Dem
47
GOP
53
Last year, the price of eggs was a hot item for many people in the election. Now, the villain seems to be shifting. The new culprit is the price of electricity, which keeps going up and up. Many people believe it is due to the AI data centers, which are slurping up every watt they can find, causing shortages and driving prices up.
People don't like this. There was a lot of reporting that on Election Day this year Democrats flipped two seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, but there was little reporting about why. Everyone was too excited about Democrats winning the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia by large margins and Zohran Mamdani being elected mayor of NYC. But The New York Times was curious about the Georgia PSC elections and sent a reporter down there to talk to the voters about them. Here is what he found.
No Democrat has served on the Georgia PSC in almost 20 years, but two Democrats won landslide victories this year. In the village of Hogansville (Pop. 3,000), local voters were very angry about their escalating utility bills, plus an extra $50/mo. levy to cover a new nuclear power plant 200 miles away. They blamed the higher costs on Republicans, who they see as far too receptive to the wishes of the AI industry, as opposed to their own constituents. The two Democrats won in some of the reddest counties in Georgia on this issue.
The connection between data centers and utility bills kept coming up over and over in the gubernatorial election in Virginia, as well. It is not that people are against data centers, per se. They just want the tech companies to pay the full cost of all the electricity they use and not have ratepayers foot the bill for them. They are also against (hidden) subsidies for tech companies since data centers are totally automated and create almost no local jobs except during the construction phase. In most cases, they are monitored and operated remotely, with only a handful of people on site to swap out defective disks and the like. AI data centers and electricity prices could well be a sleeper issue in the midterms. (V)