Senators John Fetterman and Dave McCormick: Bipartisanship, Money in DC, Datacenters, Graham Platner

Now a look at the state of Pennsylvania. It’s one of the most important states in this presidential race.

Both of Pennsylvania’s senators, Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Dave McCormick, voted in favor of the bill.

In this situation, we both agree that shutting our government down is wrong for our commonwealth and for our nation.

So we’re looking for ways to find common ground, and when we disagree, we disagree. But when we can agree, we agree.

Our votes are about country over party at this point.

We’re trying to set a good example because we have lots of disagreements, but we trust each other, we like one another, and we look for ways to work together.

I thought the best way to kick this off was to actually give both of you a few moments to just say what’s on your mind. In the rules of parliamentary decorum, Senator Fetterman, as the senior sitting senator from Pennsylvania, maybe you can start.

I’m proud to call Senator McCormick a good friend. Things are very polarized now, and I refuse to engage in the kinds of extremism that we’re seeing. We’re going to fight together for Pennsylvania and for our nation right now, and we’re going to continue to have conversations like this, whether in Pennsylvania or here across the country.

We have to find a better way forward through a lot of these circumstances.

Dave.

One of the benefits of being in a place like Pennsylvania is that the voters expect us to find ways to work together. If you put this moment in perspective, I think it’s probably the most consequential moment in all of our lifetimes. In fact, I think it might be the most consequential moment in humankind. So much change is happening.

It’s artificial intelligence, of course, but it’s really how that’s affecting everything: life sciences, defense, and energy. It’s a moment of enormous change. That change creates a lot of anxiety that lends itself to polarization and extremes. If there was ever a time when it’s more important to find ways to work together, it’s now.

We’ve found ways to work together on everything from energy policy to fentanyl, the fentanyl crisis, and antisemitism in Pennsylvania and across the country, to drone technology. These are issues of such consequence that you can’t get there by just being with your team. You have to be able to find common ground, and we’ve really looked for ways to do that.

I think he could confirm that Pennsylvania keeps you honest. I’d like to remind everybody that we are the only two people in our respective cycles who flipped seats. Both parties want that. We want to flip seats. We’ve done that because I think we’ve rejected the extreme kinds of views, and now it’s better to work together for Pennsylvania and for our country.

AI is really important, and that sometimes puts me at odds with the direction that the Democratic Party seems to be moving in right now. A moratorium on data centers, for me, is a China-first kind of policy. I’m going to continue to push back on that. I’m not going to describe that as a scourge; I’m going to describe that as an incredible new opportunity.

My friend organized an incredible symposium in western Pennsylvania that brought AI and energy together. Those are two parts of what Pennsylvania really brings to the table in this very, very important conversation.

I think that we’re at this point now where, as Pennsylvania goes, so goes the rest of the country. If you can find common ground in the state on these very thorny issues, maybe the rest of the country can find common ground, and vice versa is also true. If you guys can’t find resolution, what are the odds that California and West Virginia, making it up, find resolution?

What is it like, day in the life, in the U.S. Senate trying to find these compromises? From our perspective outside in, a lot of the time it just seems like nothing is happening.

Dave.

If you step back, you would see that we look very similar, but we have many similar backgrounds.

We do?

We have similar backgrounds in the sense that we both grew up in rural Pennsylvania. We had similar childhoods, and John went into public service. I left, went to West Point, and went into the military, but we both came back from those rural backgrounds.

What’s interesting in Pennsylvania is that it has 19 electoral votes and is a microcosm of the country. You have these 2 big urban centers, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, which are mostly Democratic. You have these rural areas that are mostly red, mostly Republican, and you’ve got to build a coalition across those to win.

Ironically, a lot of the same people who voted for Senator Fetterman voted for me and voted for President Trump. That’s the coalition you have to build. In particular, it is a working families coalition.

The thing that’s ironic is that even though all the national unions would have endorsed Kamala Harris and Bob Casey, my opponent, 2-thirds of the rank and file—the electricians, the pipefitters, the steamfitters—voted for me. They voted for him, too. Even though we have a lot of differences in our parties, we have come together around that coalition.

That coalition includes a very significant Latino turnout and a very significant African American turnout—the highest African American turnout in 2024 in the last 30 years. That coalition, I think, is up for grabs. Who wins that coalition in Pennsylvania and who wins it in the country, I think, will dictate the future to a large degree in 2028 and beyond.

