The Results Are In: Voters Hate Data Centers

It was a bad night for data centers. In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown, who has aired ads for months calling his opponent “the face of data centers in Ohio,” cruised to victory to flip a Senate seat. Democrat Chris Pappas, who when seated will be the nation’s first openly gay male senator, mentioned his opposition to data centers in his victory speech and drew massive boos from his crowd in New Hampshire—even though the state has no large-scale data centers under construction.

Elsewhere, two separate Republicans named Derek and Derrick, whose Democratic opponents labeled them “Data Center Derek” and “DC Derrick,” suffered losses in House races in Ohio and Wisconsin.

As part of last night’s shocking blue tsunami, voters selected candidates with tough policies on data centers at all levels of government, in a clear rebuke to the industry’s buildout in states across the country. Almost a quarter of all voters told NBC News that data centers were “crucial” to their vote, while nearly two-thirds said it was either a major or minor factor.

“The revolt against data centers was one of the top issues of the 2026 election, and in a few years we will look back on it as just the early tremor of a much bigger AI earthquake upending American politics,” Greg Casar, the Texas Democratic congressman, said in a statement.

“Data centers and AI as a technology are fundamentally linked in many voters' minds,” says Alexander McCoy, a Democratic strategist working on AI. “So you can address all of the different concerns with data centers with regards to their energy or their noise, or their pollution, and there would still be significant concerns about what these projects are enabling and the effect is having on opportunities, prices, jobs, society.”

Meanwhile, as the results rolled in, Musk posted on X, “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”