Category: Politics

The fight over data centers is suddenly at the epicenter of the midterm elections.

One new ad in Texas begins with someone typing into a chatbot, “Why is my electric bill going up?” Another in Ohio blames one of the state’s Republican senators for a proliferation of data centers, calling them “a total scam.” And in top House battlegrounds in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the Democratic challengers are all running ads against the server warehouses powering the artificial intelligence boom.

Data centers have become unlikely fault lines in the broader fight over an AI revolution that is remaking the global economy and threatening to disrupt the job market. Now politicians are racing to tap into the backlash — or inoculate themselves — as political strategists in both parties described the issue as an unusually fast-moving force that is already reshaping races for the House, the Senate, and governor’s mansions.

“It’s very much a bottom up, organic movement,” said Anna Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster, who said that while people’s views on data centers were largely tied to how close they live to them, the facilities were also becoming symbols of the excesses of Silicon Valley.

“Data centers are a physical manifestation,” she said. “Billionaires are building them, and it feeds into all of the Big Tech skepticism that is there. It’s very symbolic of everybody’s issues with AI.”

There are signs that the emerging data center debate is scrambling the usual partisan divisions.

So far, Democrats have chiefly been the ones racing to harness voter anger about data centers over rising electricity prices, water use, and mistrust of the tech sector. They aim to punish Republicans for cozying up to industry by approving many of these projects.

But in recent weeks, a growing number of Republican candidates have scrambled to shield themselves from any fallout. They have voiced skepticism about data centers, despite President Donald Trump’s full-throated cheerleading for the AI industry and fears among party leaders in Washington that blocking construction of the centers could slow the economy and make the United States less competitive against China.

Some Republicans are now using “data center” as an epithet, and casting themselves as the real opponents of corporate tax breaks and unfettered construction. Last week, Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in the key swing state of Michigan, said that he supports a one-year moratorium on data center construction.

Polls show a revolt brewing against data centers. A Gallup poll conducted in March showed 71% opposed local construction of the centers, and a summer survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the number of people opposing new data centers in their areas had risen by 12 percentage points since February and March.

The fallout has been so swift that in some races, including the governor’s contests in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida, both Democrats and Republicans are airing television ads about data centers.

On Wednesday, a remarkable memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that data center politics was endangering Sen. Jon Husted (R., Ohio). His challenger, Sherrod Brown, the state’s former Democratic senator, has aired millions of dollars worth of ads, calling Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio.”

“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the memo said.

The one-page document, which was earlier reported by Axios, amounted to a desperate plea for the well-heeled industry to finance an advertising campaign — lest a Husted loss serve as “a cautionary lesson” for politicians elsewhere.

Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster, said that opposing data centers offered Democrats a rare chance to make inroads in rural areas and small towns that are resisting the developments.

“It absolutely shakes up the snow globe on the partisan coalitions in a part of the world where Republicans have been dominant,” he said. “It’s one of the few issues today that does not immediately code as red or blue, left or right.”

In Florida, Rep. Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor, spent more than $2 million on one ad in his primary, vowing to “protect” the state from data centers that “jack up utility rates.” In the ad, he tried to cast that position as standing with Trump, whose administration sought to blunt some of the opposition earlier this year by proposing a “ratepayer protection pledge,” in which data centers promise not to drive up electricity costs.

His Democratic opponent in the fall, David Jolly, said, “We don’t want crime or data centers in our neighborhoods” in one of his first ads of the general election.

In a sign of how top-of-mind data centers have become, Donalds brought up the topic unprompted at an event this month in Naples, Fla. “Listen, I know people have concerns,” he said. “I’ve seen the polling. But leadership isn’t just looking at polling.”

He then tried to thread the needle between selling the importance of artificial intelligence for the United States’ competitive future and addressing boiling anger at local data centers. “I don’t want it near your home, just like I don’t want it near my home,” Donalds said.

Jolly’s position is less complicated. In an interview Thursday, he said Florida should impose a moratorium on data center construction until the full impacts could be studied.

The fierceness of the mounting opposition has startled some in the tech sector.

“This is a powder keg,” warned Chamath Palihapitiya, a public-facing venture-capital investor, in a post on the social platform X last week, responding to the dire warning in the NRSC memo. He wrote that the AI industry had “failed miserably in doing the basics” of selling itself.

Political strategists and pollsters in both parties said that voters have linked the facilities to concerns over higher electricity prices, water use, the fate of farmlands, and general fears about the advent of artificial intelligence and Big Tech.

“They didn’t do a good enough job explaining anything,” Ryan James Girdusky, a Republican political strategist and podcaster, said of the industry.