That’s what we’re working on together, because we’re trying to build that coalition to do good things together in Pennsylvania.

The Senate is at an all-time low in terms of approval rating. We have the lowest approval rating of a president in history after Biden, who was extremely low-rated. You guys can’t control the debt. The American populace believes we’d be in a golden age right now, but they’re not seeing it. Inflation is soaring. The president seems to be running amok and has no check in the House, and you guys are responsible—

What do you really think, John?

Other than this—“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln”—there’s $40 trillion in debt, and you’re spending more than ever. The American people, I think, are extremely frustrated with both parties.

It’s great to see you guys come together, but what are you going to do to bring back some balance between the branches of government? This does not seem to be going in the right direction for anybody but the people in this room, which is to say the top 10% of our society.

For me, you referenced that inflation is soaring. Just recently, that’s primarily driven by energy prices right now. Why are those energy prices high? Because the president decided to hold Iran accountable. I’m the only Democrat who actually agrees with that.

That was not a radical idea for a Democrat. Every single person running for president as a Democrat said, “We must never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb,” and now we have the opportunity to hold them accountable. That’s why I continue to vote against the War Powers Act, too.

For inflation, yes, absolutely no one thinks $5 a gallon is great. But if you allow Iran to become nuclear, $5 a gallon is going to seem quaint.

So what’s driving this economic conversation overall right now? For me, I think what’s most important is not to turn everything into a partisan thing. That’s the danger. If we despise Trump more than we are concerned about Iran becoming a nuclear power, that will have profound implications not just for that region, but also on the global stage.

That’s the difficulty moving forward. I’ve said this on the All-In podcast: “Who’s the leader of the party?” I’m like, “That’s TDS, 100%.” Our party is defined by opposition to whatever he comes out for. I’ve said, “If Trump comes out for ice cream and lazy Sundays, we’re going to hate that.”

We all have a bandwidth, and we all have a platform. I feel like you have to discriminate. I don’t care about the ballroom. If you want to build it, sure, great. I was there for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and I saw how dangerous that was for our leadership, but I don’t care about the reflecting pool.

We can’t stop talking about all this other stuff, so we can’t really focus on the thing that’s more important. It’s all become distracted by this small-ball game.

Dave, is there a path to resolution? You guys are going to be forced to confront the filibuster, which is this critical bulwark that sort of leaves some attempt at finding common ground out there, but there’s a lot of pressure to end it.

I think, Senator Fetterman, you said you’d be supportive of ending the filibuster. Is that where we’re going—to total tribalism?

Let’s talk about the filibuster. The entire Democratic Party, including myself, was so wrong about the filibuster.

In my cycle in 2020, every single Democrat identified that we had to eliminate the filibuster. It seemed like it made sense then, and thank God—thank God—we had people who stood there, whether it was Senator Manchin or Senator Sinema. History has vindicated their wisdom in doing that.

And now Democrats—we all wanted to get rid of it in ’22, and in 2025 we love it. Now it enforces people to work together on both sides. If you turn the Senate into a smaller version of the House, where majority rules, that would have profound implications.

I would be the first person to announce, “Hey, I was so wrong about that.” That’s one of the kinds of hills I would die on now to defend the filibuster—how important it is to the Senate, but also for Senate minority rights, whoever that happens to be at that time. That’s what’s so critical about the filibuster to governance here.

I would say, first of all, Congress—but lots of institutions right now have very low public approval and very low trust. That’s a huge problem. It’s across all areas: the church, public officials, and business in many cases. So, we’ve got to rebuild trust in our institutions.

One of the ways you do that is through your own personal conduct. One of the things we can do is try to set the example. If you look at my voting and his voting, I am an unapologetic conservative. I vote as a conservative. At the same time, that doesn’t mean you can’t work together.

We look for every opportunity for bipartisan legislation. I’ve got more bipartisan legislation than anybody. We’ve collaborated on dozens of things together because you can do both.

The filibuster is frustrating as a businessperson. I was in business for 25 years, so it’s frustrating, the pace of how slowly things move. But I do think it creates the requirement—the impetus—to get things done. I would disagree with you: I think a lot of big things have been done.

