Photograph Source: Conlan Houston – CC BY-SA 4.0
Outspent 11 to 1 by Congresswoman Haley Stevens, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s August 4 win in the Michigan Democratic primary for the party’s U.S. Senate nominee is the buzz of the nation. While big media outlets are wringing their hands or casting their eyes at familiar issues of affordability, rejection of establishment candidates and generational shift, many are missing an important element that could have clinched progressive El-Sayed’s upset victory in a race he won by about 15,000 votes: hyperscale Artificial Intelligence data centers, which loom big in Michigan.
Longtime political writer and pundit John Nichols, executive editor of the left-leaning Nation magazine, who was interviewed on the August 5 edition of the Democracy Now! international radio-television program, gave the Michigan Senate primary a close look at voter behavior in precinct districts. He had this to say:
“And with Dr. El-Sayed, one of the things that he learned was that people across Michigan were deeply concerned about data centers and AI — AI in general, but especially AI data centers. And he made that a big part of his campaign. Obviously, the national coverage focused a lot on all the issues we’ve been talking about here, all of which are important. But his focus on data centers connected him with a lot of small towns, with a lot of rural areas, with a lot of outstate areas, and I think it had a real impact on showing him to be a candidate who wasn’t in the pocket of big money or utilities.”
Nichols also noted the victory of William Lawrence, 35, in the Democratic primary for the Congressional seat in Michigan 7. Lawrence is a co-founder of the youth-led climate action group Sunrise Movement. In El Paso, Texas, the community activist organization Amanecer Peoples Project was born from the Sunrise Movement. Amanecer is very active in opposing local data center projects.
Weighing in on the political impact data centers in the Michigan primary, Steven Prager wrote on Commondreams.org:
“While rejecting corporate PAC money, Lawrence championed Medicare for All, legislation to curb money in politics, and an end to arms sales to Israel.
But he also distinguished himself by harnessing voters’ growing fear and frustration with the expansion of artificial intelligence data centers, framing them as an imposition by unaccountable “tech billionaires” without regard for the public’s concerns about rising energy prices, diminishing water supplies, and pollution….
Lawrence took the clearest position on the issue, calling for a 12-month federal moratorium on new data-center construction and joining local opposition movements as proposed sites sprang up across his district.”
Like many other places across the nation, AI data centers are a burning issue in the Paso del Norte borderland, with two massive facilities under construction in El Paso (Meta) and Santa Teresa (Oracle, Open AI) while a third one is proposed for the U.S. Army’s Ft. Bliss in El Paso. Joining many other places across the U.S., local governments in four New Mexico counties have recently passed moratoria against big data center construction in their entities. Let’s see how the AI data center issue will reverberate in local and national politics and reshape the fates of various political actors in the coming ’26 elections.
