Some of us remember where we were when the earthquake rocked Louisa County in 2011, shaking buildings across much of Virginia and beyond.
You may want to make a note of where you are now because there’s another earthquake happening right now — and it’s rearranging the political terrain beneath our feet. Conservatives are turning against data centers.
We’ve seen anecdotal evidence of this before, but now we have statistical evidence in the form of the latest Commonwealth Poll from Virginia Commonwealth University. We now have a rare political event: both left and right united.
The growing liberal skepticism, and sometimes downright opposition, to data centers is more understandable: Data centers have environmental consequences, with both water and energy use, and the environmental community is anchored on the left. Now, though, we’re seeing growing conservative opposition — even though data centers create jobs and tax revenues, two things that usually animate pro-growth conservatives. The opposition is so intense that we now see an even rarer political phenomenon: conservatives embracing a tax increase.
While we can see what is happening, we don’t know where this will lead — but this political realignment on data centers has the potential to cause some tensions within the Republican coalition between pro-business and anti-data center factions, just as it’s led to tensions within the Democratic coalition between Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who has to pitch Virginia as a good place to do business, and more progressive types, who don’t have that responsibility.
Enough of the number-free summaries; let’s dig into the data.
We’ll start with a 2023 poll by The Washington Post and the Schar School at George Mason University. To my knowledge, this may have been the first Virginia-specific poll question about data centers. It asked if respondents supported or opposed a tax break for companies that “create at least 1,000 jobs” with data centers: 61% said yes. (That seems an awfully high figure for job creation since data centers typically create far fewer.) The numbers from Democrats and Republicans in the survey were almost exactly the same; this almost never happens. There was support for that tax break across Virginia, although a little less in the Northern Virginia exurbs (55%) that were starting to feel overrun by data centers than in the western part of the state (68%), where usually anything that promises jobs is going to get a positive reception.
How strong was the support for data centers then? This strong: 69% statewide said they’d be comfortable if a data center were built in their community. That support ranged from 58% in the Northern Virginia exurbs to 79% in the western part of the state. Based on those numbers, it’s no wonder that local officials felt empowered to seek data centers as a means of economic development. With those numbers, it would have almost been malpractice not to.
Earlier this year, The Washington Post-Schar School polled again, and this time the results were quite different. When the poll asked the question about tax breaks for data center companies that create at least 1,000 jobs, it found Virginians were now quite opposed: That 68% support had dropped to just 37% and the opposition had risen from 31% to 56%. At the risk of using another number, Virginians had done a 180 on data centers in just three years.
Before, people were united despite political differences. This poll found that opposition was higher among Democrats than Republicans. Democrats who previously supported the tax break now opposed it: 61% said no. Republicans were more mixed — 50% supported it, 48% opposed it. That’s still a shift, but clearly it was Democrats who were driving the opposition. However, when the poll looked at regional breakdowns, it found that every part of the state was now opposed to the tax break — even in western Virginia, which previously had been the most supportive: 53% there said no.
Opinions had also shifted on whether people were comfortable with a data center in their community. Statewide, 59% said no. On this question, every region of the state said no. And a slim majority of Republicans also said no while Democrats were more emphatically no.
All that’s by way of background. Now we come to the more recent Commonwealth Poll. Different questions, but they’re close enough to allow us to make some comparisons.
In this poll, support for the tax break for data centers had dropped to 25% — even if they are “creating jobs and spurring economic development,” as the poll question framed it. Opposition now stands at 69%. That support is lower, and the opposition is higher, than what we saw in the Post-Schar School poll near the start of the year, which suggests that opposition to data centers is intensifying.
That may not be that much of a revelation to anyone who’s looking around Virginia these days, but what’s notable is how it’s now conservatives who are driving that opposition — it’s the rising opposition on the right that has spiked those numbers. The Commonwealth Poll found 73.1% of Democrats opposed, definitely higher than the 61% the Post-Schar School poll found earlier in the year. However, the Commonwealth Poll also found that 68.6% of Republicans were opposed, where 48% had in the Post-Schar School poll. Where Democrats once had been driving the opposition, now it’s Republicans who are pushing the “opposed” numbers higher. This runs quite counter to the party’s traditional “pro-business” instincts.
What is driving conservatives to oppose data centers? We can guess a lot of things, but they would only be guesses; the poll can’t give us a definitive answer, so I’ll leave that to you to debate. What we can say with more certainty is where much of this conservative opposition to data centers has come from: the mostly rural, western part of the state.
