Data center anxiety plays out in Senate campaign debates

WASHINGTON — In debates and advertisements ahead of the midterm elections, Democratic candidates for Senate are consistently pressing their opponents on artificial intelligence data center policy, often as a proxy for voter fears about the economy and local impacts.

In Ohio, former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is fond of calling Republican incumbent Sen. Jon Husted “the face of data centers.”

Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., tied the vote by opponent Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., for the Republican “One Big Beautiful Bill” health and tax cuts measure last year to data centers.

And James Talarico is accusing his opponent in the race for the Senate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, of “selling off Texas” to data center firms.

In addition to attacking each other’s policy positions on tech, candidates of both parties are attacking each other’s campaign donations from Big Tech groups and investments in data center companies. Both pro-AI and regulation-focused groups are spending millions on Republican and Democratic candidates.

As Democrats have sought to put Republicans on the back foot by tying data centers to rising energy costs and the larger issue of affordability, polling data appears to support the choice.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in July and August found that 50% of U.S. adults think data centers are “mostly bad” for home energy costs, compared with 38% in January.

Those polled have also gotten more pessimistic about data centers’ effects on the environment, jobs, tax revenue and quality of life for those living nearby.

Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said because voters believe data centers are the cause of their higher electricity bills, the construction projects are part of affordability concerns.

“President [Donald] Trump campaigned for office in 2024 saying he was going to make things more affordable, was going to break down inflation, and he hasn’t delivered on that,” Cassino said. “And that means it’s a real point of vulnerability for Republicans.”

As a result, Cassino said, Democrats are “hitting Republicans really hard” on the need to regulate data centers.

Pocketbook issues

In a Georgia Senate debate earlier this month, Ossoff used last year’s budget reconciliation bill, which included tax breaks that Ossoff said are being used by data center companies, to criticize Collins.

“Just think about this, when you are paying more for your health insurance, when a hospital in your community is closing down,” Ossoff said. “Mike Collins voted to take that money out of your pocket and out of your community and give it instead to data center developers.”

Collins, in turn, said he favored “local control” over data center decisions.

Data center attacks may work differently, however, against sitting members of Congress. Cassino posited that candidates like Collins who have already been on Capitol Hill may have an easier time on this issue than their counterparts coming from state and local government. “They might have been doing something indirectly, but they weren’t on zoning boards,” he said.

Talarico’s race with Paxton highlights the local nature of the data center backlash, with ads tying data centers both to the cost of living and to accusations of corruption against Paxton.

“The data centers bankrolled Paxton, they get tax breaks and you get stuck with the bill,” Talarico said in one ad. In another, he promised that if elected he would “take on the data centers raising our costs.”

Husted, as well, is being challenged for actions during his time in state government. He served as lieutenant governor before his appointment to the Senate early last year when fellow Republican JD Vance became vice president. In an ad, Brown pointed to tax breaks his state agreed to for tech companies building data centers.

Husted “gave away two and a half billion dollars to these out-of-state corporations and billionaires,” Brown said in the advertisement. “He gave up Ohio’s money, our tax money, to Meta, a company worth $2 trillion, to make sure they come to Ohio.”

Other Brown ads connect data centers to rising residential electricity costs. He also pledged to “require the data centers pay the full cost of their electricity, not you.”

While Husted’s own ads don’t seem to mention data centers, his work in the Senate has.

He sponsored the Senate version of a bill, dubbed the “Ratepayer Protection Act,” that would encourage states to adopt standards to make data centers take on the cost of electrical grid upgrades needed to meet their new energy demand. The House-passed version stalled on a procedural vote last month on the Senate floor after Democrats said it wasn’t strong enough.

In a debate last week between Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Democratic challenger Troy Jackson, Collins responded to Jackson’s data center attacks by pointing to her support for the Husted bill.

She also said that “guardrails” on energy use are particularly important because of Maine’s high energy prices, which she blamed on Jackson, who previously served as state Senate president.

Jackson agreed on the need for “real guardrails” to ensure that data centers don’t cause higher electricity costs for other consumers or hurt local water quality.

Democrats’ data center arguments, while not the central issue of most campaigns, seem to be part of a successful strategy. Inside Elections rates Georgia as Lean Democrat, while Maine, Ohio and Texas, all seats currently held by Republicans, are rated as Toss-up.

Effectiveness

As sitting senators talk about the Ratepayer Protection Act bill, Cassino cautioned that voters may not care about Capitol Hill procedural votes.

“Anything incumbents say about, ‘oh, this is what I’m doing to protect you,’ is going to ring hollow because everyone sees their electricity prices going up,” Cassino said.

Ray La Raja, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of the UMass-Amherst Poll, said that Republicans also aren’t likely to see success arguing that data centers are needed to beat China in a race over artificial intelligence.

“When people see these huge constructions in their backyard, that is much more tangible than any … economic, national security competition with China,” La Raja said.

He also said that with less than a month to go, “this election is baked in,” including the Democratic advantage in talking about data centers. But he sees a possibility for Republicans to develop a long-term strategy to tell voters why they support data centers.

“If you want to allay people’s fears… be very concrete about the benefits that are going to be coming into the community,” La Raja said, adding that benefits could include subsidies or promises that “you’re going to keep your … energy prices below this level, we’re going to build new facilities that serve the community, recreation.”

In the Michigan Senate debate earlier this month, Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers tried a version of that tactic.

“If a community wants one of these facilities … every dollar of the generated property tax should go to defray the cost of everyone that lives in that municipality,” Rogers said. “Dollar for dollar, it should go down.”

Rogers has previously expressed support for Michigan taking a one-year pause on data center construction. His Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, said at the debate that he supports “terms of engagement” for data centers, though he did not specify what those terms should be.

Inside Elections rates the Michigan Senate race as Tilt Democratic.

Looking beyond the midterms, Darrell M. West, a senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, said this year’s vote could be “very formative.”

“If the candidates who were supporting data centers end up losing, that’s going to encourage the critics to enact even tougher rules,” West said. If things go the other way, it could “take the wind out of that sail.”

But any federal restrictions in the next Congress would be up against Trump’s firm support for AI and data centers.

West said that support is making things even more complicated for Republicans running this year.

“They’re getting local pressure to slow down the development of data centers, and Trump is telling the country, ‘don’t worry about this, data centers are not a problem,’” West said. “And voters don’t believe that anymore.”