Is 2026 shaping up to be the data center election? Signs that this could be the case are out there, and they are becoming increasingly hard to ignore. While there are plenty of other big issues the voters will be considering this November, data centers seem to have leapt to the forefront with increasing importance. Both major political parties are finally starting to react to the new reality, which has the potential to be a new dividing line in American politics. The most interesting thing about it is that, so far, it is an issue which cuts across the usual partisan divide -- because almost everybody now hates data centers. It doesn't matter your political affiliation, the issue has generated so much pushback that the politicians are (belatedly, for most of them) trying to catch up with public opinion.

There are other issues in play in the 2026 midterms, of course -- some of them quite visceral. The economy and the affordability crisis are likely to be on the minds of more voters, along with the opinions about Donald Trump and his disastrous war of choice with Iran (as well as the rest of his misguided agenda). But these are more partisan issues, although Trump has been bleeding support on both of them from even his most loyal MAGA base (who still have to fill up their pickup trucks at the local gas pump, and thus are just as hard-hit by the price of gasoline or diesel as everyone else).

Data centers, on the other hand, are not nearly as partisan. Polling shows that something like a whopping three-fourths of the public would be against having a data center built near where they live. This was initially seen just as some sort of "not in my backyard" (or "NIMBYism") phenomenon, but it shouldn't be dismissed as some sort of minor thing. There are very concrete and understandable reasons why people don't want a data center in their backyard (or, more accurately, just over the fence from their backyard).

Picture it for yourself. The empty lot behind your house used to be where the neighborhood kids would play sandlot baseball. Then one day, the bulldozers showed up. After enduring months of construction noises from early morning to the end of the day, a huge industrial building is completed. Then when it starts operation, it begins emitting an incredible amount of noise -- a loud and annoying background hum that just never goes away, because it runs 24/7. After your view was been ruined by a really ugly giant building looming over your lot, you now can't even go out back and relax, because it is like trying to relax next to a jet airplane warming up its engines. Then the secondary effects hit you -- your power and water bills both start climbing, as a direct result of your backyard's quality of life having been ruined. And you now don't even have the possibility of selling your house and moving elsewhere, because due to the data center's proximity, you would no longer be able to get back what you paid for it (because nobody else would want to live there either).

Who could be for all of that? It's pretty easy to see why data centers are so unpopular.

Data center pushback isn't just happening in the suburbs either. Pretty much no matter where data centers are planned, there are people fighting back. In rural areas -- where you might think data centers would be more accepted since they could be built far from people's houses -- it becomes a question of taking arable land out of production. Any acreage that isn't growing food is wasted, as far as a farmer or rancher is concerned. And it doesn't matter where you live, the problems of noise and electricity and water usage are still huge. In the West, water is a life-or-death issue for both towns and for farmers and ranchers. Data centers use an enormous amount of water. And their electricity needs are gargantuan too. Even if a data center pledges to build a new power plant to cover its electricity needs, the question then becomes where that power plant will be built -- and where the resulting pollution is going to be felt. These are issues that cut across political and demographic lines.

There's a bigger and more intangible reason why people are so outraged at the race to build as many data centers as possible in as many places as possible, and that's the feeling of powerlessness. Up until now, the corporations behind the data center building boom have operated in the shadows as much as they can. They swoop into a town, sit down with all the elected officials who need to sign off on their project, and essentially bribe them into both approving it and keeping quiet about it until it is too late for the citizens to do anything about it. They would even use non-disclosure agreements with the politicians to avoid anyone even learning the name of the corporation about to descend on the town. They would make glimmering promises of future tax revenues while at the same time trying to force concessions so they wouldn't have to pay the taxes they normally would. The approval process is often hustled along before the residents of the town even become aware of what is going on. This -- quite obviously -- generates the stink of corruption and a feeling of absolute powerlessness among the citizens the politicians are supposed to be representing. This brings the general feeling the public already has of giant corporations screwing over the little guy down to a very local and personal level -- because it's not the president or some faraway senator who has been bought and paid for by the big corporation, it's your local mayor or city councilmember.

