Data Centers Became the Midterms' Electric Bill Issue — and Won

PJM Interconnection capacity prices jumped from $28.92 per megawatt-day in 2024-25 to $329.17 for 2026-27 — and on Tuesday, candidates who blamed data centers for that surge won races across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.

"People really effing hate data centers," Abdul El-Sayed said at a July campaign event, as E&E News reported. On Tuesday, NBC News projected he won Michigan's Senate race. He was one of many winners who made the AI buildout part of their cost-of-living argument.

Voters named the cost of living a top issue in AP exit polls. In much of the region served by PJM — the grid operator covering 13 states from New Jersey to northern Illinois — that issue showed up on the monthly electric bill. Candidates in both parties blamed data centers.

What's behind the higher bills?

The money trail runs through PJM's capacity auctions, which pay power plants to guarantee future supply. Monitoring Analytics, PJM's independent market monitor, estimated data centers drove 63% of the price increase in the 2025-26 auction. That equals $9.3 billion recovered from customers through higher rates, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

IEEFA put the added cost at roughly $16 a month for the average residential bill in Ohio and $18 in western Maryland. The increases may not be over: consulting firm ICF estimated residential rates across PJM could climb 30% to 60% by 2030.

Consumers have noticed. In an October Consumer Reports survey, 81% of people who had lived in the same home for at least three years said their electricity bills had risen. Another 84% said they'd support their utility creating a separate rate category for large users like data centers.

How did the winners run on it?

El-Sayed's plan called for "no rate hikes," arguing data centers should pay for their own energy demand. Two months after OpenAI and Oracle broke ground on a massive data center campus in Saline Township, he held a rally in front of the site.

In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown defeated Republican Sen. Jon Husted after branding him "the face of data centers," citing deals Husted cut as lieutenant governor. Brown campaigned on eliminating tax breaks for data center companies and requiring them to pay for the utilities their campuses use.

Logan Phillips, founder of the forecasting site Race to the White House, told Fortune that Brown focused on the issue "way before anyone else was focused on it," while Husted had been "basically at every single ribbon cutting for data centers across the state." Phillips added: "Boy, did that not age well."

Republicans moved the same way by late in the cycle. El-Sayed's opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, said in August he supported a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Michigan. In Ohio's governor's race, both nominees — Democrat Amy Acton, who won, and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy — proposed moratoriums. In Florida, Republican Byron Donalds, who won the governor's race, proposed restrictions on data centers.

What did voters decide directly?

Where the question was on the ballot, voters mostly said no to new facilities. At least 14 Ohio municipalities passed bans or other restrictions Tuesday, including Sunbury, where a ban targets a planned Amazon data center. Nationally, voters in 10 states considered 41 data center measures.

The polling matched. More than 70% of Americans said they would oppose a data center planned for their area, with rising electricity prices the top reason, according to a Heatmap poll published last week.

Not everyone accepts the causal link. The Ohio Manufacturers' Association has rejected the claim that data centers drive up energy costs. "Ohio does not have a data center cost crisis," the group said. Amazon declined to say whether Tuesday's ballot measures will change its expansion plans, saying its commitment to communities where it operates remains unchanged.

The industry also spent on airtime. Build American AI, a nonprofit linked to the AI industry's Leading the Future super PAC network, spent at least $2.54 million on Ohio ads touting data centers' economic benefits, according to an investigation by DeSmog.

The new Congress could take up the issue. Goldman Sachs strategists believe a Democratic Congress could curb data center tax incentives, though they see a nationwide moratorium as unlikely. The buildout isn't waiting: data center capacity under construction is up 48% nationwide, according to Reuters — meaning the political fight over who pays for it is only starting.

By Amara Osei