If you look at the energy agenda, we can’t win the AI race without energy, and we’ve made huge progress on energy. I’m hoping we’re going to get permanent reform, which would be the biggest economic lever we could possibly get done over the next 6 months or the next 2½ years.

We’ve closed the border. We’ve stopped the flow of fentanyl. We had 4,000 people who died in Pennsylvania in the last year of the Biden administration; it’s 1,600 this year. It’s down 60%. We’re seeing those same statistics nationally.

And then there are huge, intractable problems like the debt and the deficit, which are existential, that we’re not dealing with. That’s not so much a product of the filibuster or not the filibuster. That’s a product of the polarization of our country and both sides taking advantage of anybody willing to look at a problem in a hard way.

My question was about the bottom half of the country in the K-shaped economy we’re in and how it’s not working. You guys are phenomenally unpopular with that group of Americans. So, is there a way to address wealth concentration?

No, it’s a huge problem, and I don’t think I listened carefully last night. I just want to tell you that it is a huge problem that’s growing. The median income in Pennsylvania is $52,000 a year.

When you guys say AI or AI anxiety, these folks have been down this road once before, when a bunch of smart, rich people said, “We’ve got the answer. It’s called globalization.” What happened in my hometown is that there was a mill with 2,000 people that got gutted. It’s now 100 people.

So, there’s enormous anxiety, but it’s because there’s no path to getting ahead. Everybody in this room has had the greatest 10 years in the history of humanity if they have assets.

So, do you have a plan?

There have got to be a number of plans.

Well, do you have a plan? Because it’s not just going to be me; it’s going to be us.

Listen, I’m a beneficiary of capitalism. I have been wildly fortunate because of capitalism. But we are going to lose capitalism unless we find a combination of ways to address this.

The Invest America Act is a perfect way, right? You’re building opportunity for the next generation. The school-choice provision in the Working Families Tax Cut Act—$1,700. Everybody in this room can give $1,700 every year. That’s billions of dollars that are going to go into school choice, making sure everybody has equality of opportunity.

If you don’t do that at maximum scale, and this moment leaves the majority of Americans behind, we’re not going to be able to get anything done.

Spend more money on programs.

Yes, spend more money—but not just spend more money. Spend more money giving people opportunities. The reason those two accounts are great is that they take it out of the government and circumvent the government. It’s based on incentives and a choice by people who have wealth.

It’s sort of Andrew Carnegie brought to the present day: Take that wealth, put it in the hands of those who will benefit from it, but it’s your choice. It’s not dictated by the government. I think that’s going to have to be part of the answer.

Does anyone in Congress subscribe to the notion, rooted in empiricism, that the more we spend, the harder it is for people to have economic mobility? I think there’s a simplified notion that government has to play a role in driving people’s progress.

The truth is, the more government intervenes in markets, the more inefficient and the more expensive those markets get. Therefore, the more inaccessible wealth and value creation are for any individual. The freer the market, the less the government intervenes, the less the government is spending, and the less the government is buying, the better things get for people, generally speaking.

It seems to me that every time I visit D.C., I leave profoundly unhappy because I meet with people in Congress, and this notion seems to be diametrically opposed to their viewpoints: that everything is about doing more for people. Government needs to do more on both sides of the aisle.

Whereas if the government did less, things would get more affordable, things would get more accessible, and people would have greater economic mobility.

Well, I mean, talk about the government. We had not just 1, but 2 shutdowns. Both were historic in terms of their length. We couldn’t agree on very basic things, and now we’ve shut the government down collectively for over 120 days or whatever it is now.

That’s one of the things that, as a Democrat, I refuse to engage in. If that’s a core responsibility as a senator, keep our government open. For the love of God, find a way to agree enough to keep things open and not put things at risk and make our country less safe.

I’m proud to be a capitalist. Capitalism is the 1 system that has proven to raise the standard of living for humans across the globe. People in my party now have bad ideas that refuse to die, and now we’re talking about socialism and communism. We have candidates now saying, “I am a communist,” and things like that.

Talk to anyone who’s had to live under those kinds of regimes. They’re all absolute capitalists. That’s absolutely the fact. The market has fixed a lot of these kinds of problems.

I’m not terrified by AI. Am I concerned about it? 100%. I have my fears and concerns about mass hacking and weaponizing it that way. That’s coming. I think that should belong to America. America should build that chassis.

