This Virginia Election Was a Warning for Data Centers

A former Biden White House climate adviser just won a successful political campaign based on opposing data centers, laying out a blueprint for future candidates to ride frustrations over the projects into seats of power.

On Tuesday John McAuliff, a progressive Democrat, ousted Delegate Geary Higgins, a Republican representing the slightly rural 30th District of Virginia in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties. The district is a mix of rural agricultural communities and suburbs outside of the D.C. metro area – and has been represented by Republicans in the state House of Delegates going back decades. McAuliff reversed that trend, winning a close election with a campaign almost entirely focused on data centers and “protecting” farmland from industrial development.

“I realized that the biggest energy crisis in the country was right here in my backyard,” McAuliff told me in an interview. “We are simply the tip of the iceberg of the enormous land rush AI has created.”

Virginia is the top data center destination in the U.S., with the bulk of operations in tech-centric Northern Virginia. As tech companies have found a home in the Commonwealth, communities have been pushing back against what they see as a drain on electricity and water supplies. As I’ve previously chronicled in The Fight, this pushback is also turning into opposition to renewable energy as part of a broader backlash to land use for advanced technological infrastructure.

Enter McAuliff who, until recently, was serving in key climate policy leadership roles during the Biden administration. He joined the Agriculture Department in 2022 after enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act and helped shepherd the expansion of the Rural Energy for America Program. He began advising the White House on climate policy in 2023 and served in the administration until the start of the current Trump administration.

Other factors contributed to McAuliff’s victory, which was certainly slim – the race was decided by less than a single percentage point. McAuliff undoubtedly benefited from a Democratic wave election in an off year during an unpopular GOP presidency that has slashed federal government employment, shattering the job market in northern Virginia. There’s also the convenient fact that McAuliff's last name is nearly identical to a recent former governor of Virginia.

But it’s impossible to ignore how much McAuliff’s campaign focused on data centers. His website had an entire page dedicated to his positions on the subject. His attack ads against Higgins focused on previous support and campaign contributions from data center developers – so much so that the Republican candidate began countering McAuliff by claiming that a Democratic victory would only lead to new solar projects.

Turns out, in this close race, the data center attacks worked and the solar rebuttal did not. McAuliff told me the day after his victory that the data center attacks resonate because yes, there’s an environmental impact from these projects, but also a “cultural” effect from the fact data centers are large, hulking complexes.

“There’s something folks are more willing to take a look at, and there’s something folks are less likely to look at, electorally speaking,” he said.

Chris Miller, president of the conservationist group Piedmont Environmental Council, told me you can see flickers of evidence that data centers shaped the results of other races in Virginia, too. One example he pointed to was in Prince William County, where Republican Delegate Ian Lovejoy lost his seat to a Democrat who campaigned on stricter scrutiny of the data center sector. Lovejoy also told voters he wanted to address the projects and authored legislation to put some minimum regulation in place on data center siting but it died in subcommittee, and when the House of Delegates passed legislation mirroring his proposal, it was vetoed by outgoing Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. This, to Miller, meant Lovejoy had nothing to show voters: “That may have been a factor, because he couldn’t deliver to his constituents.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if these races in Virginia are also turning heads in nearby Washington, D.C. — particularly those of the lawmakers in Congress debating whether to change our country’s permitting processes to meet growing power demand for artificial intelligence. Back home, permitting reform that makes it easier to build data centers could be a tough sell.