The LedeCould Data Centers Swing an Election in Wisconsin?Illustration by Tarini SharmaSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyIn early March, Philip Gorman, a county supervisor in southern Wisconsin, came across a local news report that had uncovered permits related to plans for a company linked to Meta to build a hyper-scale A.I. data center in his district. The proposed data center, named Cornmaze, would cover more than four hundred acres of an aging quarry, straddling two tiny towns in Rock County, which borders Illinois. Soon, Gorman discovered that town officials and the county administrator, who was supposed to report to elected officials like him, had signed nondisclosure agreements with the developer a year earlier. Gorman told me that, when he approached the administrator, he responded by saying, “I’m not sure if I even should have told you I signed the N.D.A.”Gorman, who has been on the Rock County Board of Supervisors since 2024, began organizing with citizens across the county who feared that the project would raise utility bills, diminish air quality, and drain the county’s groundwater, joining a growing nationwide backlash against data centers. But, while travelling around his district, he noticed that the reasons people had for opposing the project went beyond typical NIMBYism. “I’ve never seen engagement like this on any normal development issue,” Gorman said. “People don’t like that they didn’t have a vote on whether social media could take over our society. And now people see A.I. getting ready to take things over and potentially upset lives, upset society, upset jobs, and they want the ability to have a say in that.” Local residents helped set up informal community meetings to discuss the data center at the public library, and opposition kept building. Dozens of meetings followed, sometimes three a week. Meanwhile, Gorman was running for reëlection, and, in April, he won his race handily. “I won very conservative parts of the town of Beloit that I had previously lost, purely on the data-center issue,” he told me. “You can knock seven doors and hear seven different reasons why people don’t want this.”A recent Gallup poll found that more than seventy per cent of Americans oppose data centers in their area. And, during the past several weeks, data centers have become increasingly toxic in midterm elections across the country. Opposition has become particularly central to contests in Rust Belt states, such as Republican-trending Ohio, where anti-data-center policies have appeared to boost the campaigns of the Democrats Amy Acton, who is running for governor, and Sherrod Brown, who is running for Senate. Brown’s opponent is the incumbent Jon Husted, who previously, as lieutenant governor, helped usher in an explosion of data centers in the state, many of which were developed after Ohio offered them lucrative tax breaks. Brown’s ability to hammer Husted on this issue is alarming Republican operatives, who see a Husted victory as crucial to holding a majority in the Senate. This month, Axios released a private memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee warning that data centers have become an “anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.” Other politicians are distancing themselves from their previous positions, including Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, who is up for reëlection in November, and used to champion data centers. Last week, he signed an executive order that he claimed “enacted the strictest requirements IN THE NATION” for data-center permits. “We will not be bulldozed by the lawyers for these big tech companies.”But nowhere have the politics of data centers been more strained than in the Wisconsin governor’s race. Earlier this month, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley narrowly won the Democratic nomination after one of the most chaotic and unusual primaries in the state’s history. The front-runner through most of the primary had been Francesca Hong, a democratic-socialist assemblywoman from Madison whose success was partially driven by her vociferous opposition to data centers; her signature policy proposal during the campaign was a one-year moratorium on new data centers, which none of her opponents supported. (In July, Governor Kathy Hochul made New York the first state to enact such a policy.) Hong also called for cutting state funding and tax breaks for companies that lay off workers as a result of adopting A.I. She lost to Crowley by fewer than four thousand votes after attacks from a hostile Democratic establishment; a disastrous appearance on CNN in which she did not walk back a 2020 tweet calling to “cancel Thanksgiving”; and a stream of late money into Crowley’s campaign, including from building-trades unions, who support data centers because of the jobs that they’ll create for their members.Shortly after he beat Hong, Crowley was asked what the biggest difference between them was. He answered, “data centers,” then went on to explain that, while he’s for “guardrails” on them, he is against Hong’s moratorium, because it doesn’t address existing data centers. It was a curious issue for Crowley to single out, especially if he was hoping to attract Hong voters. And, while most politicians who have opposed data centers have been Democrats, Crowley’s Republican opponent, Representative Tom Tiffany, saw a populist opening and pounced. He posted an edited clip of the interview, and the issue soon became the centerpiece of his campaign. (It is the only specific policy currently detailed on his website.) He dubbed Crowley “Data Center David,” and ran ads with a clip from a primary forum in which Crowley said, “There’s an opportunity for us to really become an A.I. and a data hub not only for the entire country but for the entire globe.”Wisconsin is particularly attractive to tech companies looking to build data centers. It has ample freshwater (needed for cooling servers and generating electricity), a cool climate, and plenty of farmland and deindustrialized “brownfield” sites, which the Trump Administration has encouraged repurposing for data centers. Many parts of the state have no zoning laws, and in 2023, hoping to further entice tech investment, the Republican-controlled state legislature inserted sales- and use-tax exemptions for data centers into the biennial budget, and the Democratic governor, Tony Evers signed them into law. Unlike similar carve-outs in many other states, there is no sunset provision in these exemptions, and they apply not only to construction goods, I.T. equipment, and other typical data-center expenses but also to electricity costs. