How Mad Are Voters About Data Centers? Watch These Races.

Data centers have become political napalm. Election Day will show how far it’s spread.

The supercomputing hubs are the unifying force of the midterms, triggering the latent doomerism of voters across the political spectrum.

Republicans’ MAGA base fears AI-powered surveillance. Environmentalists see them lighting the planet on fire. Farmers in rural Texas worry the facilities will guzzle precious water resources. And community leaders from Memphis, Tennessee, toLinn County, Iowa, are villainizing the tech titans blowing dirty air into their neighborhoods while reaping record profits.

“Data centers are the boogeyman du jour in this election cycle. There's no doubt about it,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican consultant in Arizona.

With just days to go before the election, Republicans are scrambling to show voters they are taking their concerns seriously, while Democratic presidential hopefuls are seizing on the issue to test drive messaging for 2028.

And it’s not just political candidates who have a lot on the line Nov. 3. The verdicts voters deliver at the polls could set the trajectory for an industry that has become the engine of the U.S. economy. Tax incentives that benefit data centers have proven to be a particular lightning rod, with a recent POLITICO Poll finding that ending the tech industry’s tax breaks is a top policy priority for voters.

Here’s POLITICO’s guide to the races that will show how the data center boom is reshaping the political landscape — and what the candidates’ positioning could mean for the future of the industry.

The one where the incumbent could actually lose on data centers

If any contest could turn on data centers, it’s Ohio’s U.S. Senate race.

Former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) has put opposition to the facilities at the heart of his populist campaign — and battered incumbent Sen. John Husted (R) as the “face of data centers.”

Husted’s history celebrating projects that got tax state incentives could be a particular liability, with the latest POLITICO Poll finding that nearly half of respondents — 47% — called Republicans the party of unpopular tech tax breaks.

“Jon Husted gave away $2.5 billion to these out-of-state corporations and billionaires,” Brown said in a recent ad. “He gave up Ohio’s money — our tax money — to Meta, a company worth $2 trillion, to make sure they come to Ohio.”

Husted’s answer has been the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bill that would encourage states to ensure that data centers don’t cause consumers’ electricity bills to rise. But his effort to swiftly pass the measure failed last month, just before the upper chamber recessed until after the midterms.

The one that will show exactly how mad Republicans are

The data center backlash has hit rural Texas, and lifelong conservatives are hopping mad.

Whether they’re mad enough to vote Democrat is the test of the November governor’s race.

Republican incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, who less than a year ago called Texas an “epicenter of AI development,” has been backpedaling hard. Last month he expanded a de facto moratorium on data center approvals until at least Dec. 10.

Abbott’s Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, has hit him sharply on the topic, accusing him of failing to protect Texans’ water, electricity and economic interests.

“I don’t hate data centers. I hate the way data centers are taking advantage of Texans, especially rural Texans, and I hate the way Greg Abbott is letting it happen,” she told POLITICO’s Dasha Burns last month.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Hinojosa has put the issue at the heart of her populist message, seeking to tie Abbott to tech trillionaire Elon Musk and the “15 billionaire tech dudes who are amassing all our money, all our power, and all our data and are about to blow up the world if we don’t come together fast to save ourselves,” as she told POLITICO.

Who takes the governor’s mansion on Nov. 3 could show how intensely the data center backlash has scrambled traditional political alliances — and could have lasting repercussions for the industry in a state that could soon overtake Virginia as the world’s largest data center market.

The one the tech industry should be most scared of

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has made one of the sharpest U-turns on data centers, going from wooing tech companies to his Rust Belt state a year ago to calling for action against “greedy developers.”

Now, the possible 2028 Democratic presidential contender is leading his party in using anti-data-center politics to try to win control of the state Senate for the first time in half a century.

In each of the four GOP-held seats Democrats are prioritizing, candidates are accusing Republicans of voting to support tax breaks for the facilities or not sufficiently holding them to account.

If Democrats succeed, they’re promising to take up bills already approved by the state’s Democrat-controlled House to repeal tax incentives, set limits on data centers’ electricity and water use and give communities more power to block their construction. Some Democrats are also pushing for a statewide moratorium on new centers.

The risk to industry isn’t just what might happen in the Keystone state, but how wins there might embolden Democrats nationally.

The one where both sides think it's the way to win a major battleground race

The race for the Georgia governor’s mansion — one of the tightest in the country — has turned into a fight over data centers, with the two candidates tripping over themselves trying to convince voters the other is worse on the issue.

In the final days of the contest for one of the country’s most prized swing states, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms and Republican Rick Jackson are blasting voters with dueling attack ads on the data centers and trading barbs from the debate stage.

Their histories on the computing facilities are very different: Jackson, a billionaire businessman, has invested in at least one data center in Texas that locals there oppose. Bottoms supported a non-AI data center connected to a university as mayor.

They also hold differing policy positions: Bottoms supports a statewide moratorium; Jackson wants to leave the decisions to the locals.

Election Day will test whether it’s rhetoric or policy nuance that matters most to the Peach State voters who have overwhelmingly soured on the supercomputing hubs — and whose views will carry outsize impact as eyes turn to the 2028 presidential cycle.

The one where even a loss could signal a backlash

By conventional metrics, Justin Pearson should lose his race for Tennessee’s 9th District in a wipe out.

The Democratic state representative is running in a district that voted for Trump by more than 21 percentage points in 2024, thanks to newly gerrymandered maps passed by his Republican colleagues in the legislature in May.

But Pearson, who has made his opposition to Elon Musk’s xAI data centers a part of his origin story on the campaign trail, is trailing his Republican opponent by just four percentage points, according to a September poll commissioned by a Democratically aligned Political Action Committee. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has since added him to its “Red to Blue” list, winning him organizing and fundraising support.

Data centers have become a galvanizing issue in Memphis, where xAI has run dozens of methane gas turbines with no Clean Air Act permits, spewing hundreds of tons of asthma-inducing pollutants into South Memphis neighborhoods.

Pearson has called for a national moratorium on the supercomputing facilities and gave progressive members of the Squad, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, a tour of the area surrounding Musk’s data centers in July.

His opponent, Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor, has been a vocal supporter of the facilities in Memphis. He has responded to the public backlash by boasting about a state law he authored to require data centers to pay for their own impacts to the grid or power themselves.

Even if Pearson loses at the polls on Nov. 3, a stronger-than-expected performance would be a powerful signal of the issue’s potency in even a solidly red district.

The one that shows the power of locals

Perhaps nowhere will voters’ feelings about data centers be clearer come Nov. 3 than in Ohio, where a pair of unlikely allies from opposite ends of the political spectrum are at the core of a grassroots campaign to ban or severely limit projects in cities across the state.

Nick Owens, a lifelong Republican and delegate for Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention, and left-leaning Independent Austin Baurichter formed the political action committee Conserve Ohio to prohibit hyperscale data centers statewide.

But their effort to win a question on the Ohio ballot fell short of the 413,000 signatures needed.

Now, the group’s plan B could test whether the best line of attack against data centers is the most local one.

At least 20 Ohio communities will vote on data center initiatives next month, thanks to the efforts of a diverse army of volunteer activists that coalesced around a distrust of Big Tech, a frustration with local officials and concerns about impacts on the resources and character of their communities. Owens and Baurichter authored ballot language for half of them.

The latest POLITICO Poll found that voters’ support for AI hubs within three miles of their home has cratered this year, falling from 36% in January to 22% in October. Fully half of voters polled now oppose the facilities locally.