Voters Reject Nearby Data Centers Over Rising Power Costs

65% of U.S. voters oppose new data centers in their own communities, a Marist Institute for Public Opinion survey of 1,280 registered voters found. Fifty-eight percent say building by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI will mostly hurt the country.

A quarter of voters support a local campus. The fight that moved the House on Sept. 16 is who pays the extra power bill when one of those campuses plugs in.

A Backyard Veto That Crosses Party Lines

The Marist survey, fielded Sept. 14 to 15 by phone, text and online, asked about construction in the respondent’s own community, not about AI in the abstract. Forty-three percent are strongly opposed. The margin of error is 3.8 points for the full sample, 6.5 points among Democrats, 6.8 among Republicans and 7.2 among independents.

Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, said the president is “out there on his own on this one,” and that the worry now runs through a wider fear of artificial intelligence. Democratic strategist Joel Payne said the public has “no nuance” in how it thinks about AI and data centers, and that neither party can afford a shrug.

Party still shapes the intensity. Geography barely does. The same local no shows up in big cities, suburbs, small towns and rural counties.

WHERE THE LOCAL NO LANDS

That MAGA exception is the political problem inside the Republican coalition. The president’s core is the one bloc that will host the buildings. Everyone else, including a GOP that is split to the decimal, is telling candidates to keep them somewhere else.

House Republicans Put the Grid Cost on the Campus

On Sept. 16 the Ratepayer Protection Act, H.R. 9340, passed the House 417-3. Rep. Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican, wrote it with Rep. Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat. The House Energy and Commerce Committee had cleared it 52-0 in July.

Evans did not pitch a ban. He pitched a bill. America still needs the plants and lines to lead in AI and outcompete China, he said, but families should not cover the extra gear a campus requires.

Hardworking families should not have to subsidize the energy demands of data centers. America needs the infrastructure to lead the world in AI and outcompete Communist China, but we cannot have that growth at the expense of hardworking families, farmers, seniors, and small businesses.

Rep. Gabe Evans, R-Colo., House press release, Sept. 16, 2026

Castor put the same point in household terms. Floridians already face high electric bills, she said, and should not subsidize “the enormous energy demands of the world’s richest corporations.” Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie said the companies building the campuses, not families and small businesses, should pay for the electricity they use.

The House GOP’s own study committee said the bill writes into law the White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge for developers, a voluntary compact that more than 300 utilities, co-ops, tech firms and other groups signed. The White House has already used that pledge as proof that a local bill need not jump.

"An energy provider in East Texas pledging not to raise their electricity bills due to new AI data center construction. SWEPCO says they've signed onto an agreement put together by the Trump Admin. to thwart the threat data centers could pose to people's electric bills." 👏 pic.twitter.com/lXOVe8xWs4

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 24, 2026

That is the administration’s answer to the Marist numbers: sign the pledge, keep residential rates flat, keep building. The House vote says members did not think a pledge was enough to take home.

What a 100-Megawatt Standard Would Change

If it became law, the bill would amend the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act so state utility commissions and unregulated utilities have to consider a federal standard for large-load customers. It would cover a site or campus drawing 100 megawatts or more, a size aimed at AI halls rather than a town server closet. Commissions would not be forced to adopt the standard. They would be forced to take it up.

WHAT THE HOUSE BILL ASKS STATES TO CONSIDER

Evans called that flexibility the point. States still decide what fits their own utility systems. Supporters also called it a modest first start, which is the opening Heinrich used a day later.

Heinrich Stopped the Fast Track in One Afternoon

Sen. Jon Husted, the Ohio Republican who is carrying the Senate companion, asked for unanimous consent on Sept. 17. Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat and the ranking member on Energy and Natural Resources, objected. He said he and Husted agree that AI campuses can raise family costs, and in a lot of places they already do, but that the House bill “falls short of what we need to do to respond.”

“It’s not enough for us to tell states to consider making data centers pay for grid updates,” Heinrich said. “Rather than voluntary pledges or suggestions to states, Congress needs to pass real legislation, with real teeth.”