In Texas, the Democratic candidate for Senate, James Talarico, and for governor, Gina Hinojosa, have held recent events about data centers, accusing their Republican rivals of pocketing data center donations while backing expansions.

“Texans are mad,” Hinojosa said in an interview. “It is hard to convey what feels like an invasion by data centers with no rules, no laws to protect Texas. They’re popping up everywhere.”

It was her advertisement that featured a chatbot being asked about the cause of rising electricity prices. The answer it provides? Blaming Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and data centers.

Even before that ad, Abbott had been shifting his stance on data centers. Less than a year ago, Abbott bragged that Google’s $40 billion investment made Texas “the epicenter of AI development,” bringing both construction jobs and tax revenues.

But this summer he announced new standards for data centers on water use and electricity and called to end some tax incentives. This month he directed the state’s utility commission to audit all data centers seeking permits before they could move forward.

“Data center growth cannot come at the expense of Texans’ livelihoods,” said Catherine Frazier, a spokesperson for Abbott.

Abbott is hardly the only politician pivoting.

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2028, had been a booster of AI investments. In June 2025, Shapiro said he was “proud” of Amazon’s $20 billion data center investment, bragging it would be the largest private sector investment in the state’s history.

On Tuesday, Shapiro signed an executive order imposing what he called the “strictest guardrails in the nation” to stop “predatory developers.”

“I’ve heard loud and clear from the people of Pennsylvania,” said Shapiro, who is up for reelection this year.

Now Shapiro has started airing a television ad attacking his Republican challenger, Stacy Garrity, as the “number one fan of data centers.” Garrity has her own ad hitting Shapiro for “data centers in our backyards,” but her campaign can afford only a small fraction of the airtime.

Another Republican candidate for governor running on data center politics is Rep. Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, who has attacked his Democratic rival as “Data Center David Crowley.” Crowley narrowly won the nomination over a democratic socialist, Francesca Hong, who had demanded a data center moratorium.

Neither Crowley nor Tiffany has called for a moratorium.

Crowley has preferred to let local communities decide, with a number of guardrails and restrictions. Tiffany, who called data centers “exciting new technology” just a few months ago, is now calling for a repeal of tax incentives.

In Michigan, William Lawrence, a progressive activist, rode an anti-data center message to win the Democratic nomination for a key Michigan House seat this month and then immediately made a general election ad targeting Rep. Tom Barrett, the Republican incumbent, on the issue.

Barrett campaigned Tuesday with House Speaker Mike Johnson in Michigan, who warned that, while “community concerns” needed to be accounted for, “a broad moratorium against data centers is kind of a dangerous prospect right now.”

The next day Barrett began airing a new data center ad of his own, in which he claimed that “I stood up to my own party and voted against giving your tax dollars to data centers.”

In an interview, Lawrence, who supports a moratorium, called the ad “outrageous” and said voters would not be satisfied with half measures. Data center opposition, he said, was “number one in terms of intensity” in the district.

“It’s bringing together three-time Trump voters, anti-vaxxers, environmentalists, independents, nonvoters, people who are in our cities, people who are in the rural areas,” Lawrence said. “And it’s bringing together all these people because none of us trust Big Tech to do right by our communities.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), the House minority leader, met privately in recent weeks with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top outside adviser, and discussed potential areas of common ground, according to five people with knowledge of the meeting.

The rare engagement was held in a private space in New York City, offered up by a mutual friend of the two men, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting and a third who was briefed on it. They and others were granted anonymity to discuss a meeting about which they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Through aides, neither man would comment on the session, which was described by one person with knowledge of it as a broad conversation on a range of topics. Still, its timing underscored that those around Trump were well aware of the likelihood of a Democratic-led House, and trying to foster as much of a working relationship as possible before any change. Jeffries is in line to be the speaker, were Democrats to win the majority.

Democrats and the president have been savaging each other on the campaign trail with increasing fury as the midterm elections approach, and as Republicans are fighting to retain their thin House and Senate majorities.

Trump has called Jeffries a “thug,” and at a May campaign event referred to him as a “low IQ” person who had inspired him to deride Democrats as the “Dumocrats.” Jeffries routinely suggests that Trump is not only extreme but corrupt, vowing that Democrats would “hold the crooks accountable” if they won control.

The private get-together was described by one of the people as a catch-up for Kushner and Jeffries. The two men have stayed in touch since they worked together on a criminal justice bill midway through Trump’s first term.

During the recent meeting, the pair discussed housing, immigration, and the high cost of living as potential areas of common ground. Kushner suggested that Jeffries should meet with the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, two people with knowledge of the meeting said.

The likelihood of any compromises between the White House and Democrats on those issues seems remote.

