Data Centers Become an Election-Loser as Voters Punish Officials Who Backed Them

Opposition to AI-driven data center projects is hardening into a decisive voting issue in U.S. local and state races. In Utah, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams — among the state’s most powerful Republicans — lost his primary after backing the Stratos project, a massive proposed campus near the Great Salt Lake tied to investor Kevin O’Leary that would have spanned tens of thousands of acres and demanded up to 9 gigawatts, more power than the entire state currently uses. County commissioners who voted to advance the same project also went down, with one conceding flatly that the data center vote cost him his seat.

The backlash crosses party lines and is being driven by affordability anxiety, with energy prices serving as its most visible symptom. Polling shows the opposition is broad: a Reuters/Ipsos survey found 57% of Americans would oppose a data center in their community, and Gallup put local opposition near 70%. Analysts note that while data centers are only a small contributor to rising electricity costs, the narrative that ‘AI is eating your power bill’ gives candidates a simple, resonant message — especially among voters already skeptical of AI and seeing few local benefits against higher bills, water use, land consumption, and taxpayer subsidies.

The pattern extends well beyond Utah. Voters recalled commissioners in Cascade Locks, Oregon (killing a project), ousted council members in Warrenton, Virginia and Festus, Missouri, and the issue is now surfacing in the Florida governor’s race, Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, and Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott moved to shield residential ratepayers from data center infrastructure costs. For an industry racing to build out AI capacity, the results expose a widening gap between national demand for compute and local willingness to host it.