Most Americans do not want a data center built near them, and opposition crosses party lines. In the latest Unfiltered, the joint series from Causal and PharosGraph, Causal’s Zackary Cantor and PharosGraph’s Mathieu Trepanier, with Nina hosting, set out why the opposition runs as deep as it does, where it is turning into votes, and what either side would have to say to change a mind rather than hold one. With the election on November 3, some of the seats where this fight is settled are on the ballot.
Why data centers, and the farmer’s case
Zack starts with the ordinary reasons and says they deserve to be taken seriously. Energy bills are rising and people feel it at home, and the usual objections to any development still apply: noise, pollution from backup generators, and a building where there used to be open land. Mathieu adds that new studies have given people a visible explanation for bills that have crept up for years.
Then he points to what the ordinary reasons do not explain. A data center should be cleaner than a feedlot and quieter than a highway, and it brings less traffic than a distribution center. Yet a Gallup poll in March found more opposition to a data center near home than to a nuclear reactor. In his words, “Americans would prefer to live near a nuclear reactor than near a server stack.” His explanation is that voters have no way to vote on AI itself, on the jobs it might replace or on who profits from it, and a data center is the first piece of AI they can walk up to. “You cannot vote for AI, but you can vote on the substation that’s gonna power these data centers.”
The fights are local and they look different in each place. In Saline Township, Michigan, the township turned a project down and the developers went to court, arguing that under Michigan law a township cannot ban a land use outright when it has no land zoned for it. In Georgia, Democrats won seats on the utility commission in a down-ballot race that usually follows party lines, which Zack takes as a sign that something has broken the habit of voting the party. Mathieu notes that commissions like Georgia’s are among the most obscure offices in American politics, that many are elected in November, and that their decisions carry a long way. In Texas, most of which runs on its own grid, Zack points to a build pipeline he puts among the largest in the country, and he sees the gap there most clearly: the national story is about growth, and the local one is about land and resources.
Opposition rarely stops a project already underway, and Mathieu explains why. A moratorium applies to future approvals and does not reverse ones already given. A project can be sited just outside the boundary, or powered on site where the moratorium covers grid connections, and there are federal routes that sidestep the local decision altogether. Zack puts the tension in one line: the benefits of AI investment are national and spread thin, while the costs are local and so is the decision, which is why federal intervention keeps coming up and why it runs into states’ rights.
Zack says the opposition goes where people feel heard, which means elections. Candidates in both parties are moving toward the same messages on tax breaks and energy bills. Zack calls bills the logical place to start, because rising bills are what people live with. Mathieu takes the overlap as a sign of something else: “If both parties are landing on similar messages, it kind of suggests that they haven’t found the right angle to communicate on.” He adds that fundraising and the primaries raise the cost of taking a strong position early for anyone with an eye on the next presidential race.
Nina asks whether people oppose one site or data centers in general. Zack answers with a farmer in rural Texas. Part of it is the familiar pattern of not in my backyard: land use is decided locally, the costs land locally, and the benefits are national. For the farmer it goes further, because the land is his way of life as well as his income. “It’s not just that the income is threatened. It’s also this fact that his very identity as a farmer is being threatened.” He sees the same pattern in coal country, where the argument about coal is also an argument about who people are.
Mathieu brings in moral foundations theory, the work of Jonathan Haidt and colleagues on how people make moral decisions in practice. It names five drivers (a sixth, liberty, was added later): care, fairness, loyalty, respect for authority, and purity or sanctity. He notes that research using the framework finds that liberals lean mostly on care and fairness, while conservatives draw on all five. In his view, the farmer’s case sits closest to purity and sanctity, the sense that something should be protected from outside harm.
The environment shows what the framework can do. Mathieu notes that decades of environmental messaging were framed around harm and fairness, which appeals more to liberals, and that a 2013 study by Feinberg and Willer found that framing the same protection around purity nearly closed the gap in support between liberals and conservatives. Zack makes a related point about liberty: in America, a message of sacrifice is often heard as a threat to individual liberty, and the case for new energy could have been made as abundance instead, meaning more energy, lower prices and less reliance on foreign suppliers.
Mathieu then explains why a better offer can make things worse. Paying the bill at a restaurant is right; leaving cash on the table after dinner at a friend’s home is an insult, because one is an exchange and the other is a relationship. The farmer is in the second kind of setting with his land, so more money or government help can land as an affront. Zack agrees that what is being offered does not reach what the farmer feels is at risk.
On measurement, Mathieu explains that moral foundations have a standard questionnaire, which to his knowledge has not been used on data centers, and that PharosGraph measures the same foundations in news coverage and advertising.
The trap, the advertising, and what would persuade
The second half opens on the trap. Zack describes how a principle can become a loyalty test: under audience pressure and the pull of attention, disagreeing with the furthest version of an argument starts to look like rejecting the value it began with.
Mathieu describes what PharosGraph’s scoring of data center advertising over the past year shows. Opponents mostly argue fairness: who pays and who decides. Supporters most often argue loyalty: the benefits for our town and the jobs coming to it. The moral framing has held steady while the emotion has risen, with more anger and disgust in recent ads. Very little of it argues from sacred land, which leaves purity and sanctity as an open lane, and the farmer is unlikely to be the only case.
What people hear depends on where they look. Mathieu sees three layers: national coverage is mostly about jobs and power, the advertising carries the two positions above, and local coverage is about who decides and who pays. Zack sees the local objection as the place where people who disagree on almost everything else can meet: “A voter that’s worried about land and independence, and a voter that is worried about corporate power, may support the same restriction for different reasons.” He is clear that agreeing on one issue is not a broader political conversion.
Whether the issue lasts beyond the midterms is open. Mathieu gives both sides of it. A midterm issue can fade once decisions are made and attention moves on. But the demand for power is not going away, the plants will be built where people can see them, the utility bill arrives every month, and ordinances and case law will keep accumulating, all of which suggest the issue will shape American politics for the next few years.
Asked what each would do next, the two take different angles. Zack sees an opening for the climate movement: point to rising bills and argue that new energy technology adds supply and helps offset the cost, framed in the moral terms of the people it needs to persuade. That, he says, is the difference between grabbing attention and persuading. Mathieu gives the strongest case for supporters, that the country needs the computing power for its economic and geopolitical standing over the coming decades, and then the problem with it. A local commission or utility board cannot weigh the national interest. Moving the decision to the federal level lets that argument be made but costs local legitimacy, and keeping it local while giving residents a real say lengthens a process in a race where time matters. Zack adds the security version of the argument: if the infrastructure is built abroad, access to it could be cut off in a conflict.
The conversation ends on what could bring the two sides together. Zack suggests a message can appeal to the same value for different reasons: sanctity can mean individual liberty on the right and the natural environment on the left. Mathieu adds loyalty to the nation, rather than to the town, as a frame that either party could take up. Zack closes on what has to happen first: “You’re not gonna lose your badge of entry to the group for rejecting that extreme viewpoint.”
Unfiltered is a joint series from Causal and PharosGraph for the strategists, consultants and buyers who decide where the money goes before they can see what it will do.
What the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqwWb4uCE_c