That’s why, if we turn my party into one where AI is the scourge or the cancer, I refuse to reject it, because it’s going to transform the world. It can come from us, or it can come from China. Whose side are you going to be on?

A lot of the people who oppose that have opposition funded by groups that are aligned with the CCP. That’s part of the danger right now. That’s the dangerous time right now. Democrats in my party say, “The problems are billionaires,” but we love the billionaires who fund our views, too.

I don’t target people. People call out Bezos or whoever, and it’s like, don’t do that. Don’t call out private citizens; identify the problem. They create jobs. If you’ve never created a job, don’t criticize people who have really changed our economy for the better, honestly.

Why is Graham Platon doing so well in the polls? This is a candidate who has a literal Nazi tattoo on his chest. What does history tell us comes next if he wins? If a candidate like that can win, what does that tell us?

Yeah, yeah, I know. When I was a kid, if someone had a Nazi tattoo, you probably could call them a Nazi sympathizer. Just yesterday, we discovered that he was sexting with up to a dozen women, and now some Democrats are saying, “What’s the big problem?”

They’re constantly ignoring a lot of these things. This is a guy who, just a couple of years ago, described an American soldier in a firefight with the Taliban as a “dumb mother [__] that doesn't deserve to live.”

Those are his words. Who does that? Who lurks online and becomes a really tough guy behind a keyboard? I can’t explain it other than as a backlash to how partisan things are. Someone like that should have been in this race right now.

So here we are: a guy who was sexting up to a dozen women, and he’s getting a pass on it. We’re just saying, “What’s the big deal?” Why not confront that and call that out? And that’s the danger. Could you imagine if either one of us described an American soldier as a dumb that deserves to lie, or described our army as absolute trash? He described the American army as absolute trash.

That’s a viable candidate now, and that’s a bizarre place to live right now as a Democrat. And I’m—

If he wins, what does that tell us about where we’re headed?

Well, look at what’s happening there. There are problems on both parties, but certainly what you’ve seen on the left is two things that I think are indisputable. One is a migration to these terrible ideas of socialism and Marxism and so forth. In addition to that, there’s this real rise of anti-Semitism and hatred.

The tell here of how pervasive it is is the people who are now campaigning in Maine, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren—these are mainstream Democrats that have now lurched so far to the left. I think if those candidates win, and that becomes validation of the viability of that stream of thinking in the Democratic Party, it’s horribly unhealthy for America.

Ironically, the best thing we want if we’re Republicans is a strong Democratic Party that keeps us honest and keeps us in check with good ideas. That’s not happening. As I said, we have problems on both sides, but I think that lurch to the left is really frightening.

Well, and then, as you just brought up, Israel—that’s a profound betrayal for my party on Israel. The people who are winning a lot of these elections, one of their signature views is anti-anti-Israel and, for many of these candidates, borderline raw anti-Semitism. That’s exactly where we are.

That has isolated me in the party, and I’m just calling that what it is. That’s dangerous, and that’s one of the things we happen to agree on. That’s the right side of history for me, and that’s a—

I mean, maybe one of the best things that can happen is that Shapiro continues to do well in Pennsylvania. Irrespective of which party you align with, a prominent Jew winning in Pennsylvania and running that state well is a very good sign for the rest of the country. It shows that there is common ground and that anti-Semitism is much more in check than the perception.

Shapiro—we had him on as well.

No, I think Josh is fantastic.

Yeah, and he has a lot of disagreements with us, maybe about going into this war and being egged into it. And by the way, Fetterman, if you’re looking for the source of why people feel comfortable saying these terrible things, you can look no further than Trump and what he said about McCain being a war hero. That started this rhetoric.

He said McCain wasn’t a war hero because he got captured. That’s where this started, and now everybody wants to one-up it.

Oh, please. You’re trying to blame Trump for the fact that a Democratic candidate in Maine has a Nazi tattoo on his chest?

No, the rhetoric—

Okay, okay, all right.

—started with Trump.

This is tedious land, but fortunately we’re not interviewing you, Jay Cal.

Let me ask Senator Fetterman a question. I appreciate your common-sense views on AI, capitalism, and all the things we’re talking about, and I think the people in Pennsylvania appreciate it. I think you’re very popular there. But I’m curious: do you ever get worried that you might get primaried in the Democratic Party when you come up? The Bernie Sanders wing is powerful. They have a lot of Black activists, and they’re very noisy. Do you ever think about that risk?

