Former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown is out with another ad hammering Sen. Jon Husted over his past support for data centers.
It’s a line of attack he’s leaned on for months as Democrats across the country fold the issue into a broader economic message accusing Republicans of cutting sweetheart deals for corporations and saddling taxpayers with higher utility bills and few tangible benefits.
The dynamic has forced the pro‑data center world to rethink how it talks to voters — and how to win them back in a political year in which the issue has become a live wire.
Mr. Brown’s latest ad features a man’s frustration with a data center that was billed as a job creator and an economic boon for the rural area.
“No one asked for that data center to be built here, and no one here is getting a damn thing from it. Except higher electric bills,” the man says. “Jon Husted is the reason this is here.
“He led the push to bring data centers to Ohio. He gave billions of tax dollars to make it happen. Even today, Husted wants to build more data centers. No matter how much water they use or how much they cost, we’re paying to destroy our own communities, and it makes no sense.”
The Husted campaign was sent a request for comment.
Mr. Husted previously pushed back, arguing that Mr. Brown has flip-flopped on the issue, which he ignored during his three decades in Washington.
“Former Sen. Sherrod Brown used to be a big supporter of data centers, and he did nothing when he was in the U.S. Senate to control power use or anything — and now he is trying to attack me with the topic,” Mr. Husted said during a recent appearance on NewsNation. “It is not going to work because the voters of Ohio are smarter than this.”
The incumbent senator said people understand that data centers are necessary and decisions about building them should be made at the local level. He introduced legislation this year requiring data center companies to pay for the power they use.
His campaign also highlighted how Mr. Brown issued a press release in 2015 celebrating data center construction.
President Trump, meanwhile, has continued to advocate for data centers, saying what they mean for communities are “jobs and lots of money and lower taxes.”
He recently told reporters, “If I were a community, I would want the data center. It means jobs, it means income and it means lower taxes.”
He pounded home the message on Truth Social: “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. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”
Still, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is concerned, saying Mr. Brown has made the data center attacks the centerpiece of his campaign “because it works.”
“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the NRCC said in an August memo. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one.
“If voters’ perception of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.”
Mr. Brown’s heavy focus on data centers has helped make the race — which could decide whether Democrats flip control of the Senate — competitive and underscored how quickly public sentiment has shifted on the issue.
Mr. Husted, who served from 2019 to 2025 as lieutenant governor, and prior to that as Ohio’s secretary of state, joined Gov. Mike DeWine and other state and local officials to promote data centers and the role the Buckeye State could play as the “Midwest tech hub” for the nation.
The projects often included tax breaks and streamlined permitting that advocates argued helped attract high‑paying jobs while modernizing the state’s economy and revitalizing rural communities.
Critics say the approach leaned too heavily on corporate subsidies, delivered fewer jobs than promised, and left ratepayers covering the cost of massive facilities that consume enormous amounts of electricity and water.
The Brown attack lands at a moment when data centers — once touted as a low‑impact economic win — have become a political flashpoint.
For years, state and local officials across the country pitched the facilities as a modernizing force: big capital investment, steady tax revenue and a stamp of tech‑sector legitimacy.
But the tide has turned. Residents in fast‑growing markets began complaining about soaring electric bills, water strain, and tax incentives that seemed to benefit multinational companies more than local communities.
Politicians have taken note.
Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the most high‑profile far‑left figures in Washington — are pushing for a federal moratorium on data centers.
New York has imposed a one‑year pause on new data centers.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, who is up for reelection, paused new projects to review their impact and received pushback from Mr. Trump because of it.
And in California, all eyes are on whether Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 Democratic presidential contender, will sign a bill that bars local governments from approving new or expanded data centers until developers disclose how much water they use — a measure he vetoed last year under pressure from the tech industry. Since that veto, public sentiment has shifted.
Against that backdrop, some in the tech world argue the industry needs a reset in how it makes its case.
Former White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich, a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump who now heads the Innovation Council, which promotes the president’s record on artificial intelligence, argued in a Washington Post op‑ed this week that data center and AI supporters are losing the public‑relations fight because they keep leaning on the wrong facts — gigawatts, capital expenditures and competition with China — instead of what voters care about.
He says companies should keep the argument local, address water and power concerns directly, and stop playing defense by highlighting tangible community benefits seen in places like a Louisiana parish where increased revenue from a data center construction projected results in some teachers receiving bonuses of more than $50,000 this year and Loudoun County, Virginia, where data centers fund a large chunk of the budget and have resulted in residents receiving property‑tax cuts every year for a decade.
“These projects are revitalizing many towns that have been left for dead,” he said, arguing that proponents must “make the other side explain why it wants to yank back the first life preservers anybody has thrown to drowning American towns in decades.”
Mr. Budowich’s warning lands at a moment when polling suggests voters have already moved in the opposite direction.
A Gallup survey released this year captured the shift: 7 in 10 Americans oppose building AI‑related data centers in their local area, nearly half “strongly.” That’s a dramatic reversal from the bipartisan enthusiasm that defined the industry’s expansion throughout the 2010s and early 2020s.
With voters increasingly wary of the industry, Mr. Brown is milking the issue.
“Ohioans are sounding the alarm about data centers and I’m listening,” he said on social media this week. “They don’t want to see our utility bills spike, our water sucked up, or our farm land devoured.”
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