If you watched this new ad in the toss-up Seventh Congressional District in Michigan and had no knowledge of the race, you wouldn’t know whether the person talking was a Republican or a Democrat. “Michigan water, Michigan land, and Michigan’s future belong to Michiganders,” the candidate says, shooting from the hip from a bar. “So while politicians are cozying up with Big Tech billionaires to force data centers on our communities, I stood up to my own party and voted against giving your tax dollars to data centers.”
The ad comes from Rep. Tom Barrett, the Republican incumbent trying to hold onto his seat. And it’s in tiny print, but the vote he’s talking about was from 2015, when “AI” was still mostly the name of a forgettable Steven Spielberg movie. The vote was about incentives for one internet data center in Grand Rapids, and had nothing to do with the massive AI infrastructure build-out that is inflaming residents across the country, regardless of party.
The ad reveals the anxiety that Republicans in tough races are feeling about data centers. Yesterday, Axios reported that the Republican campaign arm in the Senate wrote privately to AI companies that their zeal to construct data centers around the country was costing Republicans votes, and could become “a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.” But being aware of the backlash and being able to avoid it are two different things.
Barrett is playing from behind here. Will Lawrence, the progressive organizer who won the Democratic primary in MI-07 largely on the strength of opposition to data centers, has dominated the conversation around the controversial topic. And he has loudly signaled, including in his first ad of the general election, that he will not let up on what he considers a unifying issue. “I’ve been running against Tom Barrett since last August, focused on issues that we know have the potential for cross-partisan support,” Lawrence said in an interview. “Data centers are perhaps the exemplar of that.”
But while Lawrence has gained some authentic bona fides on the issue, spending time with activists and speaking at town halls against specific data center projects in the district, Barrett’s ad attempts to cover for a host of votes and stances that are at odds with his new positioning as an anti–Big Tech man of the people.
As the Prospect reported on Monday, just six companies, all of them related to the AI build-out, received $83 billion in tax breaks last year thanks to the extension of various corporate tax benefits in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Like nearly all Republicans, Barrett voted for that bill, which enabled Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Nvidia to spend more funds on building data centers.
An early version of OBBBA included a moratorium on any state-level regulations against AI for ten years. Barrett also voted for that before a bipartisan coalition excised it from the bill. That moratorium would likely have killed any state-level restrictions on data centers.
Barrett also supported the SPEED Act, a permitting bill that passed the House mostly along party lines last December; it has not been picked up in the Senate. That bill would diminish federal environmental reviews, including for data centers. President Trump signed an executive order in July 2025 that attempted to exclude data centers from environmental review, and the administration intends to place data centers on public land. Trump has endorsed Barrett and appeared at a rally in the district just a few weeks ago, where he was disrupted by a data center protest.
Barrett’s past donors also feature an array of Big Tech investors and data center builders, including Elon Musk, whose super PAC spent over $869,000 in the district to get Barrett elected two years ago; Peter Thiel, who maxed out to Barrett this cycle; and Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, which has $150 billion in global investments in data centers. Schwarzman maxed out to Barrett in 2024 and 2026. The corporate PACs for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle—the company behind the controversial data center project in Saline, Michigan—have all given to Barrett as well.
“Tom Barrett wants to reinvent himself as a data center fighter, but his record says the opposite,” said Ravi Mangla, a spokesperson for the Working Families Party, which has backed Lawrence. “He voted to give data center developers billions in tax breaks and left Michiganders holding the bag.”
The Barrett campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Barrett’s strategy on data centers, which likely will be mirrored by Republicans nationwide, is to foreground local control. “I believe you should decide on data centers, not Washington,” Barrett says in the ad. In a separate clip from a virtual town hall this week, Barrett said that he talked to people in Mason, a town where 400 acres of farmland is being sought for a hyperscaler project. “I said there have been these proposals to nationalize decisions that would override local communities about their decisions around data centers. And the people that I speak to overwhelmingly say that they don’t want to do that.”
Scary talk of “nationalization” obscures the idea of a pause in development and makes it sound like the federal government will force data centers on an unwilling public. The only person in Washington trying to do that is Donald Trump, who is working hard to install them without local input and silence state regulatory action.
The local control message from Barrett parallels what Lawrence’s Democratic opponents tried in the primary; Lawrence won by double digits. And the bigger point is that the Democrat is driving the conversation and steering the incumbent Republican to his issue turf, rather than the other way around.
In our interview, Lawrence suggested that he had some other ideas to build on his data center critique. “I’ve seen more and more people starting to turn their attention to Flock surveillance being rolled out across the district,” he said, referring to the license plate reader cameras that have triggered outrage across the country because they capture large troves of data that they can share with government and law enforcement agencies, and which can be misused to track former girlfriends and other such abuses. “I’m seeing that as part of what they’re building data centers to do, to build these massive storehouses of data on all of us. This is a deeply un-American thing that’s being done, a total information surveillance dragnet that’s being constructed.”
A bipartisan amendment to the surface transportation bill introduced in May would have blocked any recipients of federal highway funding from using automated license plate readers like Flock cameras for anything but toll collection. The amendment failed 44-20 in the House committee that Barrett sits on. Barrett voted no on the amendment.
While Barrett catches up to the new reality on data centers, he will have other flanks to protect, including surveillance tracking by law enforcement. And all the while, the debate is focused squarely on issues where Lawrence is taking the popular side of the argument, and Barrett is trying to come up with answers.
“We have an opportunity to unite people across the political spectrum,” Lawrence said.
UPDATE: A House Majority PAC poll released on Thursday finds Lawrence with a 49-47 lead on Barrett, with Barrett facing tough sledding with an favorability rating of only 35 percent compared to 47 percent unfavorable.
