The News
MILWAUKEE — Hours after Wisconsin’s most respected pollster gave her a 22-point lead in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Francesca Hong told a group of voters why she wanted to rein in AI.
“We’re the only campaign that is supporting a moratorium on data centers,” she told a special education teacher at a Black-owned small business hub. “The tax exemption for data centers is around $2 billion that the state is missing out on.”
Hong, a 37-year-old socialist legislator from Madison, is rolling toward the Aug. 11 primary as the clear favorite over a panicked establishment. Her rise started with her Jan. 8 announcement of a “Control-Alt-Delete” plan for AI that started with pausing new data center construction.
The issue emerged, she said, during conversations on the trail with rural voters who asked what they could do to stop the electricity-hungry facilities that have sprouted up nationwide to power the nation’s AI buildout.
“I don’t know if I had a ‘eureka’ moment,” Hong told Semafor. “I just knew that people were pissed.”
Grassroots opposition to data centers has exploded since last year, with the biggest political benefits accruing to fully opposed left-wing candidates like Hong — who’s aligned against labor unions and business groups that want to see construction, with limits. Democrats are eager to run against the Trump administration’s proposal to cede federal land to data centers, but just as with “Medicare for All,” progressives have filled in the blanks with a marketable response faster than the center-left did.
National Democrats, nervous about their left flank’s policies and electability, are now bracing for Hong to win her nomination, for Abdul El-Sayed to win the Senate nomination in Michigan, and for Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence to win a swing-seat House nomination in the middle of that state.
There is still frantic work underway to find a Stop Hong candidate in Wisconsin, after Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley un-suspended his campaign with the support of Gov. Tony Evers. Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes ended his own campaign on Thursday, shrinking the field to four candidates.
But Democrats here conceded that Hong had the first-mover advantage on an issue that’s lighting up voters. In the same polling that found Hong building a lead, 88% of Democrats said that the downsides of data centers outweigh the benefits.
Breaking into that conversation, and winning those voters, has been a challenge for Hong’s opponents. On Tuesday night, at a debate where Hong’s rivals largely avoided criticizing her, all four of them clarified that they would also stop tax incentives for data centers and demand that the facilities be built with union labor.
State Sen. Kelda Roys, whose Madison district overlaps with Hong’s, pointed out in an interview that Hong’s proposed data center moratorium bill has nine co-sponsors in the state assembly; a different data center bill, focused on regulation, has 49 co-sponsors.
“You tell me which one’s going to pass first, the actual regulation bill or the pause until regulation?” Roys said. “Ironically, this is one way in which social media and Big Tech is elevating the most extreme and angry voices, and manipulating us emotionally. It’s making it harder to solve problems because the very folks who are politically profiting from this anger are, in many ways, the least capable of actually solving the problem.”
Yet Hong’s political boost has been undeniable. In one gubernatorial candidate forum, where participants were handed paddles with “yes” and “no” written on opposing sides, only Hong held up the “yes” side to a question about pausing data centers.
“I wasn’t expecting everyone else to say no,” Hong told Semafor.
The argument’s been just as lopsided in Michigan, where progressive candidates were first out with plans to limit data centers.
Lawrence told Semafor that the issue started to crystallize for him in December, when a Democrat from the Oakland County part of the district asked him for “advice on how to fight back against the data center in Lyon Township.”
It was the second time, he realized, that a Michigander had raised the issue to him — asking not just for political advice, but advice on how to organize locally against the AI industry. Lawrence went on the air with his first ad in June, focused on stopping data centers, that showed an image of a green field turning brown.
Days earlier, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared with OpenAI founder Sam Altman for a groundbreaking ceremony at a data center not far from the University of Michigan.
“The fury from the Democratic base on social media was intense,” Lawrence said. “And we were hearing about it at the doors from rank-and-file Democrats — strong Whitmer supporters.”
As he headed to an Indivisible protest at that data center site on Thursday, El-Sayed told Semafor that the issue had grabbed his attention in December, with a “level of ferocity and anger” he hadn’t seen from voters before. On Jan. 8, he published “terms of engagement” for AI — not a construction pause, but requirements for hiring and energy consumption that would be tougher than Whitmer’s. (It was a coincidence, he said, that he and Hong rolled out plans the same day.)
“This puts an exclamation point on the affordability crisis. Because rather than do the things that would alleviate your inability to afford your utilities or your housing or your car, you’ve got these huge corporations that are about to make it worse,” El-Sayed said.
Senate contender Mallory McMorrow later countered with her own AI proposal, before dropping out; the race is now between El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens, who has talked about protecting Michiganders from new costs but not limiting data centers.
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Room for Disagreement
Barnes’ final event in the Wisconsin gubernatorial campaign turned out to be a forum on data centers hosted by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, where candidates reminded voters that Hong isn’t alone in wanting the state to set terms for the AI industry.
Crowley pointed out that her proposed statewide moratorium would prevent communities that were open to AI-focused construction from having that option. “There’s some people who understand it’s a nuanced conversation, and there’s those who don’t want to have a nuanced conversation,” Crowley told Semafor. “Let’s just face it: There are many people who want politics to be as black-and-white as possible.”
David’s view
I don’t hate to say it: I told you so. Back in October, Bernie Sanders strategist Faiz Shakir told me that “the people are way ahead of the politicians,” urging Democrats to run against data center construction. In November, environmental groups said that blaming data centers for higher electricity bills was a decisive issue in Georgia, where Democrats won seats on the Public Service Commission.
A few months after that, Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., proposed a national moratorium.
The left is working old muscles, built during campaigns against fossil fuel infrastructure like the Keystone XL pipeline. But that project arguably causes more coalitional stress than do data centers.
Both are built by laborers, but opposing a pipeline amounts to stopping the creation of a few thousand jobs. Opposing data centers amounts to, potentially, stopping the erasure of millions of jobs. If the establishment loses Midwest primaries in August, many factors will have contributed. But the Democrats in those races who took risks on data centers have clearly benefited. Luddism has more grassroots support than abundance.
Notable
- Earlier this month, I wrote about center-left Democrats working to blunt the left’s advantage on anti-AI politics, with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul issuing a pause and neutralizing the issue there.
- Allan Smith covered the backlash to data centers in both parties’ races; in Wisconsin, likely GOP gubernatorial nominee Tom Tiffany has said he’d stop tax breaks for them.