Nearly seven in ten Americans don't want an AI data center built near their home, according to a new NBC News Decision Desk poll. Donald Trump's response to those Americans, posted to Truth Social, was essentially: sounds like a you problem. The midterms are two months away.
The Number Trump Cannot Spin
The NBC News Decision Desk poll, conducted by SurveyMonkey from August 20 through September 1, found that 69% of respondents oppose construction of AI data centers in their local area. Forty-five percent said they "strongly oppose" it. That is not a fringe position. That is a supermajority.
This cuts across every partisan category. Democrats oppose local data centers at 81%. Independents come in at 71%. And here is the part Republicans in tight House races are quietly panicking about: a majority of Republican voters, 57% to 43%, are against them too.
Trump, characteristically, is not sweating it. "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 in a late-August Truth Social post. "If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign." Let Data Reign. The man has a gift.
The Strangest Political Coalition You'll See This Year
Meet Dawn Vogel. She is a Republican county supervisor in Buchanan County, Iowa, a place that voted for Donald Trump 63% to 35% in 2024. She voted earlier this year for a moratorium temporarily banning data centers from her county. Her position on the issue is essentially identical to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, who have proposed a national moratorium.
Vogel told NBC News she hasn't talked to a single voter at home who wants data centers nearby. "It's an issue of what's the best use for the land, what's the best use for our natural resources," she said. "You can have all the data you want to in the world, but if you don't have water to drink, you don't have humans to use the data."
AOC and a Trump-country Republican county supervisor agreeing on anything is not a political development you plan for. It is the kind of thing that happens when a real material grievance overrides the usual tribal sorting. Data centers drink enormous quantities of water, drive up local utility costs, and often arrive with tax breaks negotiated by state governments over residents' heads. That combination, it turns out, makes people mad regardless of their voter registration.
The I-80 Road Trip That Should Terrify House Republicans
NBC News drove the length of Interstate 80 from Nebraska to New Jersey, a corridor that cuts through eight swing House districts that will decide which party controls the chamber next year, plus two major Senate races. Voters across the political spectrum told reporters the same thing: no data centers near us, thanks.
"All of the data centers that are starting to pop up in areas, I find that troublesome because it drives utility costs for citizens in the area," Tamara Clark, a 49-year-old Democratic healthcare worker in Ohio, told NBC News. "I don't feel like the rich should continuously get rich while we have to grovel for what we need in our everyday necessities."
That framing, the powerful exploiting the powerless, is the emotional core of why this issue has legs. It is not an abstract environmental complaint. It is a water bill. It is an electricity bill. It is a foreign-owned corporation landing in your county with a sweetheart tax deal your kids will be paying off after the servers are obsolete.
Politicians Who Built This Mess Are Now Running From It
Ohio Republican Senator Jon Husted is a useful case study in political whiplash. As the state's lieutenant governor, he was, according to NBC News, a "full-throated advocate" for data centers, selling them as economic development gold. In July, he introduced Senate legislation requiring utility companies to charge large-scale data center operators enough to cover the actual costs of their electricity and water use. Same guy.
In Ohio's congressional race, Democratic 22-term incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur is hammering Republican challenger Derek Merrin over a 2017 state legislature vote that extended tax breaks to data center companies. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is on the ballot in November, signed new data center regulations in August after having spent time actively recruiting the industry to his state.
This is what it looks like when politicians realize they sold something their constituents didn't want. The scramble is bipartisan and not particularly graceful.
The Workers Who Actually Like Their Jobs
To be straight about it: the opposition is not unanimous, and the economic case for data centers is real for some people. National and local labor unions involved in construction and maintenance have backed the facilities as a source of well-paying jobs. Several Ohio data center workers spoke to NBC News anonymously, per the outlet, because they had agreed not to discuss their employment publicly.
One of them said he can earn as much as $5,000 in a single week, including overtime, at a relatively low-level union position. "It's helping a lot of people," he said, noting that the horror stories he heard before taking the job, overuse of water, strange ringing noises, did not match his personal experience.
Those jobs are real. The pay is real. The tradeoffs are also real, and the communities hosting these facilities are increasingly deciding they were not consulted on the deal, and they did not agree to subsidize the infrastructure costs of trillion-dollar tech companies.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a 69% opposition number is just noise, that voters will forget about their water bills by November, that Trump calling concerned constituents "backwards and poor" is a winning message in eight swing House districts. Good luck with that.
What is actually happening here is that the data center boom followed the exact playbook that has burned rural and working-class communities for decades. State officials cut deals, tax breaks get handed out, companies arrive, local infrastructure strains under the load, utility costs climb, and residents who were never asked find out after the fact. The AI industry dressed it up in language about jobs and the future, and enough politicians bought it long enough to create a genuine political liability heading into the midterms.
Trump telling the majority of his own voters they are going to end up "backwards and poor" if they don't get excited about server farms is funny in a purely abstract sense. In a concrete electoral sense, with the House majority potentially riding on a handful of districts that run right along the I-80 corridor where this anger is loudest, it is the kind of gift that Democrats, if they have any sense at all, will be spending money on through October.
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