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a nonpartisan state agency, has estimated that these tax breaks will cost Wisconsin more than two billion dollars in lost revenue.In the years since the exemptions went into effect, Wisconsin has become a major hub of data-center construction. More than forty-six billion dollars’ worth of data-center-development projects are currently under construction or being considered in the state, according to an estimate by the nonprofit newsroom Wisconsin Watch. Recently, a Seattle-based company called Cloverleaf Infrastructure has been drawing national attention as “A.I. prospectors” in Wisconsin—securing large plots of land from farmers and other landowners for tech companies. Its biggest success so far is facilitating the development of Oracle and OpenAI’s fifteen-billion-dollar data-center campus in Port Washington, a small town in southeastern Wisconsin. It will eventually cover nineteen hundred acres (much of it former farmland) and require 3.5 gigawatts of electricity—roughly three times the amount needed to power all residences in Milwaukee. Hyper-scale data centers often demand new natural-gas power plants and transmission lines, and Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission approves or denies permits for such developments, with no requirement for input from local communities. Recently, the commission predicted that the state’s power-generation needs will rise by forty per cent in the next six years, largely because of data centers.Meanwhile, statewide opposition has surged. Seventy-eight per cent of Wisconsin’s residents now oppose data centers, according to an August poll from Marquette University Law School, up from fifty-five per cent this past October. And, crucially, opposition in both parties is growing, though it is much stronger—ninety-four per cent—among Democrats. “Republicans have become more opposed, but Democrats have become even more opposed,” Charles Franklin, the poll’s director, told me. The Marquette poll also showed similar levels of opposition across the state, even in places where there is no proposed development. There are no plans for data centers in the assembly district of Ben Gruber, a Democratic assembly candidate in southwestern Wisconsin, but he has found that the issue still resonates with voters. “Data centers are a physical target of an emotional, visceral populist anger,” Gruber told me. “Behind them is A.I. People aren’t sure what it’s gonna do for them. Is it going to improve their life, or is it going to take their job?” Gruber noted that five elementary schools in his area have closed in the past nine years. “What everybody is most upset about is the corporate welfare, while our communities suffer,” he said.Since Tiffany’s attacks began, Crowley has moved in Hong’s general direction, emphasizing his requirements—using exclusively renewable energy to power new data centers, building them with union labor—for developers to receive the tax breaks. But he has stopped short of calling for repealing those exemptions, giving Tiffany an opening to try and gain a populist edge on the issue. Last week, Tiffany, who grew up on a dairy farm, embarked on a tour called “Protecting Wisconsin Farmland,” continuing to cultivate his image as a folksy, rural Wisconsinite devoted to beloved institutions like the family farm and the tavern. (One treacly campaign sign reads “You Betcha! Tom Tiffany for Governor.”) His data-center-focussed attack ads emphasize that message. “Our lakes run dry. Family farms paved over. Why? Because Crowley’s campaign is funded by the people building them,” it goes. “Big Tech wins. Wisconsin pays.”This line of attack is especially performative, considering that, as recently as earlier this year, Tiffany had been a strong supporter of data centers. In January, he called them an “exciting new technology,” and, last year, in Congress, he voted for a version of the “Big Beautiful Bill” which imposed a ten-year ban on state and local regulations of A.I. (That provision was later removed by the Senate.) The bill that passed has, so far, given six A.I.-invested companies nearly eighty-three billion dollars in tax breaks. In fact, Tiffany’s record shows little concern for protecting natural resources and local control, or for restraining corporate power. In 2011, when Tiffany was a member of the State Assembly, he introduced a bill to expedite the permitting of an enormous open-pit iron-ore mine near Lake Superior, in one of the most pristine watersheds in the state. In 2013, as a state senator, he co-authored a bill that barred local municipalities from regulating the mining of frac sand, which is used in fracking and can cause silicosis, an incurable lung disease. In 2017, he led the successful effort to repeal Wisconsin’s moratorium on sulfide mining, and also that year he voted to give the Taiwanese company Foxconn billions of dollars in subsidies to build a massive LCD screen factory, a deal that several Wisconsinites described to me as an important precedent that fuelled their distrust of data centers. The deal, negotiated by President Trump and Governor Scott Walker (Trump called it the “eighth wonder of the world”), reached 4.5 billion dollars—the largest subsidy of a foreign corporation in American history and quickly became a boondoggle. Foxconn had promised to open a manufacturing plant that would employ thirteen thousand workers. To build the campus, hundreds of