In the months before America's midterm elections, an unlikely consensus has emerged across the partisan divide: both Democrats and Republicans are spending millions to cast artificial intelligence data centers as a threat to the communities where they are built. The convergence is less a matter of shared ideology than shared opportunity — ground-level protests over water, power, and broken promises have given politicians on both sides permission to challenge an industry that had long operated beyond serious electoral scrutiny. What this moment reveals is something older than any technology deb