My new research: I analyzed 280,000 fundraising emails to track the recent, sharp rise in anti-billionaire populist rhetoric among Democratic politicians, and to show how it's slowly merging with a new kind of anti-AI populism.
We know from @davidshor, @jasminewsun, @ArchieHall and others' writing and research that American voters are skeptical of AI, but we know less about how politicians at large are thinking about it. Fundraising emails are a super useful way to measure, in roughly real-time, what politicians are saying to their most devoted followers about key issues.
Here are some of my main findings:
(1) Anti-billionaire rhetoric took off sharply in 2025 among Democrats, driven by anti-Elon fundraising appeals and now including a variety of tech themes.
(2) Anti-AI content is only a small fraction of Dem emails even today---but it's rising quickly.
(3) Anti-AI Dem emails don't tend to focus on job loss or x-risk; they're focused on how AI is the next thing that billionaires are "doing to us"---the latest symptom of an oligarchy rigging the economy against us.
(4) The spike in anti-billionaire populism looks similar to a previous spike in anti-social-media rhetoric among Republicans around 2021. That spike never really turned into meaningful policy.
(5) On the other hand, the adoption of the AI topic among Dems is on a similar trajectory to their previous embrace of anti-billionaire rhetoric---so it could be a major focus in the near future.
Lots more details in the full write-up here:
freesystems.substack.com/p/a…
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