There’s a reason so many Republicans are backing away from data centers while President Donald Trump pushes them. They’re on the ballot on Nov. 3, and Trump is not.
AI is everywhere. What do Americans want done about it? Regulation.
Dr. Steven Kull talks to USA TODAY Opinion about the work his organization did to survey Americans about the rise of AI and what should be done.
The latest nightmare scenario for the Republican Party may be a deeply unpopular president – Donald Trump – showing up in Dallas next week at the midterm convention to advocate again for a deeply unpopular cause – the construction of data centers across America.
Data centers, the sprawling warehouses for computer infrastructure supporting the development of artificial intelligence, have emerged in this year’s midterm elections as an unusual area of bipartisan agreement. Republicans and Democrats seeking state and federal offices have reversed course on projects that were once pitched as economic revival engines but are now seen as dangerous flashpoints for voter anger.
Trump, by contrast, shrugs off that voter anger and lectures Americans to just accept the data centers they find so unacceptable. And then Vice President JD Vance – likely with one eye on November’s midterms and the other on the 2028 presidential election – tries to play clean-up for his boss.
Trump’s ‘backwards and poor’ comments on data centers get bipartisan rebuke
Trump’s declaration on Aug. 31, via a social media post, that “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” should be listed as an in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party as it seeks to win control of Congress in November.
That tone-deaf post came a week after Trump, in an interview, said: “Communities that don’t take a data center, they’re making a mistake.” And Trump in July urged communities to surrender to data center projects, declaring, “You can’t fight it. You have to go with it.”
Trump’s declarations delight Democrats while making Republicans cringe. After Trump’s “backwards and poor” crack this week, Vance tried to smooth things over with nuance. He suggested that data center owners should build their own power plants, so communities where they are located are not impacted by energy costs.
“I think probably 99 percent of the backlash to data centers has come in areas where building a data center means higher utility and higher electricity for the people on the ground,” Vance told journalists on Aug. 31.
Trump’s comments landed with a thud in Congress, where U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican and Trump ally, seized the opportunity to call himself “backwards and poor” while recommending that data centers be built on military bases and blaming tech companies for doing a poor job on community outreach.
There’s a reason Republicans turned on data centers: Voters
There’s a reason so many Republicans are backing away from data centers while Trump pushes them. They’re on the ballot on Nov. 3, and Trump is not.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, in a survey released on Aug. 11, found a sharp uptick in data center opposition over just four months this year. Sixty-one percent of Americans opposed the projects as of mid-July, up from 49% in March. And that was bipartisan, with majorities opposing the projects – 69% of Democrats, 54% of Republicans and 53% of independents.
An Emerson College Poll released in July also found a surge in opposition to data centers, with 63% of voters not wanting them built in or near their communities, while 27% supported them and 10% were neutral. Emerson cited a 21-percentage-point swing in opposition from a similar poll released in December.
Gallup in May found that 7 in 10 Americans don’t want data centers built in their communities, citing local impacts on energy prices, water consumption and the environment.
And that’s why next week’s midterm convention will be a split-screen affair, with Trump a big fan of data centers and the other Republicans gathered in Dallas trying to navigate that political minefield.
Texas is an apt locale for this tension, given that the Republican governor there, Greg Abbott, in June released stringent regulations for data center projects, a move endorsed last month by state Attorney General Ken Paxton, also a Republican. Trump, who has endorsed Abbott for another term and Paxton for a seat in the U.S. Senate, made it clear he was not a fan of that call.
Democrats can only hope that Trump touts data centers from the convention stage next week, when the midterm elections will be just eight weeks in the future. Republicans would like to hear anything else from an unpopular president who sounds so consistently tone-deaf about a controversial topic driving so much voter anger.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on Bluesky, @bychrisbrennan.bsky.social, and on X, @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.