Working families The party said Thursday it was making a specific recruitment call for people who are organizing against data centers in their communities to run for office.
The announcement comes during a period of increased political unrest around data centers, as some prominent Democrats jump into the fight. Earlier this week, three Senate Democrats sent letters requesting information from big tech companies on the impact of data centers on electricity bills, while Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, became the first national politician to call for a moratorium on data center construction.
“We see our role as addressing the concerns of families and workers, the issues that keep them up at night,” says Ravi Mangla, the national press secretary for the Working Families Party. “We would be ignoring the needs of our citizens if we did not answer the question of data centers and their impacts on communities. »
The Working Families Party was founded in New York in the late 1990s; it now has chapters in states across the country. Even though it does not seat candidates (for the most part) independently, the support and organizing power of the progressive third party can carry real weight in the races in which it chooses to get involved. He supported Zohran Mamdani in the race for New York City mayor this year, along with a series of other successful candidates.
Opposition to data centers has skyrocketed in some parts of the country over the past year, as technology companies have increased their investments in building hundreds of facilities across the country. A Heatmap poll released in September shows that less than half of Americans of all political persuasions would welcome the construction of a data center near their home, while a recent survey by a private industry group shows that community opposition grew in the second quarter of this year, successfully blocking or halting billions of dollars in data center development.
In many parts of the country, affordability issues, including rising electricity bills, are intertwined with other concerns about data centers, such as worries about climate and water impacts, or even noise from the centers themselves. Concerns about data centers have played a role in a number of midterm elections, including factoring into several elections in Virginia, which has the nation’s highest concentration of data centers and faces growing demand for energy from more facilities expected to come online by the end of the decade. The political fallout around data centers lasted beyond the midterms and extended beyond Virginia. Last week, officials in Chandler, Arizona, voted 7-0 to reject a proposed data center in the city, despite high-profile lobbying from former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, while Georgia voters on Tuesday elected a newcomer to the state legislature who promised legislation requiring data centers to “pay their fair share.”
Mangla says the Working Families Party decided to launch the organizing effort after seeing how the issue played out in the Virginia election and after observing some intense local resistance across the country. “You can’t fill a community center or a town hall organically,” he says. “There are people who are clearly mobilizing within their communities, organizing their neighbors and leading the charge to fight these data centers. »
