Do voters care about existential AI risks? One Senate candidate thinks so
Democrat Mallory McMorrow has released an unusually detailed AI agenda. Will it be a vote winner?
Last Thursday, Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow stood in front of a crowd of more than 100 at a small brewery in Elk Rapids. The village is located in northern Michigan in Antrim County, which went more than 24 points for Trump in 2024. The state senator was listening to a Presbyterian minister rank AI risks among her greatest concerns.
“I’m very concerned about Christian nationalism, and I hear a lot about the great replacement … However, I think the greatest replacement is artificial intelligence,” the minister said, struggling to find the words to succinctly describe such a gargantuan fear. “Do you take money from billionaires that are trying to control our country, steal our data, and call intelligence a commodity?”
McMorrow smiled reassuringly before launching into a list of her proposed solutions for both AI-driven job loss and AI safety risks. This is an answer she’s been waiting to give: though the candidate had rolled out her AI agenda just that week, she says she’s been getting similar questions about AI all along the campaign trail.
“She was like, as a faith leader, when we are called to lead our people in doing what’s right, this feels like an existential threat.” McMorrow told Transformer. “Across the board, everybody sees that it’s happening. It feels like it’s happening very, very quickly and they are concerned. Where is this going to go — is it going to help us, or is it going to hurt us?”
The day before her Elk Rapids campaign stop, McMorrow unveiled a plan to make companies pay for AI-related job losses by funding retraining programs and community benefits. The plan is based around two fiscal interventions: creating an AI Workforce Reinvestment Fund, which would require “companies that automate away jobs” to pay for upskilling and apprenticeship programs, and a “token tax” on all companies using AI to bolster state-funded aid programs like SNAP and Medicaid.
The plan attempts to appease progressives hostile to AI and get ahead of more widespread anxieties about an AI-induced reshuffling of the American job market. On Thursday, she announced even more AI policy positions including requiring a human in the loop in areas such as healthcare, hiring decisions and military technology, strengthening chip export controls, and a process for third-party or government reviews of frontier models before deployment — work that “starts to touch at some more of the existential questions,” McMorrow said.
“What I’ve seen is that policymakers in Washington seem to have taken one of two approaches,” says McMorrow. “It is either we can’t stand in the way of innovation, and bring all the tech CEOs to the table — or at the inauguration, if you will — and just let them do whatever they want. Or there’s the calls for a moratorium, that we just need to stick our heads in the sand until we can figure out what’s going on, which I think is just wholly irresponsible and unsophisticated given this is a global arms race.
“What I hear from Michiganders is that people are using this and they don’t wholly dislike it, they’re just worried about what it can do.”
McMorrow says she talked to a construction worker at a labor event who felt caught between welcoming more data center jobs and wanting to know those data centers wouldn’t power tools that would cause harm. “He was like okay, what can you do to ensure that the thing I am building isn’t used to surveil me and isn’t used to kill kids in another country?” she recounts. He was “really grappling with, ‘this is good for me and my job, but I also want to be able to sleep at night.’” (That calculation may get all the more complicated with the announcement from OpenAI that it has started work on a 1GW data center in Michigan.)
Her perspective on AI puts her squarely in the middle of the two other candidates vying for the Senate seat. Progressive podcaster Abdul El-Sayed has built his AI agenda on data centers, focused on concerns they may hike electricity costs, threaten energy reliability, and contaminate tap water, while they avoid basic transparency. Haley Stevens, meanwhile, the Democrat currently representing MI-11 in the House, hasn’t been as critical of the industry. Instead she has pushed bills such as one helping small businesses implement AI, and backed funding for NIST’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, but has been largely absent from negotiations on safeguards. She also has been criticized for taking money from super PACs and dark money groups. Neither have as comprehensive an AI agenda.
That may be because McMorrow has had some tutoring. In order to learn about AI, she says she’s met with AI workers and researchers at frontier developers and research institutions. They have told her about AI’s risks to jobs, the military and medicine, but also existential risks. Hearing them out alongside her constituents, she says, is part of gathering different perspectives. “I try to cover the broad bases as much as I possibly can — bring the smartest people into the room … to strike the balance.” (McMorrow’s campaign has received donations from Anthropic employees.)
McMorrow’s resulting rhetoric shows similarities to that of Alex Bores, whose RAISE Act was originally much more stringent than what was eventually passed, requiring third-party safety reviews before new models were made available to the public, similar to McMorrow’s safety plans. On the campaign trail, Bores has announced plans for an “AI Dividend”, a wealth distribution scheme between AI companies and workers with similarities to McMorrow’s AI-related job loss measures.
Notably, Bores has also attracted more than $4m in oppositional spending from the super PAC Leading the Future and its affiliates, whose backers include OpenAI investors a16z and Ron Conway, and the company’s President Greg Brockman. McMorrow has invoked LTF several times on the campaign trail, even though it hasn’t so far jumped into her race.
A number of pro-safety AI PACs have opposed Leading the Future’s spending against Bores, attracting national media attention that some argue has boosted his campaign. McMorrow claims she’s wary LTF will enter her race, but if it did it could help her curry favor with anti-AI voters. “I fully expect there’s going to be a target on my back — I’m watching what’s happening in New York right now,” McMorrow said. “Telling people what the money is makes that money toxic.”
Despite similarities with Bores’ campaign, the only standing or potential future member of Congress McMorrow is willing to name as someone she knows can work with on AI legislation is Senator Elizabeth Warren. She claims that Warren “expressed some gratitude to me that we put out a plan that’s really thorough and thoughtful.” The influential senior member of Congress formally endorsed McMorrow in March. McMorrow promises she’s prepared to reach across the aisle, too, pointing to her career in the state legislature.
At another event in Macomb County, a swing district, McMorrow said it was clear that voters were desperate for a solution, no matter which party it came from. “Almost everybody I talked to at this roundtable said they’re either anxious, scared, pissed, or angry at this current [administration], but that doesn’t mean they think Democrats are any better,” she says. “There’s this sense that both parties care more about corporations than they care about regular people,” she says.
“There is a lane, just like in every other industry, where guardrails don’t mean you’re anti-innovation. I come from a state that’s the home of the auto industry — there are seatbelts and air bags, we do rigorous safety testing, and if something goes wrong, that car is recalled,” she says. “That’s my call, as the lane for the Democratic party: fight for people, because people are looking for somebody who’s going to fight for them.”
McMorrow invoking Leading the Future before they've entered her race is telling. The $4M they spent against Bores in New York has turned PAC opposition into a preemptive campaign issue — candidates are now running against the possibility of AI industry spending before it materializes. That construction worker in Antrim County asking whether what he's building will surveil him captures voter anxiety that no current federal policy addresses.