Lurking in the background of the midterms is a potential political realignment sparked by protests over data centers. Wall Street is resetting its forecasts for AI valuations and capital expenditures because of local data center opposition, from the Virginia suburbs to the Utah plains. And it’s bleeding into the political arena. Some officials have already lost their elections over approving data center construction or even for failing to stop it, and more are threatened in the fall. When Greg Abbott—that Greg Abbott—is making proposals for stronger regulations, you know that the data center issue just hits different.
But among several candidates who have talked to me about the increasingly pivotal role data centers are playing in their elections, nobody had quite articulated the meaning behind the grassroots pushback until I heard from Will Lawrence, a progressive running for Congress in Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District, a swing seat in the Lansing area.
Lawrence, a former climate and affordable-housing organizer, said that data centers were the most salient issue in his district, or at least the one with the most intensity of opinion. And he acknowledged the basic quality-of-life issues involved, like the impact on energy and water bills, noise pollution, and bright lights at all hours. But, he added, there was something more.
“It’s also about who decides the future of our communities,” he said in an interview. “We have the richest companies in the world coming in, signing elected officials into nondisclosure agreements, with PR agents and lawyers telling everybody how good of a deal it’s going to be … They say, ‘This is the way of progress. And you need to engage in shared sacrifice for the common good.’ And we say, ‘What common good? The benefits of the development have gone to the one percent!’”
To some campaign organizers and observers, Lawrence’s lack of fit into the typical swing-seat candidate box is actually the reason he’s winning.
In other words, the data center question is really about the same dynamics of money and power that have led the public to (correctly) believe that government doesn’t listen to their concerns. The cause unites Republicans and Democrats and independents under the rather American message of standing up for the little guy.
That’s why Lawrence is highlighting data centers in his first ad of the primary, which was released yesterday. The ad features a homeowner named Randy Cantu from Mason, Michigan, a small town supporting a property owner’s request to annex 400 acres of farmland in nearby Vevay Township for a proposed hyperscale data center project. The Vevay Township board, after a fiery public meeting that brought out hundreds of people in a town of around 3,000, rejected entering negotiations with Mason to transfer the plot of land as part of a shared economic development agreement.
Lawrence, who spoke at that meeting, says in the ad, “I’m running for U.S. Congress because I’ve never been afraid to stand up to corporate power.” Cantu agrees. “Will Lawrence isn’t going to let us be bullied by big corporations.”
THAT LAWRENCE IS LEADING the August 4 Democratic primary for Michigan’s Seventh, a district formerly held by centrist Sen. Elissa Slotkin and currently in the hands of Republican Tom Barrett, might surprise some people. But he has been on top in most available polls, including in an internal poll from one of his two Democratic primary opponents, ex-Navy SEAL and business executive Matt Maasdam. A third poll sponsored by his other opponent, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink, has her so far out in front that it feels like an outlier.
To some campaign organizers and observers, Lawrence’s lack of fit into the typical swing-seat candidate box is actually the reason he’s winning. “This is the year to prove the point that bold economic populists can win in swing districts,” said Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has endorsed Lawrence. “Will shatters the conventional wisdom that we need a Slotkin to win.”
Lawrence’s background has been on the outside of the halls of power. “I started out as a grassroots organizer,” he told me. “The Democratic Party was where social movements go to die.” But Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016 triggered his re-evaluation of how mass political movements can reach people.
He became co-founder and director of strategic partnerships at the Sunrise Movement, building the bottom-up coalition for a Green New Deal. He later organized the Michigan Rent is Too Damn High coalition, which in 2024 got a ban on housing discrimination based on sources of income, like HUD or VA vouchers, through the state legislature. The coalition also secured hundreds of millions of dollars in housing investments, and Lawrence got appointed to a housing trust fund in Ingham County that allocated that money.
The Inflation Reduction Act didn’t fully realize the promise of green industrial policy and now is in tatters. And Michigan housing wins were offset by unrealized goals. During these fights, Lawrence said he learned how swing districts like MI-07 were held up as resisting any such big changes.
“I saw the way that corporate interests on Capitol Hill talk about districts like mine,” he said. “We can’t have housing money because purple districts and swing voters don’t want that … That’s crap, but we have to prove that it’s crap by running as progressive populists and servants of the people in districts like this.”
That means a mix of old-line Democratic concerns like economic security in health care and housing and jobs, but also ending endless wars. “When the war in Iran started, I had an influx of 18- and 19-year-olds walking through the door saying we don’t want to go die anywhere around the world,” Lawrence told me. He also offered ideas like expanding the Conservation Reserve Program that pays farmers not to plant near riverbanks that can become contaminated with soil runoff, believing that the issue could be “strong ground for bipartisanship.”
He’s drawn upon his work in building coalitions. Lawrence recently held an eight-hour “ask me anything” event outside of Barrett’s congressional office in Lansing, standing in for a politician who he says hasn’t ever held an unscripted event. “We see somebody who would be not just a backbencher but an organizer in Congress,” said Ravi Mangla of the Working Families Party, who characterized the race as a “top priority.”
