Data centers lost the midterms
In ballot measures and exit polls, voters across the country rejected unrestrained development.
by Lauren FeinerNov 4, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC
In ballot measures and exit polls, voters across the country rejected unrestrained development.
by Lauren FeinerNov 4, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC Lauren Feiner is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
Data center developers are poised to face a more restrictive building environment after voters across the country voted in candidates who favor moratoriums and ballot measures that put more obstacles on their expansion, delivering a stinging blow to a central pillar of the AI industry.
Of voters polled by NBC News on Election Day, 76 percent said they opposed data centers in their communities. Dozens of local communities voted directly to restrict development through ballot measures. And upset winners like Texas Democratic Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa and Michigan’s Democratic Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed support moratoriums on development.
It’s hard to draw a direct line from data center backlash to the election of any of these candidates, and there were still some races where candidates who favored more limited restrictions on data centers prevailed. Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, who previously lauded development in Florida, was elected as governor, and Iowa’s Democratic Governor-elect Rob Sand opposed a moratorium that his challenger favored. But even these candidates were forced to engage on data center issues during their campaigns, and will be likely to face continued pressure to put at least some guardrails in place.
Ballot measures
Voters were faced with questions about data centers directly in 45 local ballot measures nationwide. As of Wednesday morning, according to a site compiled by Redbud Consulting, the results of 33 of those will restrict data center development. The Town of Wells, Maine, favored a 180-day moratorium on large data centers, backdated to mid-June 2026. Several cities in Ohio voted to ban data centers over 25MW. The City of El Dorado, Kansas, voted to ban data centers with peak electrical load over 10MW for 10 years.
Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa will take over the governor’s seat from Republican incumbent Greg Abbott, marking a major Democratic flip in a state with the second-highest number of planned data centers. Hinojosa supports a statewide moratorium on data center development, while Abbott took a more measured approach. He announced a new audit this summer on data centers that could slow new developments from connecting to the state energy grid, but has previously praised data center expansion in the state.
In another major upset, Democratic State Rep. James Talarico flipped Texas blue in a landmark Senate victory against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Both Talarico and Paxton wanted to remove some tax exemptions for data centers, and to make them responsible for their own energy infrastructure-related costs. But Talarico also put an emphasis on the facilities’ environmental impact and ensuring they shared their profits with the public, while Paxton’s message focused on keeping Chinese tech out of data centers.
Republican congressman Byron Donalds won the governor’s seat over Democratic former congressman David Jolly. Donalds opposed an outright ban of data centers, while Jolly said he’d bar hyperscalers for a year beginning on day one in office. In Congress, Donalds introduced the Protecting Ratepayers Act, which would make developers pay for their own energy and water needs. Donalds’ win was still closer than expected in a state that’s been a Republican stronghold in the Trump era. As of Wednesday morning, NBC News reported that Donalds had exactly 50 percent of the vote, with 99 percent of expected votes already counted, while Jolly had 48.7 percent, and the rest went to an Independent candidate.
Pennsylvania
Democratic incumbent Governor Josh Shapiro held onto his seat against Republican challenger and state Treasurer Stacy Garrity. Both Shapiro and Garrity toughened their stances against data centers as the race went on, despite previously touting their potential benefits to the state. Shapiro signed an executive order that barred nondisclosure agreements for data center developments and took proposals for AI data centers off the fast track. Garrity has said she supports a development pause of up to three years.
Democrat Sherrod Brown won back his former Senate seat from Republican incumbent Jon Husted, whom Brown had labeled “the face of data centers.” The National Republican Senatorial Committee warned this summer in a leaked memo that if data centers were blamed for Husted’s potential loss, it would make them seem poisonous to future candidates. Husted earlier helped install data center tax breaks as lieutenant governor, though he more recently introduced the Ratepayer Protection Act in Congress to force large data centers to cover their infrastructure upgrade and energy costs. Brown hammered Husted on the issue throughout the campaign, and while he hasn’t gone as far as to call for a moratorium, he’s said that developers shouldn’t get tax breaks or get a go-ahead without local input.
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