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The Enthusiasm Gap and the AI Message Fight: Jim Pfaff on The Vicki McKenna Show | Sep 17, 2026

Published: September 17, 2026
Network: WIBA Madison / iHeart
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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Vicki McKenna opened with a poll almost everyone in Wisconsin misread. The Marquette University Law School poll is a Wisconsin operation, so everybody thought it was a Wisconsin poll — it is not, it is a national poll, and it says nothing about Tom Tiffany versus David Crowley. What it does say, on the enthusiasm measure, does not look good. On the September 17 edition of The Vicki McKenna Show, one week after the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention in Dallas, she put the enthusiasm gap to Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff and got agreement, then spent the rest of the segment arguing with him about the thing she says is making it worse: the AI fight national Republicans have picked with 71% of the country. The conversation ran through hyperscale data centers, zoning, the investment bubble, regulatory capture, open source models, and where Tom Tiffany actually stands — and it never got far from the enthusiasm gap.

Topics Covered

• The Marquette Poll and a Persistent Enthusiasm Gap
• McKenna’s Objection: Stepping on Your Own Applause Line
• Guardrails, Hyperscale Data Centers, and the 71%
• Regulatory Capture and the Open Source Answer
• Tom Tiffany, David Crowley, and the Wisconsin Argument
• Key Takeaways

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The Marquette Poll and a Persistent Enthusiasm Gap

McKenna raised the margin of error herself and then set it aside — whether the large margin of error is relevant or not, she said, she is a bit worried Republicans have lackluster enthusiasm for this upcoming midterm. Pfaff granted the methodological point, a large margin of error is not a good poll, but refused to use it as an escape hatch: he is not saying there is nothing to understand there.

“I think enthusiasm has persistently in other polls show that relatively Democrats have more enthusiasm than Republicans do up to this point.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

That word — persistently — is what makes this an enthusiasm gap rather than one bad survey. A single poll with a wide margin of error is the one he was willing to discount; the pattern across other polls is what he was not, and his read is that the pattern has held up to this point. His view of the convention is that it moved things: the GOP midterm convention did help some things. What happened next is the problem.

“What’s happening right now is this AI doomerism discussion is really taking what positive came out of the GOP convention and turning the debate away from the positive things that did happen.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Pfaff’s framing of the fight is not about the technology. It is about who gets to define November. He said this is a leftist effort to change the foundations of the debate of what people could be and should be voting for in November to something Democrats are very good at, which is creating chaos so they can claim to be the saviors of the world. He called it a God complex, and then located it precisely.

“The God complex is not in the AI. It is in those on the left, and then some on the right like Josh Hawley and Steve Bannon, who apparently want to extend the doomerism talk.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

The solution being offered, as he described it, is government central control — and as proposed, an internationalist, government-style World Health Organization type of control. His reference point for how that goes is COVID. The fear driving it is that AI becomes Skynet, and his answer is that we are not in a Terminator movie: if a Terminator were ever to come about, it would be created by a government institution that would take the technology and do with it what China does, which is build a social control network.

McKenna’s Objection: Stepping on Your Own Applause Line

McKenna stopped him there, and her objection is where the enthusiasm gap and the AI fight meet. She went back to the same Marquette poll: 29% of people like it — 29%, and that is Republicans and Democrats together. Republicans, for reasons she said she cannot explain, have decided to bring attention to the doomerism and tell the 70 or 71% who do not like it that they are just being hijacked by leftists in China.

“I think that is the dumbest thing you could possibly do, and that’s called stepping on your own applause line after the convention.”
— Vicki McKenna, host, The Vicki McKenna Show

Her arithmetic is the campaign argument for closing the enthusiasm gap rather than widening it. Take the poll’s 71% and assume the polling is off by five points: call it 65%, with the 4.55-point margin of error running in the negative direction on that particular number. Either figure is a supermajority, and Republicans have put themselves on the 29% side of it. As she put it, we are in the chute for an election — and she is talking to the 71% if she is a Republican candidate.

Guardrails, Hyperscale Data Centers, and the 71%

McKenna’s prescription is short enough to fit on a card, and she recited it as the thing a candidate should say. Yes, we need some guardrails. We need to make sure people are not abusing this technology. And she named the specific complaint she says a lot of people actually have, which is not Skynet at all — it is the hyperscale data centers, and the promise she wants made is that communities are bought in before a resident wakes up one day to find a nondisclosure agreement has put a monster small-town-sized concrete block next to their residential neighborhood. Then: the cost is not going to be socialized onto ratepayers, and you are going to have a say in whether these things go in your town.

Pfaff’s reply drew the distinction he had been driving at all segment. What she just described is the data center problem, not the AI problem, and on that he conceded the ground: if that is your concern, go ahead and make that argument — if you are into zoning, zone it into the industrial area and not the residential area. His warning was about what a candidate buys when he takes the doomerism framing along with the zoning complaint.

“If you’re going to buy into the facade that’s being brought up by Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI, if you’re going to buy into that, then you’ve done something where you might win an election, but you’ve lost the war.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

McKenna pushed back on the premise itself. Sam Altman and the rest of them are jawboning, in her reading, because they are trying to head off a bubble that is about to burst in the investment world. AI was oversold. Companies bought their Copilot systems, signed their contracts, and that is pretty much where they appear comfortable staying — which means the $30 trillion in profit promised over the next ten years is probably false. The doomerism, on her account, is expectation management. Her complaint about her own side is that Democrats and Bernie Sanders turned it into an issue, Republicans could have turned it into an issue too, and instead the party took the 29% and told them we are on your team.

