Elisabeth Garber-Paul
Contact Elisabeth Garber-Paul on X View all posts by Elisabeth Garber-Paul November 4, 2026 Add us as a Google Preferred Source
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People participate in a protest of an AI data center in Kenilworth, New Jersey. Stephanie Keith/Getty Images Democrats won big in Tuesday’s midterms, not only taking back the House of Representatives and Senate by overwhelming margins, but rebuking Republican candidates down the entire ticket in deep-red states like Texas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Pundits and politicians are offering plenty of explanations for it — the exorbitant cost of living, the war in Iran, Republican candidates simply not being good enough — but there may be another thing that drove voters to the polls: the public’s deep distrust of AI data centers going up across the nation.
According to the report Data Centers on the 2026 Ballot, published by the firm Redbud Consulting, which has been tracking the initiatives, the election showed a decisive loss for data centers. Since yes and no could mean different things depending on the ballot, Redbud broke it down by votes to “restrict” or “allow” data centers in their analysis. Of the 39 nationwide referendums that have been fully counted, 38 of them enacted new restrictions for potential new data centers.
“For as much as Republicans did poorly last night, the one thing that did even worse were data centers,” says Alex Lundry, founder and CEO of Redbud Consulting. “For the most part, the restrict side has gotten about 77 percent of the vote in each of these races.” This lines up with recent polling: On Monday, Gallup published a survey that showed 70 percent of Americans don’t want data centers near where they live.
The one initiative that didn’t pass so far, Lundry notes, was in the town of Harwood, North Dakota, where an initiative would have imposed “additional significant requirements” on “certain development or building projects within the City.” Though the measure was ostensibly there to target data centers, Lundry notes that the phrase “data center” wasn’t itself present in the ballot language, which could have affected its outcome. “To be clear, there are literally only, what, 430 people voting on this issue in the city of Harwood,” he says. “So it’s hard to read too much into this, but it is interesting.”
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According to Lundry’s analysis, those that used the phrase data center had stronger support, but most still managed to pass. In Ohio, for example, 21 separate local initiatives used largely the same language, calling for a mandatory referendum process on the construction of any structure that “occupies 50 or more contiguous acres, draws more than 20 megawatts of electrical power at peak capacity, or consumes more than 500,000 gallons of water per day.” All 21 of those ballot measures passed.
