The data center debate has the power to swing mid-term elections, and campaigns have created audience segments around the issue. 

By Michael Gofman | Head of Political Sales, Samba

The debate over data center regulation is one of the most important political issues, across both parties, this mid-term election, and campaigns are using web and TV data to identify and target voters interested in the topic.

A nationwide pro-data center campaign is using Samba’s TV data to identify households that have viewed data center-related campaign ads on TV in the last several weeks and target them with its own messaging. The data allows the campaign to find households that have seen an opposing data center ad and respond to it, and skip households that have seen the organization's own ad several times already. 

In other campaigns across the country —  from deep blue California, to ruby red Louisiana, to purple Ohio — campaigns have access to Samba data that identifies data center voters based on their web browsing activity. Voters who read about data center-related topics, such as news reports about rising electric bills or zoning studies about county water usage, can be segmented into distinct audiences and targeted with campaign ads.

Sophisticated campaigns can segment these audiences even further and build campaigns tailored to voters’ specific data center-related concerns. Households worried about their utility bills going up can receive a pro-data center ad assuring them their electricity and water rates will be unaffected (they might even go down!), while another household can receive an anti-data center ad emphasizing the potentially negative environmental impacts of a data center in their community.

Why Data Center Audiences Are so Important

Campaigns are hammering the data center issue — they’ve already spent more than $45 million on data center ads this year — because the issue is so important for so many swing voters.

Public sentiment has swung wildly against data centers in recent years. In August 2025, Heatmap Pro found Americans close to evenly split on a data center being built near them: 43 percent in favor, 42 percent opposed. Twelve months later, asking the same question, 75 percent were opposed. Fewer than one in 20 voters strongly support one.

Data centers are also a cost-of-living issue, which is already key for voters this election cycle. Voters see a data center construction site on their drive to work and a higher power bill when they return home, and they blame data centers for that bill.

Voters have strong feelings about data centers and neither party owns the issue, making it a key battleground for the mid-terms.

A Rare Case of Bipartisanship Interest

The data center issue is one of the precious few issues that speaks to voters all across the political spectrum. The electorate is often bitterly divided on cultural and political issues, but seemingly everyone in the country agrees that data centers pose a job, health or environmental risk to their communities, and they want them closely regulated.

More than 80 percent of Democrats oppose a local data center, according to a September poll from PBS News, NPR and Marist. Yet the building trade unions, a core Democratic constituency, are campaigning for them. Republicans split 46 percent in favor of data centers to 44 percent opposed. The Trump administration backs data center construction, while Republicans at the state and local levels are less enthusiastic. 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law preserving communities' authority to deny data center projects, and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has warned about rate increases. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who in 2025 promoted the state as the "epicenter of AI development," has since called for repealing the state’s data center sales tax exemption, directed regulators to make data centers pay their own grid costs and paused new approvals pending a state audit. The reversal came in the middle of a close re-election race in which data centers are a central issue.

It’s impossible to know a voter’s feelings about data centers by party alone, which is why campaigns are using more sophisticated methods for targeting voters.

How to Target Data Center Voters

Consider one active campaign for the last few weeks of this election cycle. An agency representing a Democrat-leaning advocacy group already had a data center message on the air and wanted to get it in front of voters sensitive about the issue. The agency used Samba data to track thousands of data center TV ads from dozens of campaigns running across the country.

The agency identified voters engaged in the data center debate — households exposed to data center ads on TV and people who read about data centers online. It targeted voters in deep-red Southern states and Midwestern swing states, and sent them the same pro-data center message, regardless of their party affiliation.

Democrats aggressively running a nationwide campaign in support of data centers illustrates both the importance and complexity of the issue. The average Democrat is skeptical of data centers because of the threat they pose to jobs and the environment, and their association with Big Tech, while trade unions support data centers because they want the construction contracts.

Gathering insights on who these voters are, in a privacy-compliant manner, and how to best target them is a problem that comprehensive web and TV data can help solve.