‘enough Is Enough’: Virginia’s ‘immovable’ Power Broker Says Data Centers Aren’t Unstoppable

President Donald Trump and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger have at least one thing in common: a problem named state Sen. L. Louise Lucas.

Lucas, the 82-year-old president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, spearheaded Democrats’ effort this year to gerrymander four congressional seats held by Republicans, a more aggressive plan than some of her colleagues wanted — and one that, after the FBI raided her office, she blames for attracting Trump’s retribution.

She also led a push to strip data centers of state tax incentives — butting heads with Spanberger (D), whom Lucas christened a “data center diva,” and bringing the commonwealth to the brink of its first-ever government shutdown.

In the latest episode of the POLITICO Energy Podcast, Lucas said she doesn’t seek that kind of conflict. It just comes with the job.

“This is not a fight that I wanted to have with the governor,” she said. “But it's a fight that I have to take on, because I am always in the trenches with the public.”

Her battle with Spanberger — whose appearance on POLITICO’s podcast earlier this month spurred Lucas to come on herself — isn’t over. Virginia’s data centers got to keep their tax incentives under the recent budget deal, but the state did impose a smaller energy tax on them. And lawmakers are poised to revisit the issue next year.

But Lucas does want to take the temperature down with Spanberger. “Hopefully, we'll be able to work together well on other things,” she said. “But on this one, I'm unmovable.”

Her battle with Trump is less likely to simmer down.

“He is who he is,” Lucas said. “He has 34 felonies — I think he'd like to see me have 34 felonies. But guess what: I'm not a felon.”

On May 6, about two weeks after Virginia voters approved Lucas’ redistricting plan, the FBI executed a search warrant of Lucas’ Portsmouth district office and a marijuana business she owns. A Fox News reporter was on the scene to capture footage of federal agents and an armored vehicle outside the buildings. (On May 8, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the new districts.)

Lucas said the search of her buildings was “totally politically motivated.”

“I'm just a bit more vocal and visible for a lot of the folks in the Trump administration,” Lucas said. “But you got to understand, I grew up during the civil rights movement. I was here for Jim Crow. And so I'm here for Jim Crow 2.0.”

The senator compared the federal raid to the 2020 felony charge of “injury to a monument” she faced after a protest against a Confederate statute. A judge later dismissed the charges and the police chief who oversaw the arrests of Lucas and 18 others was fired.

“Every time I've done something of this magnitude, there has been some repercussions from some court system,” she said.

Lucas’ confrontational style continues to shape Virginia’s top political debates. She’s started a statewide town hall tour on data centers, tapping into public concerns toward the sector that she says run deep.

“The crowds got larger and larger,” she said. In some rural areas, there was “an equal number of people who were Republicans and Democrats and independents, Black and white, young and old. This issue cuts across all demographics.”

Lucas is focused on channeling that public anger into a repeal of Virginia’s sales and use tax exemption for data centers, which has grown to about $2 billion a year.

“That is just much too much for the richest, richest, richest, richest corporations on planet Earth,” she said. “Now, enough is enough.”

The data center industry has said those incentives are critical to the industry. Spanberger and House Democrats said Virginia would risk its business reputation by repealing them, comparing it to a broken promise.

Lucas says those concerns misread the mood of the public. But she isn’t ready yet to back calls for a statewide moratorium, like New York just implemented. She says she wants to wait to see what comes out of lawmakers’ upcoming study of data centers — which she will be part of — before committing to going further.

The fight over tax incentives, she said, will already be a heavy lift.

“Let's go back to [America] 250. We were fighting the British. Right now, Virginians are fighting these data centers,” she said. “And Virginia, we're always first. … And I'm pretty sure we're going to be one of the first in terms of setting a policy for these data centers and one of the first that will begin to fix this issue.”