How the Data Center Debate Revived Local Politics in 2026
On March 1, Amazon Web Services posted that it was seeking a “Senior Construction Manager” for a new data center in Calvert County, Maryland. “We are the backbone that keeps the cloud operational,” the advertisement read. “Join us.” Republican-leaning Calvert, located about 50 miles from Washington, wasn’t known for particularly lively local politics. But after this post, “quite honestly, all political hell broke loose,” recalled Ethan Cox, a Democrat who just the previous week had entered the race for the Calvert County Board of Commissioners.
Citizens had questions, chief among them: Who let this happen? Suddenly, feisty attendees began showing up to county commissioner meetings to demand answers from their elected leaders. And overnight, the race for seats on the board — which had the power to approve or reject a data center — became hot. “The pulse here has been, ‘Oh my god, people are actually paying attention to local politics.’ I think that is the wake-up call that we are experiencing,” said Amanda La Costa, who created a nonprofit called Citizens for Calvert in response to the data center debate. “The people are more aware. They’re actually tuning in to who’s running, what they’re running on.”
On the “AI Data Center National Day of Protest” in July, I watched as a 30-person crowd in Prince Frederick, the county seat, chanted, “Hey, ho, hey, ho, data centers got to go,” as a steady stream of cars honked in approval. The protestors wielded signs that read “Save Calvert County,” “Water for People, Not AI” and “Power to the People, Not the Power Hungry.”
Throughout 2026, scenes like this have been unfolding across the country. As Americans have grown angry about data centers, many are showing a renewed interest in local politics. “You can’t vote on regulating Silicon Valley. It’s not on the ballot,” Peter Levine, a professor of civic studies at Tufts University, told me. “But if they’re going to build a data center in your community, you could block that. It’s just a leverage point, and once it’s a leverage point, it’s also an organizational opportunity.”
There are about half a million elected government positions in the United States, and the vast majority are at the local level. Yet, for a system so democratic, so few participate. “Turnout,” says Levine, “is often very bad. I mean, really amazingly bad.” Arguably, low turnout is both a symptom and cause of a broader problem: Local civic life in America is in disrepair. Could the outcry over data centers change all that? Recent conversations with more than 20 anti-data-center activists, local politicians, concerned citizens and experts around the country left me convinced: It is already happening.
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One of the first places, as far as I could tell, where the data center debate sent a jolt of life into an otherwise sleepy local political scene was Festus, Missouri, population 14,000. Rick Belleville was serving on Festus’ Planning and Zoning Board in late 2025 when the city administration asked the board to consider rules surrounding data center development. At the time, Belleville didn’t even know what a data center was. He voted not to push forward in order to allow more time for research and for public input. “But I was outvoted,” he told me. “Within 10 days we went from farmland to large scale data center approval, and that’s when things got crazy stupid.”
Suddenly, Festus’ town hall meetings — previously a place where the high school track team or science club might get a shoutout to an audience of 10 or 12 — were flooded with hundreds of attendees voicing their opposition to the new data center. Local police instituted security screenings to check for weapons, according to Belleville, and the city upped the number of meetings offered each month. “We didn’t have enough room for all the people,” he said. “When the city started making decisions without including them that was going to affect their neighborhood, that’s when people got excited and started coming to the meetings and getting more involved.”
Mitchell Peterson, who lives near Salix, Iowa, told me that he wasn’t personally all that interested in government until he learned a data center was coming to town. “On Facebook, I saw videos of people that are dealing with water issues and noise issues from all over the country with these data centers,” he said. “When I saw those videos, it was just, ‘Oh, you know, whatever,’ and I didn’t think much of it. Now that it’s right here in my backyard, I feel a lot different about it.”
Matt Long of Hood County, Texas, also had a transformation. A real estate developer with nine children, Long didn’t have time to follow the ins and outs of local politics, let alone think about serving in public office. But when he learned of a multibillion-dollar cluster of AI data center projects coming to his area, he did a full 180 and became hyper-engaged. Now, he has attended dozens of city council meetings across Texas to oppose data centers.
Long, a conservative and devout Christian, said the data center debate has led to some unlikely political bedfellows. One city council meeting “I went to was me and all the liberal white women that were against the data centers,” he recalled. “Probably a group of people that I would not normally hang out with. We’re hugging and high-fiving at the end.”