Regulatory Capture and the Open Source Answer

Under the enthusiasm gap argument sits a policy question, and Pfaff’s position on where the regulation should stop is unambiguous: no regulations on open source AI. Every local government and every state should set its own guidelines for how it wants to deal with data centers coming in. The federal fight is a different animal, and he named the motive behind it.

“This is regulatory capture that they are attempting to undertake, these frontier model companies. They do not want the open source competition.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

The competition is the reason the fight is happening now. Anthropic and OpenAI are about to face massive competition from open source models, many of which are American-made, including Meta’s Llama. His historical parallel is the one the entire internet runs on: almost every computer server in the world runs Linux, one of the greatest open source projects ever created by man. That is what he means when he says the positive use of open source methodology is something everyone in this country already lives on.

“Every small, medium-sized business should be investing in local iteration of AI methodology so they can be more effective in their customer service and their marketing.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

This is not theoretical for him. Pfaff said The Conservative Caucus is implementing open source models that stay out of the frontier companies’ view, running on servers an organization builds for itself, to make effective tools for winning elections and for business — and that the Caucus has created these for itself. Small and medium-sized businesses are the group he says benefits most, because a local model on your own hardware also answers the data center objection: there is a way to shimmy through this, as he put it, and that way runs through local compute rather than through Washington. McKenna’s counter was that Microsoft already owns that business — they are all buying Copilot, everybody has got it — and Pfaff’s answer was that Satya Nadella himself recently praised open source.

Tom Tiffany, David Crowley, and the Wisconsin Argument

Wisconsin is where the national argument and the enthusiasm gap become a ballot. Pfaff said he understands what Tom Tiffany and others in Wisconsin politics need to say on this and does not necessarily disagree with it — his caution was only that a candidate should not play into their hands while saying it. You can squeeze through this narrow gap if you are willing to be smart about it. Then McKenna named who is not.

“National Republicans are not being smart about this. They’re just not.”
— Vicki McKenna, host, The Vicki McKenna Show

Her example was the President. Trump is out there saying everybody complaining about AI is just being suckered by China, and she said plainly that his rhetoric surrounding this issue is a problem, because the issue did not have to be political and now the whole thing is. Republicans should have grabbed it first; Democrats grabbed it instead. Nobody wants mass unemployment from computer technology disrupting the economy, and nobody wants a hyperscale facility next to their neighborhood — industrial zoning or not.

On the Wisconsin race itself, McKenna’s read is that Tom Tiffany was ahead on this while David Crowley wants data centers everywhere and is all for AI. Tiffany’s position, as she described it, is that people are given a heads up, can fight back, can change the zoning, can move these things, and are not going to be beholden to a ratepayer socialized cost. Her frustration is that he is being painted in the media as holding the exact opposite position of the one he actually holds. Pfaff agreed the position distinguishes Tiffany in a proper way and that he can definitely work through this.

Pfaff’s closing move was to widen the frame back out, which is where he thinks the enthusiasm gap gets closed. The economic numbers are generally good, with gas prices and the Iran situation hampering things. The vision is an economy that is less regulated and not bound by what Democrats want to impose, and the GOP convention made that case — there was much more than AI talked about there, and those are the winning messages, a point TCC made in our coverage of the convention’s enthusiasm reset. McKenna’s answer was that the winning messages are also the ones not being shared, and never will be by the press. Her example: David Crowley’s line on illegal immigration — I’m not an ally, I’m an accomplice. You will never hear the media use it. Which is why, she said, Tiffany has to bury every form of media with the message himself.

Key Takeaways

1. The enthusiasm gap is a pattern, not one poll – Pfaff said enthusiasm has persistently shown in other polls that Democrats have more of it than Republicans do up to this point. McKenna noted the Marquette University Law School survey is a national poll, not a Wisconsin one, and says nothing about Tiffany versus Crowley; Pfaff’s caveat was that a large margin of error is not a good poll.
2. The AI fight is drowning out the convention that was supposed to close the enthusiasm gap – Pfaff said the GOP midterm convention did help some things, but the AI doomerism discussion is taking what positive came out of it and turning the debate away from it.
3. 29% versus 71% – McKenna said Republicans have decided to tell the 70 or 71% who dislike AI that they are being hijacked by leftists in China, which she called the dumbest thing you could possibly do and stepping on your own applause line after the convention.
4. Guardrails, zoning, and no socialized costs – Her prescription is that communities get a say before a hyperscale data center lands next to a residential neighborhood, that nondisclosure agreements not decide it, and that ratepayers not absorb the cost. Pfaff called that the data center problem rather than the AI problem and told candidates to make the zoning argument.
5. Regulatory capture is the motive – The enthusiasm gap is not the only thing at stake in the AI argument. Pfaff said the frontier model companies — Dario Amodei’s Anthropic and Sam Altman’s OpenAI — are attempting regulatory capture because they do not want open source competition, and that there should be no regulations on open source AI.
6. Open source is the alternative – Almost every server in the world runs Linux. The Conservative Caucus has built its own local models, and Pfaff says every small and medium-sized business should invest in a local iteration of AI for customer service and marketing.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast Sep 17, 2026 on The Vicki McKenna Show, WIBA Madison / iHeart.