I appreciate your maverick streak and your independence, but how do you think about that risk?

A seat or a job is not something I’m always going to compromise for. I’m going to be honest, and my votes and my opinions are going to be what I happen to believe is true. It’s not a seat worth trying to maintain if I’m going to lie or pretend that things aren’t absolutely true.

Yeah, absolutely, I can be primaried, and there are some Democrats who are angry at me. If they’re angry at me for supporting Israel, they can have at it. If they’re angry at me because I think it’s wrong to shut down the government, that’s fine. If they’re angry at me because I refuse to call him a Nazi or a fascist or a piece of [__], I’ll never do that. You can hold me on that, too.

But what’s really strange is that the truth is, somebody who votes 93% of the Democratic line—if I changed my party, there was a lot of palace intrigue that I was going to change parties. I’m never going to do that. If I did, I could announce right now, “I am changing it right now.” My votes aren’t going to change. My views aren’t going to change. I wouldn’t vote any differently. I’m going to vote for the things I happen to believe in.

And if Democrats run me out of the party, they will be attacking a committed Democrat who votes the party line 93% of the time. We’re in a new time right now where I think things are more important than trying to—

I know what pays the bills as a Democrat now. Literally, campaigns are based on Trump. It’s literally in their campaign commercials, in their emails, and in the outrage. It’s constant rage bait. I refuse to engage in that, and I’m going to be an example of what I think is entirely appropriate.

A lot of these conversations are driven by people who represent very safe blue-state seats. That’s why Pennsylvania keeps people honest. People are going to remember in 2028: “Oh, yeah, I want to be bipartisan. I want to get along.” People don’t believe you. They remember what people have said and how they’ve behaved.

So that’s where I’m at. Yes, I could be primaried, but what’s more important is being truthful about the values I think are important and reminding people of the things we used to believe in. I think—

Senator, I want to move to domestic policy and economics for a second. You mentioned this incredible story in the green room, which maybe you can start off with: the number of people who reach out to you every week, mostly to complain about various companies. Use that as an insight to talk about AI, because that’s a huge part of your state and a huge part of the American economy. Maybe compare it to what happened with shale and oil, because there are a lot of commonalities. I think it’s quite interesting.

I don’t know if he gets the same amount, but on an average week, we have almost 14 million people in Pennsylvania. On an average week, I’ll get something like 100,000 outreaches to me—letters, emails, phone calls—across different issues. You can almost see when activists are mobilizing groups to come and make the case on certain things.

I do a call every 2 weeks that’s sort of an open mic, where you get about 10,000 people to show up. The number of data center calls has grown. Data centers have become a much bigger and more pervasive issue.

Just to put this in perspective, David was there. Dean and I hosted an energy and innovation summit in Pennsylvania last July. We had $92 billion of investment committed. We had the energy CEOs, the AI CEOs, big investors, and global investors. Senator Fetterman came, Governor Shapiro came, the president came, and the cabinet came. It was amazing.

By the way, that’s what you need. Winning is a team sport, and winning in AI is a team sport. You need all those players at the table. It was a real success, and since then there have been enormous investments made in Pennsylvania.

I visited one just the other week in Homer City: 4.4 gigawatts of power from a coal plant that’s being transitioned over to natural gas. 3.4 gigawatts is going into a data center complex, and 1 gigawatt is going back on the grid to hopefully bring down energy prices.

This is happening across Pennsylvania, but the opposition is growing, and it’s clear—

Is there an organic part to this? It’s very hard to understand what’s happening when you have these kinds of dark forces and dark pools of money. Is there a legitimate “I don’t want to have this in my backyard for X, Y, and Z” component?

There’s enormous misinformation, and I think that misinformation is largely being driven by China and outside forces. Then there’s simply a legitimate lack of understanding and knowledge.

We need to do a much better job of making sure that the outlines of what these data centers mean to communities are clear. Frankly, there needs to be a much clearer covenant about what it means if you’re going to have a data center in your community and you’re a township supervisor.

Here’s what you know: they’re going to bring more energy than they’re going to use. They’re going to protect their water with closed-loop systems, and they’re going to give this much to the tax base.

