President Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot this midterm election season, but on some tickets, an industry he wholeheartedly supports was: Ballot measures in more than 30 districts across the country asked voters to weigh in on AI data center development.
And data centers lost big.
Voters overwhelmingly chose to ban or pause local data center development across 38 out of 41 ballot measures. (The other three measures aren’t yet reporting results, according to Ballotpedia.)
The ballot questions varied, in some instances asking voters to prohibit data centers in their cities, and in others, asking them to allow data center development, or even to uphold specific data center deals.
Where were data centers on the ballot?
Not all results are yet in. But it’s still clear that no matter the framing, data centers lost by landslides.
In Edgewater, Florida, more than 77% of voters approved a ballot initiative to amend the city charter in order to “prohibit the approval, construction, expansion, or operation of new data centers.”
In Ashville, Ohio, a ballot referendum asked voters to maintain the village’s deal with EdgeConneX for two data centers and on-site natural gas across nearly 200 acres. Residents struck it down with more than 81% of the vote.
Grove City, Ohio, saw one of the closest races , but it’s still looking bad for data centers. It looks like voters there still chose to rein in data center development—by requiring public approval for certain projects—with 55% of the vote.
In 28 of the 38 ballot measures for which Ballotpedia is reporting results, support for banning or pausing data center development hit 70% or more. In 13, it hit 80% or more.
Strong support for data center critics
Data centers didn’t only lose when it came to specific ballot questions, either. Candidates who spoke out against data centers won handedly.
In some cases, candidates seemed to sense the public rebuke of data centers early on, and switched their tune.
Democrat Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, for example, was once in support of the AI data center boom. Then in August he signed an executive order to restrict certain projects and require them to be approved by local officials.
“We will not be bulldozed by the lawyers working for these big tech companies,” he said at the time, according to NBC News. He won a second term on Tuesday.
In Georgia, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms, who won her race for governor, made a statewide data center pause a key part of her campaign. Georgia is one of the leading states for data center development.
Texas, too, is a major data center hub, with more than 781 data centers either operating, under construction, or planned across nearly 300 campuses, according to Cleanview.
Outgoing Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who lost his reelection bid, did recently introduce a data center moratorium, but he had backed the industry before, and even raised about $9 million from data center donors.
Governor-elect Democrat Gina Hinojosa, Abbott’s opponent, called that temporary moratorium a “scam.” She campaigned on data center opposition, promising a new construction moratorium, an end to data center tax breaks, and tighter regulations around water and power use.
Across both parties, midterm campaigns and outside groups spent more than $173 million in anti-data center ad spending. Democrats led that charge, with $140 million of that spending, versus Republicans with $28 million.
The data center industry fought back, setting up a super PAC that set aside $1.5 million in ads to supporting Republican Darline Graham, who was fighting to keep her late brother Lindsey Graham’s Senate seat in South Carolina.
She lost to Democrat Annie Andrews in what New York Times reporter Teddy Schleifer called “a black eye for the data-center industry.”
Trump has gone all-in on data centers and AI companies, even writing “let Data Reign,” on Truth Social in August. Voters clearly disagree.
