US Voters Rejected Data Centres in Almost Every Midterm Ballot Measure

Redbud Consulting runs Data Centers on the Ballot, a project that tracks these votes. It counted 41 data centre measures across the country and said voters were on track to reject or limit development in all but one. Two contests were still being counted but were expected to go the same way. As of Thursday, restrictions had won in 39 of the 40 measures with complete counts, according to Redbud figures cited by The National.

The only exception was Harwood, North Dakota, a town of fewer than 800 people. Voters there defeated a measure that would have required independent reviews of large industrial projects, including data centres, before construction.

For companies building AI capacity, the results show that opposition crosses party lines. A September poll found that 70% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans supported limiting new data centres in the US. The Pew Research Center estimated in April that the country already had 3,000 data centres, with more than 1,500 more under way.

The Electricity Bill Argument

People interviewed by Al Jazeera put the backlash down mainly to costs. Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at Tufts University, said voters could see AI "in data centres being built in their back yards" and were seeing the effects "in their energy bills". A 2026 working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimated that data centres had raised wholesale electricity prices by 6.9% as of last year.

James Mercer, founder of the advisory firm Metro Colo Advisory, said residents objected to "a building down the road that needs as much power as a small city, when they suspect their own electric bill will cover it."

Ohio and Texas

Several winning candidates made data centres central to their campaigns. Ohio had 21 of the 47 data centre referendums and measures held across the US this year, more than any other state. There, Democrat Sherrod Brown flipped a Senate seat after attacking Republican incumbent Jon Husted's support for the projects.

In Texas, Democrat Gina Hinojosa beat Governor Greg Abbott after calling for a moratorium on new data centre approvals until stronger protections for local communities were in place. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that Texas accounts for 25% of planned US data centre capacity. "Hinojosa is a known anti-data center politician and negative on the AI buildout, which makes worries around the future of the data center buildout in Texas a real issue for tech investors," Dan Ives, managing director at Yorkville Ives, wrote in a note.

Also in Texas, Senator-elect James Talarico flipped a Republican-held seat on a pledge to tighten data centre rules. He proposed closed-loop cooling to cut water use and wants operators to pay for local infrastructure. He carried Corpus Christi, a drought-hit city whose reservoir fell to 8% of capacity earlier this year, by 12 percentage points. In Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won a Senate race with more than 52% of the vote after calling for a federal agency to oversee the AI industry.

Investors React to the Results

Markets reacted quickly. On Thursday the Nasdaq Composite fell 5.5%, putting it in correction territory, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped 12.2%. Investors weighed whether a Democratic Congress would bring more scrutiny of data centre construction. "We anticipate more congressional hearings on who pays for the power-hungry buildout," Vijay Valecha, chief investment officer at Century Financial, wrote in a note.

Alex Turner, a former researcher who resigned from Google DeepMind, told Al Jazeera that the new Congress makes "real regulation and oversight" more likely. The next test will be in the states and counties now voting on specific projects, where the ballot results give opponents a recent precedent.