They're going to build schools or infrastructure, whatever they're going to build.

Isn't that first part the only thing that matters in people's minds? I just don't want my energy bill to go up.

No. Because as soon as you get through that, they move to the next thing, which is water. Then the schools are going to be crowded. The schools are going to be crowded because there'll be new jobs? No, because there'll be new people, and they're not making the connection to the tax base. The roads are going to be crowded.

So there's a whole comprehensive case that needs to be made. Chamath was making the point that we went through this before. John and I both lived through this with fracking: a huge campaign against it, huge misinformation, and a lack of understanding. Fifteen years later, I'd say there's pretty broad-based support for it.

Yeah—well, no. There's unlimited money. Someone finds some B-roll or some kind of a comment, and they put $10 million behind it. They can turn you into the most extreme kinds of things.

Ironically, originally people tried to convince people that I'm a socialist, and now people are like, "Now I'm MAGA," or whatever. I'm like, "No, I just haven't changed. My views are the same." I would tell people, energy is national security. Look at what's happening in Europe and other parts of the world. If you don't have energy security, then your national security is in danger.

Now AI is coming. What he's done—he created this amazing symposium to remind people that we need both. We need energy, and Pennsylvania produces a lot of that. And now AI is coming; otherwise, we'd still be using the spinning jenny, or whatever that's called.

Why do we talk about data centers? Because people are describing them as a scourge or a cancer that's going to bankrupt you or destroy your community. Why do we have that right now? Because this is something that's going to transform our society. There could absolutely be a downside, but overall it's going to be much more productive, and that's going to create new opportunities.

I refuse to become a party of Luddites. If I had to vote and claim that it's all cancer, it's dangerous, and it's all downside, then I'd be lying. Republican or Democrat, that's a fact. These things are very important, and that's why I'm going to—

Can I just double-click on this thing? When you compare it to shale, I'm going to assume that when shale was escalating in importance, the pushback was from corporate interests that would have economically lost out. That's what I'm guessing—the majority.

Environmentalists.

Yeah, environmentalists.

But it seems like in AI, we're dealing with foreign state actors. Is that fair? Is it as reductively simple as that?

Well, if you go to those 2 parts, one was the campaign of misinformation, and the other was a lack of understanding. There's much more of a campaign of misinformation from outside forces this time around.

But in the case of shale, methane destroys the water table. People don't want these in their backyards. What happened, of course, was these enormous royalties for the farmers. We're the 4th-largest natural-gas reserves in the world. If we were a country, Pennsylvania would be number 4. This is the economic engine for our state. Our state is the 2nd-largest energy producer in the country.

So this unlocks everything for Pennsylvania. As those jobs started to be created and you saw the economic benefit, the misinformation about the methane in the water table became clear. Slowly, and much too late, 15 years later, we're now in a place where I bet 80% of the people would have supported fracking.

Well, at last night's event, you described that we have 6 to 8 months ahead of China, right? Is that right? Yeah. Okay. So now my party is driving for a moratorium on data centers. Do you think China doesn't love that? That's why there are forces behind some of this driving of this view.

You want to give that race to China. It's coming. It's coming. It's the choice: Do you want America to build that chassis, or do you want the Chinese to do that? Data centers can make some things challenging.

That, John, is what you said earlier: It starts with TDS, and then it goes to "Give China AI." Is that—

I want to say this: Vote me out if you think it's okay to give China a benefit to win the AI race. Vote me out. But it's like, so—

Your favorite person in the audience—my wife—is clapping for you.

Oh, yeah. Exactly. That's exactly the way I see it as well. So we have great bipartisan agreement here.

So, Dave, I was at your summit last year, the Energy Innovation Summit, where you announced $90 million of new investments. The thing I was struck by was how broad-based the representation was at that summit. You not only had software companies; you had hardware companies, manufacturing, robotics, energy, nuclear, fracking, and, most interestingly, the trades there.

That's when a lightbulb went on for me: This is a blue-collar boom because this is a construction boom, and blue-collar workers are really going to benefit. The trades represented there spoke to that. Since then, we've had hundreds of thousands of new jobs—construction jobs—created, and 25% to 30% wage increases for construction workers.

I'm curious: Does that help make the cause more popular in Pennsylvania? Are those trades and the unions still on board with this, or have the politics of that changed at all over the past year?

