by the race to technologically transform the global battlefield — a dynamic that has focused unprecedented controversy around Israel, a country that has rapidly vaulted to cyber-superpower status. Crime? Seen any headlines about cyberattacks lately …?

Yes, in a very real sense, as Donald Trump so memorably put it, everything is computer now.

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But the left elite has no qualms about the force of these transformative technological changes. It only opposes the vector, which has arrowed in a nominally rightward direction ever since the most influential faction of Silicon Valley decided they could only remain masters of their own destiny if they threw in with Trump.

The left elites do not want to de-technologize our economy, our government, our immigration policy, our health care industry, our foreign policy, or anything else. They simply want to control the technology — the better to control everything downstream of it.

Right-wingers may look at that fact and see within it a darkly pulsating evil. Because they share little religious unity, many on the right insist on seeing that menace in ideological, not religious terms — not demonic but communist, socialist, or third-worldist.

Yet whatever kernels of insight may lurk therein, the truth is that the right is even more desperate to control the tech than the left is, and that tortured desire defines the political battle space far more than any of the hoary modern “isms” that Americans keep being told to conform our transformed postmodern reality to. It’s not going to work.

Everyone — left, right, center, white, brown, or purple — fears erasure, defeat, and destruction at the hands of adversaries who have aced them out for control of godlike tech.

RELATED: Sorry, Bill Gates. We’re sitting out this apocalypse.

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That’s why the midterms weren’t a referendum on the breakneck advancement of technology to an even greater position of dominance over our country and our way of life. And yet despite real defeats for data centers in local elections, tech’s commanding position remains intact. Those setbacks may turn out to be Tootsie Roll-sized speed bumps. (Think stopping data centers stops AI? Think again.)

Tech elites who embraced Trump — Elon Musk first among them — may worry about reprisals from Democrats looking to throw bloody beefsteaks to the slavering mob. But at a time when almost nothing but tech has consequential energy behind it, it is technology that was the victor on Tuesday and technology that will define the fateful choices America’s elites will make — with or without public support — about just what our country and our people are to become.

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