acres of Wisconsin farmland were cleared and dozens of homeowners sold their properties after being threatened with having them taken under eminent domain. Foxconn never employed more than about a thousand people and eventually part of the land was sold to Microsoft, which is planning to build seventeen data centers on the site.Underneath the bluster, Tiffany’s and Crowley’s positions on data centers actually overlap in several key areas: both say N.D.A.s related to data-center projects should be banned, that local communities should be able to reject data centers, and that corporations should cover the costs of upgrading the power grid. “Data centers have the potential to be a blockbuster issue in the election,” Barry Burden, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told me. But, of the candidates, he said, “at the moment, I think their kind of messy and inconsistent positions don’t offer much clarity to voters.”The unsettled partisan lines around this issue have allowed anger, rooted in decades of deindustrialization and public austerity, to flourish in the electorate. It also showcased Hong’s ability to use the data-center issue to tap into the state’s long tradition of economic populism, challenging both Republicans and establishment Democrats alike.“She recognized what most people don’t: that data centers are the physical embodiment of how we have been screwed by Big Tech, of how we have been screwed by the government, of how both parties have failed us,” Chali Pittman, a Madison-based reporter who has been exhaustively covering Wisconsin’s data-center explosion, said. “People are able to point to them and say, ‘That is what I’m against.’ ”Last month, during a visit to Rock County, I attended a meeting of the Town of Beloit supervisors, and I saw the fruits of months of organizing by Gorman and other residents. The issue at hand was whether to advance a one-year data-center moratorium. The lobby quickly filled up as people crowded around two women selling bright-yellow “No Data Centers” T-shirts. Inside, every chair was taken, and more people, including Gorman, stood in the back. The meeting moved quickly as the supervisors outlined various financial and legal risks they could face for opposing the project—including potential lawsuits that could overwhelm the town’s meagre resources. One supervisor gave a brief disquisition on the history of corporate personhood, how it was created from a headnote in an 1886 Supreme Court case. The supervisors voted unanimously to advance the moratorium, and the crowd erupted.Shelley Strommen, one of the activists who has spearheaded the effort, hugged Gorman. “I’m concerned about our water, I’m concerned about our air, I’m concerned about noise and light,” she told me. “I’m worried about what kind of future we’re going to leave behind.” Strommen has an Instagram feed with tributes to Charlie Kirk, but that didn’t prevent her from working closely with Gorman, who, while technically in a nonpartisan position, is married to Mark Spreitzer, a progressive Democratic state senator. “It’s not a typical horseshoe issue where the right and left are aligned,” Gorman told me. “The entire horseshoe is aligned.”Still, this coalition might prove fragile. Doug Sutter, a Rock County supervisor who supports the moratorium, describes himself as a constitutional conservative. He has reservations about data-center projects, and had earlier put forward a motion for a countywide moratorium. “If it’s a moratorium for a limited time, to get more information out of the companies that are proposing these things, then I’m in favor of it,” he said. “It would eliminate a lot of the fear, and fear is a dangerous emotion.” But he echoed an idea that has been circulated by some A.I. investors and Republican politicians, suggesting that the Chinese Communist Party is somehow behind the grassroots movement against data centers. “Sometimes I think a lot of the information out there is being thrown out there by these other governments that would like to take our place as the leader,” he said.The unlikely bedfellows behind anti-data-center activism in the state show how scrambled political labels are becoming. Trump endorsed Tiffany for governor earlier this year, and wrote on Truth Social that he’s “always been at my side.” But lately Tiffany has started distancing himself from the President, whose approval rating in Wisconsin is the lowest it’s ever been. In a recent interview, Tiffany, who has vigorously pushed conspiracies about the 2020 election being stolen, said, for the first time, that Joe Biden won the election, and declined to say whether he wanted Trump to campaign with him. And he may have to keep distancing himself from the President if he wants to keep positioning himself as the anti-data-center candidate. Last week, Trump doubled down on his support for them. “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an A.I. plant or a data center,” Trump said, “I would absolutely want it, because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.”Crowley is leading slightly in the most recent polls. When I reached Gorman by phone one evening after the Democratic primary, he told me that he is planning to vote for Crowley. “I think David Crowley’s a great guy, he’s got a great record,” Gorman said. “But one question that I have—and I think a lot of activists are going to be asking is—is he for the repeal of the sales- and use-tax exemption? I hope that he’ll join the rest of the Party, and the rest of the electorate, and recognize that data centers are different from normal developments.”Despite Gorman’s recent success in pushing for a data-center moratorium, he knew that the battle was just beginning. As we talked, he mentioned that his husband, Mark, was held up in a meeting about a new front in the data-center fight in his area. “Just when it feels like the data-center moment is calming down a little bit,” he said, “there’s this giant, electric, extra-high-voltage transmission line that’s coming in through Jefferson, Walworth, and Rock Counties.” ?