He hosts prayer circles to get neighbors invested in fighting data centers, often packing 40 people into his living room. I attended one gathering virtually in July. Listening intently to his words that day were the head of the county Republican Party, an elected county clerk and a judge-elect. Long likened the battle against data centers to the American Revolution and assured attendees that God is on their side this election cycle. “Today my prayer is,” Long said, “that, as a county and beyond, we would come to the fight ready. That we would be creative in our ways to overcome these projects, to overcome these developers that are here for monetary gain that want to turn our county into a sacrificial zone.”
Long volunteered to serve on the Hood County Development Commission, an appointed board tasked with reviewing proposed developments and making recommendations. And he runs an anti-data center Facebook page that has generated a substantial local following. “It’s like a relic that’s been left over,” Long said of being involved in local government and politics. “We’re having to go back and relearn those practices.”
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Many local elected leaders weren’t prepared for such a fervent response from their constituents. And why would they be? Americans have been largely checked out of local politics for a long time. Levine points to Boston, where mayoral-election turnout in recent years has hovered around 20% of eligible voters. In Los Angeles, turnout was so low that in 2015 a nonprofit created a program to offer cash prizes for voting. A 2001 study of school board elections in Michigan found an average turnout of 8% across the state’s roughly 500 districts. As a result, local incumbents have often cruised into office and held their positions with little effort.
But maybe not anymore. Tony and Mary Wortmann live in Stanton, Nebraska, across the road from a crypto mine, a warehouse dedicated to validating blockchain transactions and generating cryptocurrency. They wrote letters to local elected officials asking them to reconsider their support for crypto mining, and when they didn’t get the response they wanted, they rethought their votes this year. “There was a lot of people we didn’t vote for, who we voted for in the past, because they wouldn’t even answer a letter, they wouldn’t come out, they wouldn’t hear us,” Tony Wortmann said. “So, why do we want them? They’re not for us.”
Cyndie Roberson moved from North Carolina to Georgia because a crypto mine was constructed near her old home. She’s now on the board of the National Coalition Against Cryptomining and spent the primary season this year fielding inquiries from friends and family nationwide about both national and local candidates. “I can’t tell you how many people who are family, extended family or friends wanted to know … ‘Who do I vote for that’s not pro data center?’” Roberson told me. “I just laid it out for people, texts, messages. And people thanked me and said, ‘That’s super duper helpful, because that’s my number one issue.’”
Data center opposition was the only topic on Hood County resident Cheryl Shadden’s mind in the primaries and the general election. Shadden, a lifelong Republican who has gotten to know Long through anti-data-center organizing, said she voted for a mix of Republicans and Democrats at the local level this year. “I’m a single-issue voter,” she told me. “Right now, I don’t care if you are pink with purple polka dots and ride in on Barney. If you do something to stop the harm here, this community will vote for you.”
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Some people anxious about the new data centers didn’t just organize and vote. They decided to take the next step — and run for office themselves.
Usually getting people to run for local office is like asking them to do “volunteer service,” Levine, of Tufts University, told me. From 2003 to 2015, more than 20% of all mayoral elections in Indiana went uncontested. In 2022, Augusta, Maine, had no contested races for city council or the board of education, and a school board seat had no candidates on the ballot. In 2023, eight city council races in the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City area had fewer candidates than there were seats. The same year, Cincinnati’s City Council election drew the fewest number of candidates in at least 30 years.
But this election cycle, according to Phil Keisling — former Oregon Secretary of State and founding chair of the National Vote at Home Institute, which advocates for voting by mail — a shift is underway. Data centers have motivated people “not just to vote, which is the easiest civic responsibility to do, kind of a gateway drug,” he said, but to decide that “by God, I’m running for office.”
Levine suspects that for some people, the data center debate may have been their first significant touchpoint with local government: “They may be figuring out that there are new offices they didn’t even realize were the relevant ones, having to do with zoning or land use or whatever,” he said. “So, suddenly they’re probably running for things they didn’t know” about before.
In Missouri, Belleville said local town hall meetings became “sounding boards for the people running for office.” He was among 13 people who ran for the four Festus City Council seats up for election in April 2026. “We’ve never had that many people sign up to run before,” he told me, adding that he believes the data center debate was the reason for this jump. Increased government transparency and no data centers were key to his platform.
