Republicans Are Running from Data Centers. That’s How They Lose.

Republicans are losing ground in this year’s midterms, and data centers are being blamed. Ohio is indicative of this larger trend: Democrat Sherrod Brown has spent months calling Jon Husted “the face of data centers,” blaming him for rising electricity bills and tax breaks for tech companies. An internal Republican memo warned data centers had become “the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.”

This contributes to the increasingly dire predictions for Republicans, with Nate Silver recently giving Democrats a 75 percent chance of winning the Senate and Polymarket around a 74 percent chance.

The polls look bad, but Republicans shouldn’t learn the wrong lesson. The data center fight is not a liability to be managed, but an argument to be won. The only issue is Republicans are conceding it by default.

Let’s look back at Ohio. First off, Brown welcomed data center investment in 2015. His newfound criticism deserves scrutiny—especially because it is based on misdirection. Brown pledges to “require the data centers pay the full cost of their electricity.” That sounds great, but Husted already sponsored that legislation. The Ratepayer Protection Act passed the House 417 to 3. It wasn’t Husted and the Republicans who stopped this bill, but Senate Democrats. Brown is now campaigning on the problem his party refused to solve.

Instead of making that argument, Republicans have allowed Democrats to define data centers as a corporate subsidy story. The GOP should do the work to explain to America what it really is: a monumental effort to keep investment at home, build affordable power, and protect taxpayers.

I saw this personally when I visited Utah, where Meta committed $600,000 to help acquire land for a future elementary school and $1.5 million to the Lake Mountain Education Foundation in Eagle Mountain. Parents understand what this data center investment meant for their growing community. Republicans should take the opportunity to explain those tangible local benefits as clearly as Democrats describe potential costs.

When it comes to power constraints, the Trump administration is already addressing the issue. FERC has ordered regional grid operators to justify or reform their large-load connection rules so large customers pay for their own infrastructure rather than passing costs to existing ratepayers. The Department of Energy put $1.9 billion into 31 grid projects across 26 states to unlock more than 23 gigawatts of additional capacity.

And though Senate Democrats blocked legislation in Congress, President Trump still instituted the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which now covers more than 300 companies representing 80 percent of US power delivered to customers and commits developers to build, buy, or bring their own power. Republicans have a record to run on. They are losing the data center argument because they refuse to run on it.

The stakes extend beyond one election. With national debt above $40 trillion, America needs the productivity and revenue AI could generate. The late-1990s technology boom coupled with fiscal discipline helped make budget surpluses possible. AI offers another unprecedented growth opportunity. Washington still has to control spending, but obstructing the computing infrastructure will not improve that arithmetic.

Instead of running from the data center issue, Republicans should offer a clear bargain that embraces domestic building without adding costs to the people: welcome investment, require developers to cover the costs they create, and build enough power to support growth. Data centers should also improve cooling and computing efficiency and, where feasible, shift consumption away from hours when the grid is strained to avoid overcapacity and keep utility costs down.

States should speed decisions on viable generation and transmission projects, with gas, nuclear, renewables, and storage evaluated on cost and reliability and deployed swiftly.

There is also a smarter way to create grid capacity than simply building more power plants. Under frameworks like the Alliance to Save Energy’s BYODC framework, data center developers fund energy efficiency improvements for homes and businesses in the surrounding community, including better cooling systems, demand-reduction programs, and smarter grid management. Those improvements free up existing capacity for the new facility, reduce emissions, and lower utility bills for neighbors. The developer gets the power it needs, and local customers get cheaper electricity without adding infrastructure costs to ratepayers.

Republicans should stop allowing Democrats to frame growth as something ordinary Americans must fear. Show voters the blocked Ratepayer Protection bill, school investments, and enforceable cost protections as proof that one party wants to build in America, and the other wants an election issue.

A record this strong deserves a party willing to defend it.