It's a great question, and it's been extraordinary. Just in the last 15 or 16 months—and these are related, by the way—it's not just energy projects and data centers. It's U.S. Steel and a new next-generation mill, Eli Lilly building a new plant, and Hanwha in the Philadelphia Shipyard. But they're coming in part because of the data centers and the energy projects.

I've spent a lot of time with the trades lately. The most secure job in Pennsylvania right now is a seasoned welder and an electrician. These folks are coming out, they're getting the training, and they're in their late teens or early 20s. They're making more than $100,000 a year at these sites, and they can't hire quickly enough. They can't find enough people to meet the demand.

I've looked closely at the data centers. There's one coming in Berwick, Pennsylvania, right next to where I went to high school. The way to think about it is there are sort of 4 buckets of economic activity—jobs that come. There's, of course, the deals that come with them, but there are the thousands of jobs to build the data centers and the energy that goes side by side. These are 5,000 to 10,000 folks on the site.

Then there are the hundreds of people to run the data centers. Of course, every 3 to 4 years, the hardware and everything in the data centers gets upgraded, which brings in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of jobs. There's the energy that's going side by side, and then there are the restaurants and the hotels.

I met with the trucking association the other day. They guess that it's about 2 logistics jobs for every 1 job in a data center. These things are economic engines. Once you get that covenant straight, people are willing to make the decision.

If they're a township supervisor or a county commissioner, no senator is going to tell them to do this. This has to come from the ground up in terms of making a decision. But once they decide to do that, it's a huge engine for their communities.

If they decide not to do it, my point is, okay, where's your plan? What is the plan? In Pennsylvania, we've been losing people for 20 years. We can't get our kids to stay. This is like a rebirth. It's amazing what's happening, but we've got to break through the misinformation.

Friedberg, do you have a final question?

Why do you think it's so difficult for the Democrats to embrace the facts on the ground? You have an empirical story to share about job creation and value creation, and there's no empirical evidence on the other side of job displacement or job loss in white-collar jobs, which is generally part of the thesis.

I would say the notion of AI broadly is getting merged with the notion of data centers as a narrow thing. Data centers, of course, are an enormous component of this, but those 2 things are unrelated. Second, I don't think it's just Democrats. We have—

No, the America First movement is now in this horseshoe exactly aligned with the Democrats.

We have the far left and the far right—

Yes.

—converging on an anti-data-center position.

I even have some besties who occasionally buy into the jobs apocalypse, so—

No, no. I'm saying job displacement. Don't ever misrepresent me, Sacks. I will call you out every time. I just believe there'll be job displacement.

You could also use the words "job mobility."

What I—

Let me finish my sentence, please. I'm speaking. Job displacement is occurring, and new jobs need to be created to fill that in.

And I think that's the blind spot of people who have Trump Derangement Syndrome: They will never actually do anything that would modestly criticize the president. That's part of the challenge. I want to ask one last question about the amount of money being donated by special interests.

Do we need to get money out of politics? That seems to be the root of a lot of these problems: Billionaires can give $50 million, $100 million, $200 million, whether it's Soros or friends of ours. It feels like there's way too much money in politics. Does that have to change for this type of issue, around data centers, et cetera, and special interests? Can we ever get there?

Yeah, well, I would say that of the 5 things I would do to fix America right now, that wouldn't be in the top 5. But yes, conceptually, I'd like to get money out of politics. My race was $500 million. We raised $200 million on my side and $300 million on the opposition side. We couldn't keep up.

I was the record before, in ’22. My race was $330 million. And now that's quaint. Wait till ’26. Wait till ’28. This is going to look quaint. And that's the thing. Collectively...

We need to get money out, or this group needs to be donating a lot more to both of us.

Yeah, or get rid of the primary process, too, and open it to other people. These primaries identify the extreme kinds of views and put out someone, and that's part of it now, too. Collectively, $300 million was spent to destroy our reputations. Think what $300 million could do for Pennsylvania or for people. That was spent to destroy reputations. You're terrible, and I'm terrible. That's the absurdity of American politics.

Right. On that note, I actually want to say both of you are incredibly rational and reasonable and incredible Americans. So I just want to thank you, Senators Fetterman and McCormick.

Very much appreciate it.

Thank you, guys.