“People really effing hate data centers,” Abdul El-Sayed said at a campaign event in July, E&E News reported. On Tuesday, he won Michigan’s Senate race, NBC News projected.
El-Sayed was one of many winners Tuesday who made the AI buildout part of their argument about the cost of living. Voters named the cost of living a top issue in AP exit polls. In much of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, the clearest way that issue showed up was the monthly electric bill, and candidates in both parties blamed data centers for it.
The bill
The link runs through PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving 13 states from New Jersey to northern Illinois. Capacity prices on PJM’s grid, which pay power plants to guarantee future supply, rose from $28.92 per megawatt-day in 2024-25 to $329.17 for 2026-27. Monitoring Analytics, PJM’s independent market monitor, estimated that data centers were responsible for 63% of the price increase in the 2025-26 auction, or $9.3 billion recovered from customers through higher rates, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. That adds roughly $16 a month to the average residential bill in Ohio and $18 in western Maryland, IEEFA estimated.
The increases may not be over. Consulting firm ICF estimated that residential rates across PJM could climb 30% to 60% by 2030. Consumers have already noticed. In an October Consumer Reports survey, 81% of people who had lived in the same home for at least three years said their electricity bills had risen, and 84% said they’d support their utility creating a separate rate category for large users like data centers.
The candidates
The candidates who won on this issue made the bill the point. El-Sayed’s plan called for “no rate hikes,” arguing data centers should pay for their own energy demand. Two months after OpenAI and Oracle broke ground on a massive data center campus in Saline Township, he held a rally in front of the site.
In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown defeated Republican Sen. Jon Husted after calling him “the face of data centers,” citing the deals Husted worked on as lieutenant governor. Brown campaigned on eliminating tax breaks for data center companies and requiring them to pay for the utilities their campuses use. Logan Phillips, founder of the election forecasting site Race to the White House, told Fortune that Brown focused on the issue “way before anyone else was focused on it,” while Husted had been “basically at every single ribbon cutting for data centers across the state.”
“Boy, did that not age well,” Phillips said.
By the end of the cycle, Republicans were moving in the same direction. In Michigan, El-Sayed’s opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, said in August he supported a one-year moratorium on new data centers. In Ohio’s governor’s race, both nominees proposed moratoriums: Democrat Amy Acton, who won, and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. In Florida, Republican Byron Donalds, who won the governor’s race, proposed restrictions on data centers.
Voters
Where voters could decide the question directly, they mostly said no. At least 14 Ohio municipalities passed bans or other restrictions on data centers Tuesday, including Sunbury, where a ban targets a planned Amazon data center. Nationally, voters in 10 states considered 41 data center measures.
The polling matched. More than 70% of Americans said they would oppose a data center planned for their area, according to a Heatmap poll published last week, and rising electricity prices were the top reason for opposition.
Not everyone accepts the link. The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association has rejected the claim that data centers are driving up energy costs. “Ohio does not have a data center cost crisis,” the group said. Amazon has declined to say whether Tuesday’s ballot measures will change its expansion plans, and said its commitment to the communities where it operates remains unchanged.
The industry also made its case on TV. Build American AI, a nonprofit linked to the AI industry’s Leading the Future super PAC network, spent at least $2.54 million on Ohio ads touting data centers’ economic benefits, according to an investigation by DeSmog.
The new Congress could take up the issue. Goldman Sachs strategists believe a Democratic Congress could curb data center tax incentives, though they see a nationwide moratorium as unlikely. The buildout is still accelerating: data center capacity under construction is up 48% nationwide, according to Reuters.
The post ‘People really effing hate data centers’: How the AI buildout became the midterms’ affordability issue appeared first on Fortune.