Following the Festus City Council’s approval of a $6 billion data center in March, all four incumbent council members running for reelection were defeated by challengers who ran on anti-data-center platforms. Voter turnout in April 2026 was 129% higher than in the previous year. Belleville was one of the victors.
Michael Bennett was visiting his son, who lives just outside Festus, on the day of a public meeting about data centers in March. He noticed striking similarities to data center fights happening back home in Calvert County, Maryland. “The sentiment that you’re seeing across the country is frustration,” Bennett said. “That’s reflected here, it’s reflected in West Virginia, it’s reflected in Missouri. And only some of those commissions are being responsive to their citizens.”
Bennett is now running for the Calvert County Board of County Commissioners as a Democrat. “I got in the race because I want to shape that discussion in a way that makes it favorable for county residents, and not to provide complete advantage to a big tech company,” he told me.
Patti Stueckler, a Republican, threw her hat in the ring for the Calvert County Commissioner race in February 2026. At the time, she didn’t think she would even win her primary. But then three Republican incumbents who were up for reelection shot down a proposed data center moratorium. “That’s all anybody was talking about,” Steuckler said. “When people knew I was running, that was the first question they would ask: ‘Do you want data centers? Where are you on data centers?’”
All three of those incumbents lost in the primary. “Primary-ing out people who are not listening to the citizens has been my favorite political thing that’s ever happened in my life,” Nick Graziano, a Calvert resident who used to stay out of politics, told me. “I just couldn’t believe the amount of people who came out and voted.”
Steuckler credits the data center debate for her primary victory. “I don’t know that I would have even won if this data center issue hadn’t been a prominent issue in this election,” she said, noting that everyone who made it to the general election opposes data centers.
“This did not happen because of one person or one post,” local organizer Melissa Emmal wrote on Facebook the day after the primary election. “It happened because of thousands of small choices. The signature you added. The flyer you printed at your kitchen table and handed to a neighbor. The table you set up at an event. The public testimony you gave with a shaky voice and gave anyway. The vote you cast.”
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There is, of course, a dark side to large numbers of citizens becoming newly and passionately mobilized. At a town meeting in Salix in July, mayor Kevin Nelson pleaded for compassion from a full room. Part of the problem, he said, was that he struggles with “public speaking, and standing in front of a hundred people talking about a very sensitive topic is not an easy thing to do.” But he also noted that “the council and clerk and I have received threats over the last few months up to and including death threats. … Put yourself in our shoes. You’re sitting in front of 100 people, and you don’t know if those death threats are serious or not.”
However, communication from concerned citizens can also take a very different form. Belleville, pointing out that his phone number and email address are on the Festus website, noted that “people have reached out to me from around the country saying, ‘Hey, we’re fighting a data center in Georgia. Can you talk to us and give us some advice?’ Or ‘We have a data center situation in Maine.’”
In the wake of the intense public opposition, developers of the Festus data center scaled back the design, and several lawsuits aiming to stop its construction entirely are ongoing. In August, Amazon withdrew its application for a hyperscale data center in Calvert. But the attention on the county commissioner race in the leadup to the general election remained strong. “We have more work to do to correct the wrongs of the Board of County Commissioners,” Cox announced the day after the withdrawal. “The community must continue to organize.”
In Hood County, advocates remain knee-deep in the data center battle. Whatever the ultimate outcome, the debate has demonstrated that local government still matters. “There’s nothing I can do to keep our military out of Iran or Venezuela, and a lot of times it’s stuff you don’t even know about until after it happens, anyway,” Long told me. “The data center thing, we can actually get very tough here at the local level and stand up. We just need leaders that are willing to.”
And what started with data centers may even extend beyond politics. “People are getting together and talking,” Belleville said. “They’re having barbecues and potlucks, getting to know their neighbors.” In a strange way, data centers have helped revive civic life in Festus. “We have subdivisions of 80 homes, for example, near the proposed site where they never really talked to each other much,” Belleville told me. “Their HOA was falling apart. Now that all 80 people know each other and they’re a real tight-knit community, this has brought them together.”
Anusha Mathur is an assistant editor for Washington Sun Perspectives.
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