I’m big on social and political movements. I was on the national leadership team for marriage equality, the most successful political issue of the 21st century, so far. I also teach– here online and at the college-level– best practices in movements on the left and right from 1960s-2026. What works and doesn’t work?
The anti-data center campaign, if not full-scale movement, is young, but it’s starting to have a lightning fast impact.
So when I saw this Politico story, I wanted to include it as today’s note.
The POLITICO Poll this month finds that more people now oppose nearby data centers than support them… The new poll finds that 41 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built within three miles of where they live. That’s up from 28 percent in a January survey. The number supporting those projects dropped during the same period, from 37 percent to 24 percent.
The backlash is starting to kill proposed data center projects. In the first quarter of 2026, at least 75 projects valued at $130 billion were disrupted by local opposition, according to the tracking company Data Center Watch. County-level moratoriums are becoming increasingly common even in conservative areas.
The “cancellation surge” is not just rooted in concerns about the millions of gallons of water per day data centers can draw or the vast amounts of electricity they require, but also due to a “lack of transparency” on the part of technology companies…
I’m writing a Tiny Book on AI data centers and politics. I want to find out where AI companies and local elected officials went wrong, at least politically. And where did the formidable opposition come from? How did it catch fire so incredibly fast?
The industry has a politics problem. Perhaps AI companies decided to sprint into the data center mess not understanding the risks and power of public backlash, or understanding it well and just not caring. They break shit on their way to record profits, so this shouldn’t have been any different (a theory, anyway). Either way, for the time being, data centers are a political gift to Democrats.
“Red or blue…if you vote against data centers, we vote for you. We’ve had enough,” said Cheryl Shadden, lifelong Republican voter in rural Texas.
My early surface read of the situation is this: The intense bipartisan nature of the opposition — based on the financial costs to the public and the arrogance of elected officials and Big Tech companies to shove data centers down people’s throats — is why the effort against data centers has a massive amount of momentum in a relatively short period of time.