The Working Families Party said Thursday that it is putting out a specific recruitment call for people who are organizing against data centers in their communities to run for office.
The announcement comes amid a period of heightened political turmoil around data centers, as some high-profile Democrats wade into the fight. Earlier this week, three Democrats in the Senate sent letters seeking information from Big Tech companies about how data centers impact electricity bills, while senator Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, became the first national politician to call for a moratorium on data center construction.
“We see our role as responding to what working families and working people are concerned about, what issues are keeping them up at night,” says Ravi Mangla, the national press secretary for the Working Families Party. “We would be ignoring the needs of our constituents if we were not responding to the issue of data centers and their impacts on communities.”
The Working Families Party was originally founded in New York in the late 1990s; it now has chapters in states across the country. While it (mostly) doesn’t seat candidates independently, the progressive third party’s endorsements and organizing power can carry real weight in the races where it chooses to get involved. It endorsed Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral race this year, as well as a string of other successful candidates.
Opposition to data centers has skyrocketed in some areas of the country over the past year, as tech companies have ramped up their investment in building out hundreds of facilities across the country. Polling from the outlet Heatmap released in September shows that less than half of Americans of all political persuasions would welcome a data center being built near where they live, while a recent survey from a private industry group shows that community opposition increased in the second quarter of this year, successfully stalling or stopping billions of dollars in data center development.
In many regions of the country, affordability issues—including rising electricity bills—are becoming tangled with other concerns around data centers, like worries over the climate and water impacts, or even noise from the centers themselves. Concern over data centers played a role in a number of midterm elections, including factoring into several races in Virginia, which has the highest concentration of data centers in the country and is facing rising demands for energy from more facilities projected to come online through the end of the decade. The political ripple around data centers has lasted beyond the midterms—and stretched beyond just Virginia. In the past week, officials in Chandler, Arizona voted 7-0 to reject a proposed data center in the city, despite high-profile lobbying from former senator Kyrsten Sinema, while voters in Georgia on Tuesday elected a 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 launch the recruitment effort after seeing how the issue played out in Virginia’s elections, and after observing some of the intense local pushback around the country. “You can’t fill a community center or a town hall just organically,” he says. “There are people who are clearly stepping up in their communities, organizing their neighbors, and leading the charge to push back against these data centers.”
