This article was produced by Capital and principal. It has been republished here with permission.
In Archbald, a district carved out of aged anthracite land northeast of Scranton, data centers are being built on the same blighted land that coal companies dug up and abandoned generations ago, becoming a barometer of voter sentiment as Pennsylvanians decide who to support in November.
Kelsey Pazanski Wargoa registered nurse who lives less than 400 acres from the proposed 400-acre data center elaborate wrote in a text message that she had a basic test for the politicians running the construction: “Will NOT vote for anyone who hasn’t spoken out against them.”
One hundred miles south in Skippack, health care advocate Peg Eitl – who didn’t just vote Governor Josh Shapiro in 2022, but she was courting him and claims to have been registered as both a Democrat and a Republican in the past – she made her own statement.
“I respect and appreciate many of his policies,” she said, “but I will NOT vote for him unless he insists on a moratorium,” adding that she would not vote for his Republican opponent, Stacy Garrityor.
No woman is an exception. This was shown by a Muhlenberg College study conducted in March 64% of adults in Pennsylvania view data centers as a crisis or problem. Anger over data center projects and skyrocketing utility bills he dragged the state’s long-fought fight over its energy future – natural gas vs. renewables, mining vs. regulation – from committee rooms to the center of the governor’s race.
Nationally, support for data centers has declined over the past eight months. In December, 42% of U.S. voters opposed building data centers in or near their communities, according to an Emerson College poll. your latest survey conducted at the end of July, this number increased to 63%. The bipartisan wave of opposition to data centers has included environmental issues — such as massive water apply for cooling, high demand for electricity straining local grids, and air pollution from backup generators — which has become a way for people across the political spectrum to discuss controversial topics like climate change.
“I think this is the first year in Pennsylvania that data centers have become an extremely significant issue,” he said Chris Borickprofessor of political science at Lehigh University, citing crowds at local meetings, protests and polls. “Data centers, in particular, were among the most important issues this year,” he said, bringing together the most crucial issue in voters’ minds: affordability.
Shapiro and Garrity, state treasurer, offer competing visionsand each says their plan will make energy more affordable.
Garrity, speaking before the Marcellus Shale Coalition in Hershey in June, promised an agenda focused primarily on natural gas: removing barriers to drilling, expediting permits for pipelines and power plants, and rolling back renewable energy and efficiency mandates. In a statement to Spotlight PA in early July, Garrity stated that she opposed the “clean energy mandate” included in the state’s data center legislation. “We need to take advantage of the abundant natural gas resources under our feet, which currently account for 60 percent of our global energy supply [the] electricity generation in the Commonwealth,” she said.
Shapiro’s evolution is a story in itself. Started out as a data center specialist – “I’m heartened to know that thanks to Amazon, the future of artificial intelligence will be right here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania” he said in June 2025 following the announcement that the tech giant would invest $20 billion to build two data center campuses in Bucks and Luzerne counties. But it has changed since thenissuing proposed standards in June that would require data centers to power at least 32% of their operations with tidy energy and sign community benefit agreements in exchange for existing tax breaks.
“We must choose the projects that are built here,” he said in his February speech to the General Assembly.
Tap dancing has its own logic. “It’s fun to watch them try to balance positions on Pennsylvania’s importance as a leader in artificial intelligence,” Borick said, “while still being aware that this is a dangerous issue among the electorate right now.”
Blocked accounts
Recently, Shapiro leads Garrity 50% to 28%. Franklin & Marshall College Survey — well beyond the margin of error — the sharper question may be what Shapiro’s second term will actually deliver. The answer lies in the state Senate.
HB 1834which passed the House in March, would ensure that the Public Utility Commission controls data center connection costs so that they are not passed on to ratepayers. Its main sponsor, a Democrat Representative Robert Matzie from Beaver County, he called it “at the heart of the Data Center Payer Protection Act.” His legislation included a provision aimed at skeptics: a data center could still get 90% of its electricity from fossil fuels, and its initial tidy energy demand of 10% could be met with nuclear power, which already provides 40% of Pennsylvania’s mix. It didn’t matter. It was adopted by a majority of 104 to 95, with every “no” vote being a Republican, and since March 31 he has been a member of the Senate committee.
Companion bill sponsored by Representative Paul Friel passed 201-1 and banned data centers from seeking public utility status – no local zoning preemption, no eminent domain.
Katie Blumepolitical director of Conservation Voters of PA, said the consensus in polls is striking: People may not want data centers next door, “but if they’re going to come here, they want it regulated.
“Pennsylvania now has a chance to do what we didn’t do with fracking,” she added, as the debate split between pro and con, “but everyone forgot about really strong regulations to protect workers, our communities and the environment.”
Blume suspects Republicans in the state Senate are participating in the same poll.
“We’re seeing people in the Senate introducing a bunch of bills to regulate data centers, whereas a year ago they were introducing bills to welcome them with open arms and get rid of the regulations,” she said. “People get angry when rich corporations show up.”
Burned earlier
Public reaction to data centers has led to the formation of the usual coalitions.
Construction unions, which have long worked with tech companies to organize workers and have been allied with Democrats, are “full-frontal” on data centers, Lehigh University’s Borick said, “which makes for strange bedfellows,” while MAGA voters and progressives have rarely found unanimity in opposing data center projects on the grounds that they allow wealthy outside interests to profit at local expense. Found a survey from last fall approximately 61% of adults in Pennsylvania believes data centers will likely create recent jobs in the state, but Borick expresses skepticism that those jobs will be long-term.
“Where I grew up in Scranton, there’s a big data center area in the northern part of the valley — old mining areas, places that have been hit hard over the years,” Borick said. “People have been skeptical of energy interests from the beginning. They’ve been burned a few times. There’s this kind of simmering skepticism in Pennsylvania about when an industry comes in, takes it, and then leaves a lot of problems in its wake.”
Garrity has tried to change that scenario in Homer City, where a former coal plant is being converted into energy data centers, which she says is proof that rural brownfields can benefit.
“The community is really improving. There will be new housing, there will be new jobs.” – she told reporters during a listening session at a data center in Montgomery County in June, while acknowledging that some residents “are not entirely happy with it.”
The stakes extend beyond the governor’s mansion. Pennsylvania has a divided legislature, with Republicans controlling the Senate and Democrats controlling the House. Both chambers are at stake in November, along with four congressional seats that Democrats have picked up in the fight for the U.S. House of Representatives. A largely unnamed climate looms over it all – what Borick called a policy pursued “in secret.”
Pennsylvanians are among the tens of millions of Americans in the Midwest and East Coast this summer survived the heatwave scientists said yes “virtually impossible” no global warming; In Philadelphia, the temperature reached 103 degrees canceled the Fourth of July parade. A record number of Pennsylvanians were identified earlier this year climate change as a crisiswith 44% of Pennsylvania adults now believing we are in a crisis, an enhance of 15 points from 2023.
According to Blume, public anger over rising utility bills fueled by data centers is not a distraction from climate policy – quite the contrary. “It’s hard to think about things like climate change when it seems so existential at times,” she said. “But when utility bills go up or you have a data center that says, ‘I’ll take all your water,’ environmental issues become much more tangible to voters.”
Copyright 2026 Capital & Main
