It was a bad night for data centers. In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown, who has aired ads for months calling his opponent “the face of data centers in Ohio,” cruised to victory to flip a Senate seat. Democrat Chris Pappas, who when seated will be the nation’s first openly gay male senator, mentioned his opposition to data centers in his victory speech and drew massive boos from his crowd in New Hampshire—even though the state has no large-scale data centers under construction.
Elsewhere, two separate Republicans named Derek and Derrick, whose Democratic opponents labeled them “Data Center Derek” and “DC Derrick,” suffered losses in House races in Ohio and Wisconsin.
As part of last night’s shocking blue tsunami, voters selected candidates with tough policies on data centers at all levels of government, in a clear rebuke to the industry’s buildout in states across the country. Almost a quarter of all voters told NBC News that data centers were “crucial” to their vote, while nearly two-thirds said it was either a major or minor factor.
“The revolt against data centers was one of the top issues of the 2026 election, and in a few years we will look back on it as just the early tremor of a much bigger AI earthquake upending American politics,” Greg Casar, the Texas Democratic congressman, said in a statement.
“Data centers and AI as a technology are fundamentally linked in many voters’ minds,” says Alexander McCoy, a Democratic strategist working on AI. “So you can address all of the different concerns with data centers with regards to their energy or their noise, or their pollution, and there would still be significant concerns about what these projects are enabling and the effect is having on opportunities, prices, jobs, society.”
Perhaps some of the biggest shocks for the industry came in the governor’s mansions. In stunning upsets, voters elected Democrats Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia and Gina Hinojosa in Texas, while putting Cindy Holscher on the cusp of a potential win in Kansas. All of these candidates campaigned not just for increased regulations on the industry, but for data center moratoriums. A pause on data centers in Texas and Georgia especially, two of the biggest hubs for development in the country, could have serious implications for the hundreds of projects planned for each of those states.
“I think we will see the end to favorable tax breaks, and it’s clear that people like Greg Abbott were harmed by their history of giving those financial incentives to AI companies and data center developers,” says McCoy. “I think we’ll likely see the appointment of regulators in various administrative bureaucratic bodies that pose more scrutiny on these projects and an increase in the enforcement of environmental protection regulations.”