This is a more potent issue than most people realize, and it is one big reason why there is such fierce pushback no matter whether the town council is filled with Republicans or Democrats. Either way, if they push through a local data center they're seen as selling out the interests of their constituents. A recent poll showed that almost nine in ten Americans now believe that politics has become filled with corruption, which shows how bipartisan these feelings truly are.

It doesn't help that the data centers are being built to power the artificial intelligence boom time. If this was all being done for a more benign reason, perhaps people wouldn't feel quite so strongly about it, but it is being done in the name of "productivity" -- which, to an average person means: "fewer jobs in the future." Even if your own job isn't personally at risk by the threat of A.I. taking it over it in the near future, the changes are becoming more and more apparent everywhere. In a continuation of a trend that really took off during the COVID pandemic, personal service is fast disappearing everywhere. Things that employees used to either do for you or at least help you with are now handled by a kiosk or an app. Forcing consumers to do everything for themselves means more profit and fewer wages to pay, and this trend has absolutely exploded with the advent of A.I. So even if you don't have a data center next to your house, your quality of life is still being adversely affected.

People are angry at the politicians who are selling out to the data center corporations. These are often local politicians, although the backlash is growing so impossible to ignore than it is becoming a defining issue in national politics as well. This has all happened unbelievably quickly -- data centers weren't really that big of an issue (at least nationally) in the 2024 elections, and prior to that the boom time hadn't really gotten underway yet. In less than two years, the issue has gone from being a small and mostly local one to one that could dominate this year's midterms. That is blindingly fast for such a change to happen in the political world (where pushbacks like this usually take years -- if not decades -- to build up steam).

This week, a city councilman in Independence, Missouri was recalled from office by the voters because he supported a data center. He's not the first politician to be booted out by his constituents over the issue, and he certainly won't be the last. Two governors of note have done a complete U-turn on their previous support for data centers: Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Greg Abbott in Texas. Shapiro is a Democrat and Abbott is a Republican, but they both can see the writing on the wall. After spending the past few years championing how wonderful it was that their state was being chosen for new data centers, both governors are now positioning themselves as being the one slamming on the brakes, with new statewide laws and policies to rein in the Wild West atmosphere of the data center boom time. How much the voters believe their change of heart remains to be seen, but it is indeed notable that such complete reversals of position are happening right now on both sides of the aisle. The issue transcends partisanship, at least with the voters.

To their credit, the Democratic Party is fast realizing the potency of the issue. It used to be just one of those things that Bernie Sanders ranted about, but in the past six months or so the dismissive attitude of: "Oh, that's just some ultra-progressive bugaboo that I can ignore" have evaporated. There are differences of opinion about what exactly should be done to combat the unrestrained data center boom, ranging from a complete moratorium on their construction to just strengthening the rules that new data centers must follow to be approved. But the Democratic Party as a whole is now increasingly seen as the party leading the fight against the data centers. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries just gave a rather forceful speech on the House floor positioning the whole party as the one that is fighting hard against the data center boom, while painting the Republicans as the party who voted several times to expedite the permitting and construction of data centers everywhere.

Republicans can't really play catch-up too much on the issue, even the ones (like Abbott) who have realized how toxic the issue has become for them. The reason for this is a simple one: Donald Trump is doubling down on the losing side of this battle. Here's some of what he had to say about it this week on social media:

The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.

Nothing like insulting your base voters to their faces to gin up enthusiasm to go vote GOP in November, eh? This actually generated some blowback among Republicans in Congress -- which is astonishingly rare, since Trump has remade the party into his very own personality cult. And more and more voices on the Republican side are warning that the issue is going to hit them hard in November. A Texas Republican officeholder warned his fellow Republicans of the dangers this week, and not so long ago a Republican analysis of the Ohio Senate race also warned that the issue was killing their candidate's chances of victory. But it's tough for most Republicans to make the U-turn that the governor of Texas was forced to make recently, because they will incur the wrath of Trump if they do so. Which is precisely why Republicans are falling way behind in the public's perception of which party is leading the fight against the data centers.

This is all why data centers could wind up being the defining issue of the 2026 midterm elections. It's an issue that wasn't even on most politicians' radars a year ago, but which has grown in importance so fast (and with so much voter anger about it) that it could wind up being the deciding factor this November.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant