Buying Both Doors

$62 million poured into four Illinois Democratic primaries. The ads are about ICE, healthcare, and Trump. Not one mentions AI. But when you pull the FEC filings, the money traces back to AI and tech PACs -- running identical operations in Republican primaries too.

The industry built parallel PACs for each party. Leading the Future split $10M evenly -- $5M to its Democratic arm, $5M to its Republican arm. Meta spent $65M on the same structure. The point isn't to win elections. It's to make elections irrelevant to the policy question.

And the playbook already worked once. Crypto's Fairshake spent $290M doing exactly this in 2024 -- defeated the banking committee chair, passed industry legislation, installed friendly regulators. The same operative who ran that is now running the AI version.

I wrote about what happens when an industry stops lobbying Congress and starts *building* it -- and why the mechanism disappears once the primaries are over. [link]