President Trump keeps insisting that AI data centers are an unambiguous win for the towns that host them. Much of his own party is no longer buying it. As the Nov. 3 midterms approach, Republican officials from Texas to Michigan to Pennsylvania are reversing course on the data center boom, spooked by polling showing the issue has become one of the few things uniting voters across the political spectrum — against them.

The clearest warning sign came in a private memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, obtained by Axios earlier this month, urging top AI companies to help fix the industry's image before it costs the party a Senate seat. The memo, addressed to AI executives, warned that data centers have become as unpopular with voters as "nuclear waste" and singled out Ohio, where Republican Sen. Jon Husted is locked in what GOP pollsters call a "dead heat" with Democrat Sherrod Brown.

Ohio becomes the warning shot

"If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one," the NRSC memo read, according to Axios. ABC News reported that Brown has built campaign ads around Husted's record promoting data centers as Ohio's lieutenant governor, arguing he is "a chief reason Ohio has so many of those centers."

The Ohio race is no longer an outlier. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who once championed his state's AI buildout, unveiled new construction restrictions and moved to end some tax incentives for data centers. Michigan Senate nominee Mike Rogers now backs a one-year construction moratorium, reversing his earlier position, and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Stacy Garrity has likewise embraced a temporary pause after previously welcoming the projects. Florida Rep. Byron Donalds and Wisconsin gubernatorial contender Tom Tiffany have staked out similar reversals in their own races, according to reporting from Reason.

The numbers help explain the panic. An Economist/YouGov poll this month found 61 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built near them, including 47 percent of Republicans — driven by fears over strained power grids, rising utility bills and unchecked AI expansion in residential areas.

"If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one." — NRSC memo to AI industry executives

Trump, for his part, shows no sign of budging. "If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous," he has said publicly, and Time reported this week that advisers describe the president as personally attached to the issue and unlikely to be swayed by midterm jitters.

That leaves Republican candidates navigating a widening gap between the White House's enthusiasm and their own voters' anger — a split Democrats, including Brown in Ohio, are moving quickly to exploit. With early voting just weeks away in several states, data centers are shaping up as one of the most unpredictable wedge issues of the 2026 midterm cycle, cutting against the party that controls the White House and, in several races, against incumbents who once campaigned on the very projects now drawing constituents' anger.