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Republican memos warn candidates that backing data centers is a losing position
A New York Times poll puts 47 percent of Republicans against data center construction. The party's own strategists are telling candidates to keep their distance from the projects the president keeps defending.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- A New York Times poll released last week found more than 60 percent of Americans opposed to data center construction, including 47 percent of Republicans.
- Trump wrote in a late August Truth Social post that only communities wanting to be "backwards and poor" would refuse data centers coming to town.
- GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio sent the party's candidates a memo last week saying unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position.
- Tom Tiffany, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin, has attacked Democratic opponent David Crowley over what Tiffany claims are pro-data-center views.
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Why it matters
- constraint Objections built on eminent domain and pollution do not engage a compute-versus-China case, so a site can die in front of a county board while federal policy stays enthusiastic.
- decision Republican candidates now pick between the president's public position on data centers and their consultants' polling, and the ones who break have written advice to point at.
- precedent Telling AI companies that no party committee can repair the sector's brand hands the persuading back to the developer, who has to win the hearing without political cover.
- contradiction The same poll showing majority opposition puts data centers far down voters' priorities, with almost a fifth unsure which party would handle the issue better, so the opposition can block a permit without moving a general election.
Molly McCann Sanders is not a permitting lawyer and does not claim to be. "I'm not a data center expert. I'm not a tech expert. But I'm suspicious and wary, and want to move slowly," she told Wired's Molly Taft [4]. Sanders runs the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, and Wired describes her as holding "a fierce hatred of eminent domain" [1]. The column does not name a project that took land through eminent domain. Her stated worry about data centers is a different one: "I'm alarmed by the idea that these data centers can move in and pollute" [3]. She also said that she loves Trump, "but I think he's wrong about data centers" [5].
The case coming out of the White House is about compute. Hugo Lowell, who covers the White House for Wired, said of the president: "He's been told that restricting data center development means restricting compute, which means the US loses to China" [12]. Former White House AI czar David Sacks and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale echo that publicly, and Lonsdale debated Steve Bannon's tech editor Joe Allen at an auxiliary event during the Republican midterm convention [14]. Sanders said that debate was the only time data centers came up during the entire convention [15].
She also called the party's courtship of what she terms "the laptop class," young men enthusiastic about technology, a huge misstep with midterms nearing [19].
An analysis by The New York Times of thousands of replies to Trump's Truth Social posts boosting AI found that anti-data-center and anti-AI comments, including from staunch MAGA accounts, outnumbered positive ones four to one [10]. Of the comments that took a side, 80 percent were against [11].
The party's private advice runs the other way from its president. In August the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent AI companies a memo warning that "campaign or party committees can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy" [7]. A developer reading that sentence is being told the persuading is theirs to do.
Two questions separate the sites in a pipeline that are exposed to this from the ones that are not. First, does the parcel need a discretionary approval, a rezoning or a conditional use permit, or is the use permitted by right? Second, does the body granting that approval answer to a Republican primary electorate? A by-right parcel in a jurisdiction with no vote to lose is insulated from every memo above. A parcel that needs a hearing is exposed whatever the federal posture, and the objections waiting there are about land and air.
Weighting the second question heavily means dropping sites the engineering team ranked first. Whoever signs the build schedule absorbs that delay.
What to watch
- Whether a Republican county board or state legislature denies a data center permit and cites the party's own polling in doing so.
- Whether other Trump-endorsed candidates copy Tom Tiffany and run against an opponent's data center record.
- Whether the NRSC or Tony Fabrizio turns the private memos into public guidance candidates can read out at a hearing.