Trump this year refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill in part because he said it was “Warren centric,” referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, its top Democratic champion. And he has repeatedly expressed openness to a deal with Democrats on immigration, only to back away from any such agreement. He successfully lobbied Republicans to abandon a bipartisan border-security bill in 2024.

White House officials and an aide to Kushner did not respond to messages seeking comment.

In a statement, Jeffries did not acknowledge the meeting, but suggested that the only way Democrats would cut deals with the administration would be if Republicans were willing to come their way on cost-of-living issues, his party’s top priority.

“Throughout this Congress, Republicans have adopted a my-way-or-the-highway approach to governing that has failed the American people,” he said.

He added: “In every conversation that we have with the Trump administration, we will continue to make it explicitly clear that the affordability crisis is not a hoax, and nothing short of transformational policy change is acceptable. We are fighting for an affordable America. The question is whether Republicans will join us.”

Kushner, who worked as a senior West Wing adviser in the president’s first term, is no longer formally part of Trump’s government. He has been deeply involved in the president’s efforts to resolve the war with Iran that Trump began, to enforce a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, and to bring an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He and Jeffries also met last year, according to two people with knowledge of that conversation.

The meeting came as nearly all polls revealed Republicans to be at a disadvantage in the midterms, and showed how members of Trump’s inner circle were digesting what a Democratic majority next year could look like.

Should that happen, Jeffries would be under intense pressure from progressives to use his power as a check on Trump, including through aggressive oversight.

Kushner is frequently consulted by a number of Trump’s advisers, and he has told people that if anything bipartisan is to get done with Congress, Jeffries is the most serious person among Democratic leaders. Wiles, he has said, is the most serious inside the West Wing.

But with Republicans in control of both chambers, Trump has mostly steered around Congress in his second term, trampling its powers and prerogatives. He has faced little pushback from Republican leaders.

Should Democrats win the House, Jeffries would have to balance the need to keep the government funded with Democratic calls to defy Trump at every turn, and possible pleas to impeach him for a third time.

Jeffries and Trump have danced around questions about what their relationship could look like next year should Democrats take control.

“I think he’s a nice guy,” Trump told Punchbowl News in a recent interview, when asked about Jeffries. “I’d probably get along with him very well.”

Trump pointed to a meeting with Jeffries in the Oval Office last fall — the only one they have had in his second term — and described it as a positive one.

In fact, during that meeting, which was billed as a bid to avert a government shutdown, the president positioned hats with a “Trump 2028” logo directly in front of Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, trolling the Democrats with the suggestion that he would run for a third term in violation of the Constitution.

Afterward, Trump posted an AI-generated meme of a mustachioed Jeffries wearing a sombrero, drawing an angry response from the House minority leader, who called the image racist and dared Trump to insult him next time “to my face.”

Soon after the meeting, the government shutdown began.

This year, Jeffries has remained noncommittal about any plans to pursue a third impeachment of the president, and has not discussed publicly what oversight could look like if his party were to win the majority.

“We’ve not ruled anything in and not ruled anything out in terms of accountability,” he told the New York Times in an interview last month, noting that his focus would be on forcing out major Trump officials.

“We’ve got to make sure we continue to get rid of toxic Trump Cabinet secretaries,” he said. “Pete Hegseth, in my view, should be next on the list.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — The Postal Service on Friday published regulations that would restrict mail voting, its latest effort to comply with President Donald Trump’s call to restrict the popular practice just months before the midterm elections.

In a 95-page final rule, the Postal Service clarified how it would carry out an executive order Trump signed in March, which sought to restrict mail ballots and create state-by-state lists of citizens to help determine voting eligibility.

In the rule, the Postal Service said that it would deliver mail ballots only in states that shared voter data with the federal agency.

Before the Postal Service accepts ballots into its system, the agency would review every envelope for compliance with the new standards, including by checking that the recipient was enrolled with the Postal Service to receive a mail ballot.

If the regulations are enacted, the Postal Service would not deliver mail ballots to states that do not comply.

Trump’s executive order was largely blocked by federal courts this summer, and the Postal Service said in its rule published Friday that it would “not take actions to implement the rule specifically for the 2026 election unless and until the government obtains relief from those injunctions.” In a filing to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department said that the government would not enforce the final rule unless the court ruled in its favor.

The Supreme Court is reviewing the issue and could rule at any time.

A Postal Service spokesperson on Friday declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims that mail voting is “cheating,” even as he has voted by mail in multiple elections, including earlier this week.

The president has acknowledged that combating fraud is not the only reason to target the practice. In March, he told Republican lawmakers that passing a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots, which Democrats now use more than Republicans, would “guarantee the midterms” for his party.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.