Count the political targets in a single column: hyperscale data centers, AI plate-reading cameras, social platforms aimed at minors, phones in classrooms, crypto, and the prediction and gambling markets [13]. Six sectors, and not one of them has a candidate making its case. The same piece notes what campaigns used to promise voters instead: rural broadband, and a laptop on the desk of every public school student [7].
The mechanism that turns mood into cost is jurisdictional. A large campus earns its return on a schedule set by county commissions and utility regulators, whose members answer to voters. A developer meeting local resistance has historically been able to shop for a friendlier map, because the objection usually arrived with a party label attached. Semafor's read takes that away, describing Democrats and Republicans arriving at the same complaint, that the industry strips communities of their autonomy [1]. The expense here is delay rather than denial, and delay does not require a hostile majority, only a contested race.
Flock is a smaller target that moves faster [2]. What a House nominee in mid-Michigan attacked was not a building but the premise of an ongoing database of the location of every American citizen, which he called profoundly un-American [3]. A named vendor is portable in a way that a single site fight is not.
Against that, the evidence is still anecdote-shaped: a handful of campaigns, one settlement in which Meta agreed to new child-safety tools after insisting the tools it already had were plenty [4][5], and a school phone ban that Marsha Blackburn and Kathy Hochul want from opposite parties [6]. No permit denials counted, no cancelled contracts, no polling figures beyond the observation that pollsters find voters queasy about the expansion of gambling and unconvinced they will get rich holding the right coin [9].
What is absent is the growth argument that normally carries a build through a bad news cycle. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that after the deportations and the closing of the border, "we don't need to produce as many jobs" [12]; job growth slower than under Biden is sometimes described from inside the administration as cause for celebration [11]. Nor is the power side getting easier, with the administration stopping wind and solar farms and unwinding Biden-era renewable spending [10]. A sector that has to ask permission to build, in a year when neither party wants to be seen granting it, should be underwriting a longer calendar than its models currently carry.
