In Brooklyn’s ‘commie corridor,’ a phone-free room of Democrats agreed a blue wave is coming — and fought about who gets the AI money
· Fortune
I checked my phone into a pouch at the door of 100 Sutton St. in Greenpoint on Thursday night, along with about 300 other people, five days before the midterms. It was deep in the so-called “commie corridor” that runs from northwest Queens through northern Brooklyn, and the crowd for Newsreel’s “Midterm Mania” panel and campaign staff, consultants, organizers, founders and journalists were gathered: the people who make a living off the feed, spending a night without it.
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Chi Ossé, the youngest member of the New York City Council and a democratic socialist, got the first big reaction. “Make some noise, Brooklyn,” he said when he walked onstage. When he called for Democrats to come out against the war in Iran and part of the room didn’t clap, he had a ruling ready: “Everyone who’s not clapping is supportive of war.”
Newsreel founder and CEO Jack Brewster had asked everyone who RSVPed, “What’s the one election question you want answered?” More than 150 answered, and the walls were covered in Post-it notes. Brewster set up the night’s last panel with his own: “Democrats are on track to win big according to polls, but they still cannot agree on who they are.”
Over 90 minutes, the people onstage made his case. They didn’t agree on whether the party is socialist, or on whether data centers are a jobs program or a menace. They didn’t agree on what to do about AI beyond taxing it. What they shared was the goal of winning Tuesday, and the odds look good. The New York Times/Siena poll released Oct. 21 had Democrats up 10 on the congressional ballot and Trump’s approval at 36%. That leaves the party most likely to take the House without a position on the AI buildout that’s eating up corporate capital spending, at a moment when half of Americans oppose a data center within three miles of their home, according to the POLITICO Poll, conducted by PF Global.
Whatever you need to do
Ossé, who represents Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, dropped a primary challenge to Hakeem Jeffries last year after the DSA wouldn’t back him. Forbes’ Isabel Togoh asked whether it matters if a progressive candidate calls himself a socialist. “The number one thing that I care about within our party is taking back this country back from the right,” Ossé said. “Whatever you need to do in order to do that at this point in time, you know, I do support that.”
That covered Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democrat who won his Senate primary with Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s backing and has since insisted he isn’t a socialist. Whatever El-Sayed is doing, Ossé said, “is one that I support in order to beat this fascist, far-right government.” He also said he believes “the direction of this party will go towards democratic socialism.”
On AI, Ossé said he doesn’t “really understand it that much” and barely uses it himself. He still had a plan for it. He’d call big tech and AI CEOs to testify before Congress and “maybe be put behind bars for a little bit,” and on Sanders’ proposed one-time 50% stock tax on the biggest AI companies, he said: “Cosign and tax some more.”
The data center lane
The data-center panel was where the room was most united, and where the party’s own record looked shakiest. Moderator Dominic-Madori Davis of TechCrunch passed along what a private-equity executive had told her: “people are not upset at data centers, they’re just mad at AI.”
Hilary Flint, who organizes against data centers in Pennsylvania for the Center for Oil and Gas Organizing, said the right tends to worry about eminent domain and the left about the environment, but “I’ve never seen people of all beliefs be on the same page about an environmental issue the way they are on this one.” The Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance group on Facebook now has over 44,000 members from across the political spectrum, she said. Maia Woluchem, who has tracked the buildout in the state for Data & Society, put data centers in “a long legacy of industrial obfuscation,” landing in towns that already have fracking wells in backyards and families living next to coal mines.
Nationally, the environmental footprint is small. Data centers account for about 1.5% of global electricity demand and 0.5% of global CO2 emissions, according to International Energy Agency data compiled by Carbon Brief. In the U.S., they used 4.4% of the country’s electricity in 2023, according to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report, a share it projects could reach 6.7% to 12% by 2028. The load is concentrated, though. In Virginia, data centers already use 26% of the state’s electricity, according to figures Carbon Brief cites.
Which party is really anti-data center?
The Democrat running Pennsylvania has been on both sides of it. Gov. Josh Shapiro announced Amazon’s $20 billion data center investment in the state, per the AP. After “incredible pushback,” Woluchem said, Shapiro “tried to reverse that decision” a couple of months ago. Flint said activists have pushed the governor to the point of “saying we have the strictest data center laws in the country, which isn’t quite true, but we’re going to get him there.” Her plan for him: “We’re going to move him slowly until he reflects his constituents.”
Morris Katz, a partner at Fight Agency and Mamdani’s lead media strategist, later offered Republicans the issue outright. “Republicans can feel free to have the pro-data-center lane if they’d like,” he said, adding that Trump-plus-25 districts are in play because of data centers.
The other side of the argument is the party’s old base. Batya Ungar-Sargon, the NewsNation host who calls herself a “MAGA leftist” and voted for Trump in 2024, said national trade unions are “crossing party lines for the first time and endorsing Republicans” because data centers mean good jobs for electricians and pipefitters. Katz said the unions “have been forced to the table by failed policies for decades,” by the same people, he argued, who have been screwing workers for 30 years.
Ungar-Sargon noted that those screwed-over workers have gone to the right. Trump won most voters earning under $100,000, she noted, and Democrats represent nine of the 10 richest counties. “The far-left has only accelerated the problem of the political realignment,” she said. She pointed to Medicare for All, which she called “extremely popular with working class voters. Until you tell them that their taxes will have to go up.” Katz responded that he didn’t think taxes would go up.
Katz called himself “a populist who believes we should have a big tent party.” Astead Herndon, host of Vox’s America, Actually, argued that 2024 wasn’t a realignment so much as “an establishment collapse.”
Ask again Wednesday
Katz threw cold water on a breakthrough for the left’s identity crisis. “Even in the best-case scenario where we win big,” he said, “I think we still need to be ready to have harder conversations about where we go from here.”
The rapid-fire round showed how far off those conversations are. Brewster asked for a yes or no on whether enough new Democratic senators would win to push Chuck Schumer out of leadership. Katz said, “I hope we get as many Democratic senators as we humanly,” before Brewster cut in: “Can not answer.” Asked about Mamdani’s next move, Katz said the mayor would wake up “laser focused on New York City.” Herndon, asked who controls the Senate in January: “I don’t want to make a prediction.”
The most specific forecast of the night came from an AI company. Aryan Ranjan, co-founder, CFO and head of AI at the campaign-software startup Baraza, called 231 House seats and 52 Senate seats for Democrats. Ungar-Sargon was the only panelist willing to call the Senate: “I think the Republicans hold on to the Senate, but I don’t know. I could be wrong.”
Then the chairs were cleared, the DJ started, and I got my phone back.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com