An enemy both parties agree on

American politics doesn't offer many issues where Republicans and Democrats run the same attack ad against the same target. Data centers have become one of them. An NPR analysis of political advertising data from the firm AdImpact found that since January, campaigns and outside groups have spent more than $45 million on ads mentioning data centers in this year's gubernatorial, House, and Senate races, and the spending split is almost perfectly even: over $22 million supporting Republican candidates, more than $21 million supporting Democrats, with independents accounting for the rest. More than 99% of that spending, according to a separate CNN analysis, went toward ads criticizing data centers rather than defending them.

That's a genuinely unusual pattern in modern American campaign advertising, where the two parties typically spend heavily attacking each other rather than converging on a shared villain. Data centers, the vast, energy-hungry facilities powering the artificial intelligence boom, have managed to become exactly that kind of shared target.

Why this issue crosses party lines so cleanly

Michael Franz, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising, explained why data centers give both sides exactly the talking points they want. For Democrats, he said, the issue offers "a chance to talk about affordability" while letting candidates "latch on to environmental concerns." For Republicans, criticizing data centers offers a way "to go in opposition to big corporations, in opposition to a system that doesn't care about you." Franz summed up the dynamic bluntly: data centers are a rare issue where "MAGA Republicans and liberal Democrats" land in the same place.

That convergence isn't accidental messaging overlap; it reflects a genuine, measurable shift in public sentiment. Polling cited in recent coverage found voters in 2026 expressed greater comfort living near a nuclear power plant than near a large AI data center, a striking reversal given decades of public anxiety specifically about nuclear safety. Residents near data centers have raised concerns spanning water consumption, electricity demand, noise from industrial cooling equipment, land-use disputes, and the fear of rising utility bills, concerns that don't sort neatly into either party's traditional platform.

Where the fight is sharpest: Ohio's Senate race

The clearest test case for how much this issue actually moves votes may be playing out in Ohio, where Democrat Sherrod Brown is challenging Republican Sen. Jon Husted. The attack carries particular bite because of Husted's own record: as Ohio's former lieutenant governor, he personally recruited tech companies to the state before the AI boom made data centers politically toxic, at one point celebrating a new $600 million Google facility in 2019 as "great news for our state." Ohio is now home to more than 200 data centers, ranking sixth nationally, according to the Data Center Map tracking project.

A National Republican Senatorial Committee strategy memo obtained by CNN made the scale of the problem explicit in the party's own internal assessment: "the new ingredient (and the new problem) is data centers," the memo states, adding that "more than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted's neck." When a candidate's own party is privately describing an issue as an anchor around his neck, that's a considerably stronger signal of genuine political vulnerability than any public ad campaign alone could demonstrate.

Wisconsin shows the issue splitting a primary too

Ohio isn't an isolated case. In Wisconsin's competitive Democratic gubernatorial primary, state Rep. Francesca Hong ran directly on a data center moratorium, drawing a sharp contrast with Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley's more moderate regulatory approach. "Unlike the other candidates, I'm not bought by corporations, so I'll actually stop AI data centers," Hong said in one campaign ad. After Crowley won the primary, his Republican general-election opponent, Rep. Tom Tiffany, immediately picked up the same line of attack Hong had used against Crowley from the left, running an ad nicknaming him "Data Center David Crowley" and featuring a clip of Crowley touting Wisconsin's potential as "an AI and data hub."

That sequence, a losing Democratic primary attack immediately recycled by the general-election Republican opponent, is about as direct a demonstration as electoral politics offers that an issue has become genuinely non-partisan in its appeal. A Believe in Wisconsin PAC ad supporting Crowley, which the group spent $634,795 to air in August, shows even his own allies feeling compelled to promise he'll "stop AI data centers from making your energy bills skyrocket," despite Crowley's more moderate underlying position on regulation.

The economic backdrop making the issue land

None of this backlash exists in a vacuum separate from actual electricity costs. A Goldman Sachs report cited in coverage projected electricity prices would rise 6% through 2026 and another 3% by 2028, driven substantially by data center demand growing faster than power supply. That's a real, bill-visible cost that voters across the political spectrum can point to directly, which helps explain why the issue resonates with roughly equal intensity in rural Republican districts and urban Democratic ones alike.

Not every analysis agrees on how much of that price increase actually traces back to data centers specifically. A report from semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis argued that data center expansion is only part of the story, contending that market design and policy decisions around electricity pricing play a larger role in rising rates than AI infrastructure growth alone. That's a genuinely contested empirical question, and it matters for policy design even if it hasn't slowed the political momentum: whether data centers are the primary driver of higher bills or one contributing factor among several, voters experiencing rising costs have settled on a visible, concrete target to blame, and campaigns on both sides have concluded that voters are right to be angry regardless of the precise economic attribution.

The industry's own defensive response

AI companies are aware of how quickly public sentiment has turned, and several have moved to get ahead of the backlash directly. Microsoft published a blog post in January outlining what it called "concrete steps needed to be a good neighbor in the communities where we build," and OpenAI followed with a similar pledge promising to cover its own energy costs, minimize water use, and invest in local jobs. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a directive requiring companies to pay for their own electrical infrastructure upgrades, reuse water, and take steps to reduce costs passed on to other ratepayers, announcing in late August that several companies had agreed to those standards.

Those industry concessions reflect a recognition that the backlash isn't a temporary campaign-season talking point likely to fade after November. Bipartisan officials ranging from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who proposed a moratorium on data center tax incentives, to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has called for an outright data center moratorium, to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has pushed regulatory legislation, have all staked out positions restricting data center growth in some form, spanning a genuinely broad ideological range within both parties.

What this means heading into November

The practical question this bipartisan convergence raises isn't really about any single race; it's about whether an issue this evenly split between the parties can actually reshape federal policy on AI infrastructure, or whether it remains primarily useful as an attack line that both sides deploy without following through on comprehensive regulation once elected. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has already signaled the administration is watching the political temperature closely, telling reporters earlier this year that tech companies perceived as driving up electricity prices "will reap the backlash." Whether that translates into actual federal guardrails, the kind Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has explicitly called for, remains genuinely unresolved heading into a midterm cycle where data centers have become one of the only subjects both parties agree deserves blame, even if they disagree on almost everything else about how to actually fix it.