There’s another through line in Lawrence’s agenda: taking on military contractors, corporate polluters, Big Ag, the Epstein class. “People don’t trust that Silicon Valley or Wall Street will act for us,” he told the Prospect. “They are fed up and angry with the rich and powerful.”
LAWRENCE WAS BORN AND RAISED in the Lansing area, but his two opponents do not have deep ties to the district. Brink, who resigned her Ukraine post last year to protest Donald Trump’s policies, describes herself as a “sixth-generation Michigander,” but she only recently moved back after 28 years in Washington, and one campaign finance disclosure found that over 90 percent of her donations came from out of state. Brink has three million-dollar D.C.-area investment properties, all of which are leased; Maasdam has one, but his current address and voter registration is in Ann Arbor Township.
Trust this University of Michigan graduate when I say that “Ann Arbor resident” is a bad look for someone running for political office in the home district of archrival Michigan State.
Maasdam and Brink were recruited to Lansing by D.C. establishment groups that have a profile of what a swing-seat frontliner is supposed to look like: veterans, national security officials, and espousers of middle-of-the-road policies. They want a clone of Slotkin, who won here in 2018. For Maasdam, it was the Democratic power brokers at The Bench; for Brink, EMILYs List, though she also has attracted some union support, including from the Michigan Education Association.
For his part, Lawrence is picking up national progressive support from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and the Working Families Party. But more importantly, he has the most local endorsements in the race.
Brink and Maasdam have biographical ads up highlighting national security experience and ties to President Obama. Maasdam is being boosted by a $750,000 VoteVets ad campaign with similar themes; Brink is getting a smaller amount from a pop-up super PAC called Mid-Michigan Women Win. National Nurses United, one of the country’s most progressive unions, has invested $400,000 in a super PAC for Lawrence.
Brink and Maasdam are also seemingly trying to lure crypto PACs, a powerful player in recent primaries, into the race. Both completed a questionnaire issued by Stand With Crypto, and according to the organization’s website, “demonstrated strong support” for digital assets and legislative action. Maasdam went a step further with a tweet last month supporting the CLARITY Act, which would shift federal regulatory jurisdiction of digital assets to the light-touch Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Michigan residents lost $210 million to crypto scams last year.
Another outside super PAC is attacking Brink for being Trump’s handpicked choice for ambassador to Slovakia in 2019, and for initially defending Trump after his altercation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. (Brink resigned two months later.)
Brink has accused Michigan Values PAC, which ran the ad, for falsely using artificial intelligence; the ad includes an image of Trump holding up a picture with Brink’s face on it, seemingly just a stand-in for the nonvisual fact that he nominated her for an ambassadorship. Brink’s bigger claim was that the PAC had coordinated with VoteVets. “Matt Maasdam and his out-of-state, dark money allies are attacking me with AI deepfakes that mislead voters about my proven record standing up to Trump,” she said in a statement.
In short, the two handpicked establishment candidates are hunting crypto cash and attacking each other—instead of the guy leading the race in most polls.
“Establishment Democrats don’t always have their finger on the pulse of who is the right candidate for a district,” Mangla said.
BRINK AND MAASDAM ARE RUNNING nationalized races that haven’t focused on hyperlocal issues as Lawrence has. And Democratic candidates have been told this year not to raise the ire of powerful AI firms spending tens of millions in primaries. That shows through in the candidates’ approaches to the rising issue of AI data centers.
Maasdam, on local radio, tried to thread the needle by saying that Michigan should compete for data centers—“If we don’t participate in these in the way that it’s coming, all those opportunities will go to other states”—while also saying local groups should be protected from electricity price spikes and given full transparency about community impact. The development should be “at least neutral to the environment,” he added. Ultimately, he said, “we have to do this (and) I want to see this done in the right way.”
That answer is on every side of the issue and no side, all at once.
Similarly, Brink said at a campaign forum in mid-June that “data center proposals should be evaluated locally with environmental safeguards.” Deferring to the locals is a way not to take a position. The cautiousness is deliberate, and it leads to candidates tying themselves in knots.
Lawrence, by contrast, supports a federal moratorium on data center construction, and he’s stood directly with residents working on that locally. Howell Township, which is in the district, just extended its moratorium. The issue resonates in places like Michigan, where industrial manufacturing once thrived and disruptive warehouse structures that don’t create jobs are being built.
At the Vevay Township data center public meeting, 120 people from across the political spectrum packed into a room with a capacity of 80—with hundreds more outside. Lawrence read from Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical that called on humanity to “disarm” artificial intelligence. “People who identified themselves as Republicans, they came up to me and shook my hand and said, ‘You got my vote,’” he told me.
“I’m a candidate that is calling for change,” Lawrence added. “That’s what people want now on all sides of the political aisle. They don’t think either party will fight for us. I’m the only candidate credible to fight for them.”
