(DCNF)—Americans’ growing fears about artificial intelligence followed them to the polls Tuesday and spread across party lines.
Seventy-six percent of voters reject building data centers in their local community, and 43 percent do not trust either party to tackle AI, according to early CNN exit poll results. These findings reflect similar results from national polling this year, which showed voters were torn about which party could be trusted to handle their AI concerns.
Out of 79,669 respondents, 23 percent of voters said AI and data centers were “crucial” to their vote, and 33 percent responded that AI and data centers were “a major factor” in their vote, CNN’s exit poll results showed. Voters who called the issue “crucial” backed Democratic House candidates 66 percent to 31 percent.
Fifty-seven percent of voters said AI will mostly hurt society, while 24 percent responded that the technology would mostly help society, the CNN data showed.
Similarly, an AP-NORC poll released Oct. 8 found that thirty-nine percent of adults said neither party could reliably handle AI. Adults in the AP-NORC poll also expressed concern about AI advancement, with 81 percent responding that it is “extremely/very important” to keep AI under the control of humans.
Another New York Times/Siena poll, conducted from Sept. 8 to 13, found 61 percent of likely voters opposed building data centers to power AI, which included 47 percent of Republicans.
However, AI and data centers were not the top issue for voters.
Ninety percent of voters felt that government corruption was a “crucial/major factor” to their vote, and 89 percent responded that cost of living was a “crucial/major” factor, according to CNN’s poll.
In 21 toss-up House districts, though, 43 percent of voters said they trust Democrats more on regulating AI, compared to 36 percent for Republicans, according to a Guidant Polling and Strategy survey first reported by the Daily Caller News Foundation on Monday. Eighty percent of voters in the same poll would be more inclined to support a candidate for congress who backed “common-sense” AI regulation.
“[T]he titans of Silicon Valley dig bunkers for themselves and warn that the artificial intelligence they are creating risks human extinction,” Democratic Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff said during his victory speech Tuesday, shared in a video posted on X.
CNN’s exit poll results come from the Voter Poll, a survey conducted by SSRS that combined nearly 80,000 participants surveyed between Oct. 19 and Nov. 3 before the election, with about 22,000 live interviews at 15 competitive states’ polling locations, according to CNN. The poll’s figures could be off by a margin of error of plus or minus 0.6 percentage points, and the data may change as CNN updates its interview data.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