On the one hand, this seems obvious — that’s the Republican base these days. If Republicans are changing their minds on something, it’s probably because rural voters are changing their minds.
On the other hand, rural voters are typically supportive of things that create jobs — and while data centers may be relatively small job creators compared to other industrial facilities of their size, they do create jobs that would be significant numbers in a small community. Because data centers vary in size, it’s risky to cite a “typical” figure, but the threshold for qualifying for that tax break is 50 employees, with the number dropping if the facility is located in an “economically distressed” area, which few are at present. The Google data center project coming to Botetourt County has talked of 300 jobs; the Stack Infrastructure project in Pittsylvania County has pledged at least 2,500. (Disclosure: Google is one of our donors, through its Google News Initiative, for our New River Valley expansion. Donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy. You can become a donor and have no say, too.)
Republicans have been slower to come to oppose tax breaks for data centers, but they’ve come to that place now, putting a majority of voters from both parties in the same place. Over the course of this year, any rising opposition to data centers has come primarily from Republicans; Democrats were already there, but it’s Republicans who are the ones changing their minds.
The Commonwealth Poll found that opposition to this tax break in the western part of Virginia was at 63.5%, up from 25% just three years before. In that previous survey, the Post-Schar School found support in the western part of Virginia for this tax break was 68%; now that support has fallen to 31.4%. This represents a complete reversal of opinion. Technical note: The two polls may define their regions differently, but western Virginia is so large geographically that I think it’s OK to draw this comparison just to make the point. Once, the western part of Virginia practically clamored for data centers because they’d bring jobs and tax revenue; now maybe not so much. We can’t say with certainty that western Virginia doesn’t want data centers; we can just say the region is against the tax incentives. Those are two different things — but they are intertwined, particularly if doing away with that tax incentive were to send data centers to other states, which seems quite possible in a mobile, dynamic economy. We have certainly seen outright opposition arise in Botetourt County and Wythe County to data center projects there, as well as opposition to just the prospect of data centers in Amherst County, Franklin County, Wise County and elsewhere.
When was the last time there were movements in rural counties to turn away jobs and tax revenue? What makes the opposition in Botetourt County and Franklin County so interesting is that these projects (a real one in Botetourt, a possible one in Franklin) are slated for business/industrial parks. These are not cases of data centers taking farmland out of production or bumping up against housing developments, as we have seen in Northern Virginia. This land has already been taken out of production. (In the case of Botetourt, which acquired the Greenfield Center land in the mid-’90s, the choice was either create a business park or see that land turned into a housing development.) However, we’re now seeing opposition to a very particular form of business.
Even more interesting, we’re now seeing conservatives embrace a tax. The Commonwealth Poll asked if data centers should be required to pay “additional fees to offset electricity demand.” To be sure, the question did not use the word “tax,” but that’s what those “additional fees” are — a tax on electricity consumption. This is what Gov. Abigail Spanberger proposed, and the General Assembly recently decided to do. Statewide, 78% of those surveyed in the Commonwealth Poll backed this; that’s a strong mandate for one of Spanberger’s signature policies.
When we start splitting the numbers apart, we see that 88.1% of Democrats back these “additional fees” — not a surprise to me — while 69.1% of Republicans do. Finding 69.1% of Republicans in favor of a tax increase, even if the poll doesn’t call it that, seems an astonishing thing. Support overall in the western part of the state is lower than elsewhere, but even there 69.2% are in favor of these fees/taxes.
It’s unclear where all this leads, but it seems politically notable that there’s now a distinct break between Republicans at the grassroots and some of their leaders nationally. Some Democratic leaders — from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez nationally to 6th District congressional nominee Beth Macy in Virginia — have called for a moratorium on data center construction. That may or may not be wise from a policy standpoint, but it’s certainly in tune with where much of their party is headed.
On the Republican side, though, the Trump administration is an enthusiastic promoter of artificial intelligence — which, by definition, means more data centers. Republican voters haven’t seemed to have connected those dots yet; many seem comfortable embracing Trump while opposing one of his signature policies. Maybe we’ll never see a fracture. Parties often hold contradictory positions; the Democrats who want a data center moratorium say they support working people but want to halt an industry that is generating blue-collar jobs in the data center supply chain. However, this poll data suggests to me there’s a political opening for Republicans who want to run against data centers, even if Trump is pushing them. If that movement were to succeed, that would be an even bigger political earthquake than the one we’re already seeing.
We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. You can sign up here:
