A data center backlash is upending Ohio’s Senate race

WILLIAMSBURG, Ohio — Jessica Baker sifted through an overflowing pile of political mailers she has received over the past month.

Lowering costs? “That’s common sense,” she said. Reducing gas prices and utility bills? “We need that.” Party division, culture wars — it’s all there. But none of it touched the issue she wants to hear about before she votes: data centers.

“My home’s under attack,” Baker, a lead organizer for the grassroots advocacy group Conserve Ohio, told MS NOW in her living room. Just a few steps away were piles of petitions and homemade maps marking where data centers are being built across Ohio. In just a few months, she said, the issue turned her from someone who was mostly apolitical into someone who ferries petitions to and from the statehouse. There isn’t a data center in her town, but there are plans to build one just a few minutes’ drive away.

“Everything doesn’t stop at that property line. So, once we started realizing that they were coming everywhere, and nobody would listen, we had —” she stops herself. “There was no choice. There’s just no choice.”

She pointed back at the mailers. “That’s what’s not on here: The people are not on here.”

But the people will vote in November.