‘costs And Corruption’: Democrats Hone Midterm Attacks On Data Centers

Democrats want voters to see data centers as giant outposts of megacorporations that enjoy undue tax breaks and ill-begotten monstrosities that suck up precious water and hog electricity.

After months of probing and message-testing, Democrats are aligning on a few key thematic attack lines as they figure out how to take advantage of a fast-moving issue riling up voters across the political spectrum.

The two themes of costs and corruption have dominated politics during President Donald Trump’s second term, and new party guidance makes that strategy even more explicit. In recent days, House Democrats’ campaign arm updated the webpage it uses to quietly communicate with super PACs, signaling them to focus on data centers in 11 different battleground races, either by calling for negative ads that connect data centers with candidate corruption or resource scarcity or requesting more polling on the issue.

And an internal memo from the House Majority PAC, the top super PAC supporting House Democrats, obtained by POLITICO, calls on allies to attack vulnerable Republicans with language that touches the “conspiratorial nerve that runs through the data center discourse among voters.”

“The candidates and party that most effectively meets voters where they are on this issue stands to maximize their gains on election day,” HMP deputy director for independent expenditures Jon Bosscher wrote in the memo. “Rather than see this as a distinctive hit, it's best to understand it as an effective proof point that marries the costs and corruption themes on a high salience issue.”

The memo included the results of polling that tested negative messaging on data centers in 24 battleground House districts. The messaging resonated widely with voters, especially in top Democratic targets in the Midwest, including the Ohio seats held by Republican Reps. Max Miller and Mike Carey and the Michigan seats held by Republican Reps. Tom Barrett and John James, who is running for governor in the state.

Democratic campaigns and their allies have begun pouring money into a wave of more than 40 political ads across two dozen races on the issue — revealing a concerted effort to use data centers as a way to slam the GOP on affordability and corruption.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Monday hinted at this new messaging, highlighting the $70 billion in tax breaks for big tech companies in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act when asked about data centers.

The House Majority PAC memo provided sample attack language that connects data centers to that bill.

“[CANDIDATE] took campaign cash from some of the largest data center developers right before voting for a bill that gave nearly $70 billion in tax breaks to data centers, giving them our money to build data centers in our communities even though these projects drive up electric rates for customers, use and pollute drinking water, and are made with secret deals that hurt area residents,” the memo reads. Meanwhile, DCCC is urging similar messaging through the webpage it uses as a “redbox” to post one-way guidance for friendly PACs in a single, public place without violating laws barring direct coordination.

Five of the 11 DCCC pages mentioning data centers focus on themes of self-dealing by citing campaign contributions or personal investments in companies connected to the data center industry.

In others, like their attack on Tano Tijerina in Texas’ 28th district, they attempt to portray perceived GOP support for data centers as a threat to the local water supply and the electrical grid.

“Voters need to know that Tijerina supports AI policies that could mean building mega data centers across South Texas even though they will pollute our water and suck up huge amounts of electricity,” Tijerina’s DCCC redbox page said.

A spokesperson for Tijerina pointed to a recent press release in which he promises to “lead in technology and still refuse to trade away the water, land, and affordable power our children will inherit."

Democrats like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore once welcomed data centers as golden opportunities to support a booming industry and create jobs while reeling in local investment from leading tech companies. But the politics around the developments have turned quickly negative as many voters grow increasingly skeptical of the tradeoff for the massive projects being built in their neighborhoods, with concerns about water, electricity, noise, land use and little long-term economic benefit from the projects becoming paramount — not to mention concerns about the AI industry writ large.

A POLITICO Poll from July found 41 percent of adults are opposed to the idea of building a data center within three miles of their home, with just 24 percent of American adults supportive of the idea. In January, 28 percent of American adults said they opposed nearby data centers when asked the same question, and 37 percent of respondents indicated support.

Both parties are now scrambling to turn public unhappiness with the data center boom into political fodder and attack their opponents. Republicans have also rushed to paint the developments negatively, with some GOP candidates relying on the same themes of corruption and energy hikes being pushed by Democrats.

A POLITICO review of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s own redbox pages also found three mentions of data centers.

But President Donald Trump’s unequivocal endorsement of the data center industry through a blunt Truth Social post on Monday has put them on the back foot. In the post, Trump condemned the “anti Data Center movement,” declaring, “let Data Reign.” The move undercut battleground Republicans who have also sought to capitalize on, or at least neutralize, growing anger over data center development.

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote.

Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee who has been working across the aisle on an AI regulation proposal, said Trump's recent pro-data center post is “not the message that Americans want to hear.”

"They want to be assured that their rates aren't going to increase, so that what they're paying on their utility bill isn't because of a surge from the data center,” she told POLITICO. “It doesn't get more on the ground than this. So I do think that Republicans are having trouble reconciling what the president is saying with what their constituents are demanding.”

Democrats are now coalescing around attacks that tap into voters’ frustrations with rising costs — particularly energy bills — and perceived self-dealing, exemplified in one instance by growing pushes to ban members from trading stocks in office.

“The lack of transparency is what has been so frustrating for so many people, and that these decisions are being made behind closed doors without community buy-in,” said Rebecca Cooke, a Democratic House candidate in Wisconsin’s third congressional district.

A new ad from Cooke calls for a data center moratorium while highlighting her pledge to refuse corporate PAC donations “because I don’t want to be beholden to any of these big tech companies.”

Kelsey Brugger and Riley Rogerson contributed reporting to this article.