Republicans must reject Big Tech land grabs or start losing elections

Republicans are continuing their uninterrupted streak of woefully underperforming in elections. However, in the first of its kind referendum on Big Tech data centers, voters are showing that a party that embraces land sovereignty over Big Tech dystopian land grabs will win the day.

Sadly, Republicans have chosen to be on the losing side of the issue.

The public is being asked to shoulder a burden to facilitate a supposed technology whose benefits are very unclear and dubious.

In a first of its kind local referendum, voters in Port Washington, Wisconsin, voted by a margin of 2-1 for a referendum that will require all future data center projects in the area to be approved by a vote of the city’s residents.

The referendum was sparked in the wake of Oracle and OpenAI’s Stargate facility setting up shop in the area. The proposed 1.3 gigawatt facility will consume the power equivalent of over one million households.

The referendum does not undo the Stargate project but will prevent any future project worth more than $10 million from getting approval without the public input.

Over 1,000 residents signed the petition that put this measure on the ballot. "We are not against development," added Michael Baester, founding member of Great Lakes Neighbors United, which spearheaded this campaign. "We are for development that the community understands, supports, and has chosen together. Tonight proves that when citizens organize and engage, their voices can be heard."

What is so important nationally about this vote is that Port Washington was carried by Trump 52-48 in 2024. It is the quintessential swing city that sways the Wisconsin vote, and by proxy, the entire country’s electorate.

Such an emphatic result from a swing town demonstrates the potency of the data center issue.

According to Politico, other communities around the country are set to vote on similar ballot measures.

Imagine if Republicans could get on the right side of the data center issue. What might that do for their failing election efforts?

In Festus, Missouri, a solid conservative jurisdiction, voters ousted four GOP councilmen who recently approved rezoning for a $6 billion data center. Two of them were defeated by margins greater than 2-1.

Thus the grassroots opposition to data centers is just as virulent in red America as it is in swing areas that have already soured on Trump because of the economy.

Oklahoma is a state where Trump carried every county, yet voters there are firmly opposed to data centers.

After Google tried to bribe the locals in Osage County to support a hyperscale data center, the Rock Volunteer Fire Department turned down a $250,000 donation from the company. This is a county Trump won by 41 points.

The opposition is just as stiff in the cities. Last month, the Tulsa City Council voted unanimously to halt construction of new data centers for nine months. All 19 speakers at the meeting voiced support for the moratorium.

Across the state in Oklahoma City, the city council recently voted to rezone over 800 acres of farmland for a Google data center. The council is now facing a recall petition.

Portage County, Ohio, is a prototypical rust belt, blue-collar county that traditionally voted Democrat but migrated to the GOP under Trump. The president carried the county by 15 points in 2024. Last week, the Ravenna City Council moved forward with a 12-month moratorium on the centers after a crowd filled the city council chambers to speak against the proposed projects.

In many respects, the ubiquitous opposition to data centers is a reflection of the sheer pervasiveness and magnitude of these projects, targeting nearly every county in states like Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Arizona and numerous places in the majority of other states.

According to the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the grid operator in most of the Midwest, by 2030, the proposed hyperscale data centers in Indiana will use an amount of electricity equivalent to twice that used by the entire state.

None of this makes any sense nor is it sustainable, especially for a product that increasingly fails to produce a degree of profit that could come close to paying for all the capital expenditure and power.

This is why red-state RINOs like those in drought-stricken Texas continue to shower these companies with lavish sales tax breaks.

RELATED: Data centers are a hidden tax on your burger

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We don’t offer 30-year abatements like this to any other industry, but this is what data centers require to remain solvent because their hardware depreciates so quickly. According to the state comptroller, Lone Star voters will subsidize $3.2 billion in tax breaks to the largest companies on the planet over the next two years.

Four of the largest states targeted for data centers — Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and Georgia — are languishing through a severe and sustained drought.

Industry apologists are trying to gaslight people into believing that their closed-loop systems will somehow not affect the water flow, but it’s inconceivable that it won’t have a short-term effect and also pose health concerns when recycled back into the water table.

An application from Amazon to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management indicates that the sanitary system it is constructing for two of its hyperscales in New Carlisle is designed to use more than 1.6 million gallons per day on hot summer days.

This is “only” the equivalent water use of about 5,000 households, which pales in comparison to some other facilities and to the magnitude of the power use. Keep in mind that the entire population of this town is just under 1,900.

There’s a reason why 65% of voters oppose all data center construction, including a clear majority of all demographics, ideological groups, and income levels, despite all of the lobbying and electioneering by Big Tech.

The public is being asked to shoulder a burden to facilitate a supposed technology whose benefits are very unclear and dubious.

Republicans can continue ignoring this grassroots revolt, but they will do so at their own peril. Nothing motivates voters more than the preservation of their own communities. That is one thing that still unites a divided America.