He then asked the Senate to pass his GRID Savings Act, which he said would require large-load customers to pay for the gear that connects them, not merely consider it. Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, objected. Both bills sat there. Moreno said the Senate had accomplished nothing.

Husted is also the incumbent whose race supplied the party’s private warning in August. A consider-not-require bill is what he could pass in the House in one day. It is also what a single senator could stop the next afternoon, which leaves the cost fight in state commissions, local hearings and campaign ads.

Opposition Groups More Than Doubled in 90 Days

Data Center Watch, a project of the AI research firm 10a Labs, tracked local fights from January through March and called the quarter a structural shift, not a blip. Communities now share a playbook. Statehouses piled on new rules. The map of active groups filled in.

WHAT LOCAL FIGHTS DID IN EARLY 2026

• Projects halted: Opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth about $130 billion, roughly matching the scale of all of 2025 in one quarter.
• The organizer count: Active opposition groups rose from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by March, spanning 49 states.
• Statehouse volume: More than 300 state data center bills were filed in the first six weeks of 2026, with statewide pause proposals in 14 states from both parties.
• Maine’s near miss: Maine came within one House vote of the first statewide data center ban in U.S. history.

Petition signatures in that quarter nearly matched the haul from the second half of 2025. The fights have moved past neighborhood groups into statewide outfits that talk about power, water, land and the monthly bill in the same breath. Town hearings now run for hours, with residents stacking comments until a council votes anyway.

Investors who defend the campuses make the same split the House bill tries to write down. Where a project brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough to protect existing customers, the political argument shrinks. Where it does not, people are right to object. The Marist local no is that objection, measured nationally.

Ohio Made Data Centers a Senate Race Weapon

On Aug. 18 the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a memo titled “Ohio Data Center Risk.” Husted and Sherrod Brown were in a dead heat, it said. Brown had made the campuses his de facto opponent, with three television ads and more than 6,000 points on the air. The committee told AI companies that party committees cannot repair “the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy.”

Only the firms that need the projects, the memo said, can explain “who benefits, who pays, and why a community should want one.” Until they do, “the issue will continue to dominate this race.” If Husted loses and the buildings get the blame, “politicians across the country will take notice, and they will not go near the next one.” The NRSC called it a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.

Payne said the president is trying to make support a litmus test for Republicans and has not gotten the success he wants. Candidates in both parties have already cut ads on the issue. The memo’s own tell is the middle clause, who pays, which is the same clause Evans wrote into H.R. 9340.

HOW THE COST FIGHT HIT THE CALENDAR

1. Aug. 18, 2026: The NRSC warns AI firms that Ohio’s Senate race has become a referendum on data centers and that companies, not campaigns, have to repair the brand.
2. Aug. 31, 2026: President Donald Trump writes that towns that refuse campuses will end up “backwards and poor,” and that China “could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
3. Sept. 14 to 15, 2026: Marist fields the national survey that finds a local majority against construction and a MAGA-only majority in favor.
4. Sept. 16, 2026: The House passes the Ratepayer Protection Act 417-3 on what members treated as a last major vote before the midterm recess.
5. Sept. 17, 2026: Heinrich blocks Husted’s unanimous-consent request; Moreno blocks Heinrich’s harder alternative; both bills stall.

Husted’s bind is the memo made flesh. He is the Senate sponsor of a bill meant to prove Republicans will not dump grid costs on households, and the candidate Brown has tried to make “the face of data centers in Ohio.”

Trump’s China Pitch Stops at the Neighborhood

Trump’s Aug. 31 post on Truth Social was the cleanest statement of the administration line. “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,” he wrote. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.” He added that if “we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame,” and that China “could not be happier.”

A Hinckley Institute survey of 2,102 registered voters, fielded Sept. 10 to 14, tested that trade. When people were asked to choose between building campuses to compete with China even if some sit near homes, or protecting communities even if it slows that race, 67% chose the communities. The China argument that works in a Cabinet Room still loses when the substation is down the road.

Republican members just voted, almost as one, to put extra grid costs on the campus. MAGA voters remain the only group in the Marist sample that wants the campus next door. The Senate could not even agree on how hard to make the companies pay. Towns that have already learned the opposition playbook are not waiting for that argument to settle.