Technology policy — AI, semiconductors, automation, energy, military systems — is usually cast as a rare domain of bipartisan pragmatism, even as polarization reaches nearly everything else Congress touches. So does the way legislators speak about technology tell the same story, or does ideological division register there too? We work from the full text of the U.S. Congressional Record (Volumes 141–170, 1995–2025, parsed into 2.55 million speech turns, 1.07 million of them substantive), using LLM-assisted classification — validated against human-labeled samples — to identify technology discourse at scale, and then measure how positions cluster and diverge across parties and over time.
In preliminary results, most technology speeches in both parties support the technology (74% among Democrats, 78% among Republicans). The parties differ on remedies. Republicans call for deregulation more often, and Democrats for regulation and public investment. That gap has widened since 2010.