The blue tsunami has a message for Virginia Democrats on data centers and campaign finance

Last Tuesday’s historic win for Democrats nationwide may not feel immediately applicable to state-level politics in Virginia, which holds its own elections on odd years rather than syncing them with federal elections. Democrats already enjoy a trifecta in the state, and last week Virginia voters handily endorsed the constitutional amendments the party put forward to secure reproductive rights, marriage equality and voting rights. 

So Virginia is bluer than ever – but that doesn’t mean next year’s state election will be a romp for Democrats. According to exit polls last week, 53% of voters have unfavorable views of the Democratic party. That’s better than the 59% unfavorable rating for Republicans, but it’s apparent that neither party has a well of good will to draw from. 

Democrats won elections across the country this month because voters are mad at Trump, his inflationary policies and his war. But they are also angry about data centers and money in politics. These are grassroots issues that Virginia’s leaders have not adequately addressed. If they want to win next year, they should take them seriously now.

Even a couple of years ago, the notion that data centers would play a major role in national elections would have been inconceivable. This year, data centers were on the ballot. Voters adopted data center bans or restrictions in at least 38 jurisdictions, while rejecting proposed limits in precisely one.

Opposition to data centers played a role in high-profile Democratic victories in states as diverse as Ohio, Texas, Georgia, Colorado and South Carolina – all states with significant data center activity. According to a Bloomberg analysis, 40% of planned data center capacity in the U.S. is occurring in states that may now hit pause. 

In Georgia, voters even flipped the public utilities commission to Democratic control, supporting candidates who campaigned on reining in monopoly utility Georgia Power. Like Dominion Energy, Georgia Power proposes a major buildout of gas plants to serve data centers. The incoming commissioners backed a data center construction freeze championed by Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Virginia Democrats are out of step with the zeitgeist here. After years of making Virginia more welcoming for data centers, this spring the General Assembly passed only the weakest versions of a few laws demanding very little of developers. Nor would the new guardrails proposed by Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s “data center framework” do much to slow the buildout. 

Where our leaders see data centers as the key to economic growth, residents just want them to go away. Polling conducted this year revealed that 69% of Virginia voters would be “uncomfortable” with a data center near them, while 72% opposed Virginia’s sales tax exemption for data centers.  

Many data center opponents suspect the unrestrained spread of data centers has more to do with money in politics than economic policy. Certainly, a politician who accepts large campaign donations from a powerful industry, then acts in the interest of that industry, has an uphill job to persuade voters that the money wasn’t the reason.

A Pew Research Center poll conducted in May showed 74% of Americans considered money in politics a “very big problem for the country today.” A few weeks before the election, another poll showed voters were more concerned about corruption in government than any other issue. 

The concern isn’t limited to Trump-style grifting by individual politicians; a depressingly high percentage of people now think corruption is endemic to government.  

Americans support campaign finance reforms when they’re given the opportunity. Last week, in deep-red Montana, a ballot initiative to strip corporations of the ability to spend money on elections passed with fully 65% of the vote. The move follows a similar Hawaii law enacted in June. In Michigan, 82% of voters endorsed a set of campaign finance reforms, including a ban on utilities and large government contractors contributing to political candidates and their political action campaigns. 

Virginia legislators consider – and reject – these kinds of campaign finance reforms just about every year, and they have never allowed voters to consider them in a referendum. As I’ve previously noted, Virginia is one of just five states that allow unlimited corporate campaign contributions. Legislators claim they can keep money from affecting their judgement. Voters know better.

Even in the wake of the blue tsunami, some Virginia Democrats still act like nothing has changed. At an Energy Commission meeting on Nov. 5, two days after the election, two Democrats joined three Republican members to block the sending of a letter to the SCC encouraging additional scrutiny of the proposed merger between Dominion Energy and NextEra Energy. The merger, of course, is all about data centers and the profit to be had from supplying them with power.

Four of the five who voted against sending the letter – two Democrats and two Republicans – are sitting legislators. For each of them, Dominion is the largest contributor to their election campaigns, doling out from $145,000 to $507,000 apiece during the last election cycle. 

The spread of data centers and the role of money in politics are intertwined. Americans don’t like the influence of billionaires and big corporations on politicians under the best of circumstances. The tech oligarchs who sacrificed their don’t-be-evil  principles on the altar of Donald Trump fully earned the revulsion of the electorate. 

Give Elon Musk credit: if his $445 million effort to buy elections for Republicans failed spectacularly, at least he was upfront about what he was doing. That’s one rat who stayed on the sinking ship as the tsunami gained force. Other tech leaders might be wishing they hadn’t boarded in the first place. 

If Virginia Democrats take last week’s election results to heart, they will adopt the data center reforms constituents are demanding and enact the campaign finance laws needed to ensure that people, not corporate interests, call the shots in Richmond.