Working Families The party said Thursday it was issuing a special call to recruit people who organize against data centers in their communities to run for office.
The announcement comes at a time of heightened political turmoil around data centers, with several high-profile Democrats entering the fray. Earlier this week, three Senate Democrats sent letters seeking information from Large Tech companies on the impact of data centers on electricity bills, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, became the first national politician to call for moratorium regarding the construction of a data center.
“We see our role as responding to the concerns of families and working people and the issues that keep them up at night,” says Ravi Mangla, national press secretary of the Working Families Party. “We would be ignoring the needs of our constituents if we did not address the issue of data centers and their impact on communities.”
The Working Families Party was founded in Fresh York in the behind schedule 1990s; now has chapters in states across the country. While it (mostly) does not cast candidates independently, the endorsement and organizational power of a progressive third party can make a real difference in the races it chooses to enter. She endorsed Zohran Mamdani in this year’s Fresh York mayoral election, as well as a number of others successful candidates.
Opposition to data centers has surged in some areas of the country over the past year as technology companies have increased investment in building hundreds of facilities across the country. Polling from the Heatmap outlet released in September shows that less than half of Americans regardless of political persuasion would welcome the construction of a data center near where they live, while a recent survey by a private industry group shows that community opposition increased in the second quarter of this year, effectively halting or halting billions of dollars in data center development.
In many parts of the country, affordability issues – including rising electricity bills – are intertwined with other data center issues, such as concerns about climate and water impacts, and even noise from the centers themselves. Concerns about data centers have played a role in many midterm elections, including several races in Virginia, which has the highest concentration of data centers in the country and faces growing energy demand from more facilities expected to come online by the end of the decade. The political uproar over data centers continued beyond the midterms and extended beyond Virginia itself. Last week, officials in Chandler, Arizona, voted 7-0 reject the proposed data center in the city despite high-profile lobbying from former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, while Georgia voters on Tuesday chosen newcomer to the state legislature who has promised legislation to make data centers “pay their fair share.”
Mangla says the Working Families Party decided to start recruiting after seeing how the issue played out in the Virginia elections and seeing intense opposition from local communities across the country. “You can’t fill a community center or a town hall organically,” he says. “There are people who are clearly getting involved in their communities, organizing their neighbors and leading the charge to take a stand against these data centers.”