The 'toxic' issue that could tank a Republican in crucial Senate race is setting off internal alarm bells

As angst over AI data centers consumes Ohio, Democrats are making an obvious and effective election play: blaming Republicans.

A memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, obtained first by Axios, warns that growing public hostility toward massive data centers could threaten Senator Jon Husted's reelection campaign.

The stakes are unusually high. The Ohio Senate race between Husted and former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown is one of the country's most closely watched Senate contests and could have implications for control of the chamber. 

A new Fox poll shows Brown maintaining an eight-point lead over Husted in the race for Ohio’s Senate seat, 53% to 45% — a margin unchanged since June.

Republicans currently hold a narrow Senate majority, making competitive races like Ohio's especially important. 

The memo describes data centers as a growing political liability and warns that a Husted defeat could send a message to politicians and the technology industry nationwide.

'If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one,' the memo says. 'This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.'

Husted's Democratic challenger, former Senator Sherrod Brown, has made the issue a centerpiece of his campaign, allegedly spending millions of dollars on advertising portraying Husted as 'the face of data centers in Ohio.'

There's a reason Brown has been able to attach Husted so closely to the industry.

 As Ohio's lieutenant governor, Husted was a prominent public champion of the state's effort to attract technology companies.  Ohio has more than 200 data centers, making it the fifth-highest state in the country for the number of data centers.

In 2019, he appeared at the groundbreaking of Google's $600 million data center in New Albany and touted the project as evidence that Columbus could become the 'tech hub of the Midwest.'

The Google project received a 15-year state sales-tax exemption estimated at $43.5 million, plus a local property-tax abatement. 

Husted defended the incentives, arguing the economic benefits outweighed the tax breaks and that additional taxes could have driven Google elsewhere.

That history has given Brown an opening.

Brown now argues Ohio's political establishment handed large technology companies generous incentives while ordinary Ohioans are asked to foot the bill for the industry's enormous electricity demand. In one recent campaign video, he said major corporations are 'gobbling up energy to feed their data centers' while Ohio families face higher electricity costs. 

He has also attacked the state's data-center tax breaks as too generous for too few jobs — and made Husted the central character in that argument.

 But Brown himself once celebrated data-center development.

In 2015, while serving in the Senate, Brown praised construction of a third data center in central Ohio, calling the Amazon project 'great news for New Albany and central Ohio' and saying the expansion showed the region was a place where businesses wanted to invest and families wanted to live.

Nearly a decade later, he is campaigning against the uncontrolled expansion of the same industry. The Daily Mail reached out to Brown's campaign regarding his 2015 comments.

Husted is no longer defending data-center expansion either. He has increasingly focused on making the companies building the facilities, rather than ordinary ratepayers, bear the cost of the electricity and infrastructure they require. 

In July, he introduced the Ratepayer Protection Act, designed to ensure large electricity users pay for the additional generation, transmission and grid infrastructure needed to serve them.

'Data centers are, and should remain, a local decision,' Husted's campaign says, adding that communities should decide whether projects suit their residents. The campaign points to tax revenue, property-tax relief and construction and skilled-trades jobs.

Husted spokesperson Amy Natoce accused Brown of suddenly embracing the issue in an election year after three decades in Congress to address it.

The fight comes as Ohio has become one of the country's major data-center hubs. Google says it has invested more than $20 billion in the state since breaking ground in New Albany in 2019. Meta, Vantage and QTS have followed, while Nvidia and OpenAI have announced major projects.

But the scale of that growth is now creating a political problem. Ohio's data-center tax exemption became a major controversy after the state reported its cost reached nearly $1.6 billion in 2025 — far above earlier projections — fueling questions about whether the benefits justify the incentives.

The issue is spreading rapidly across the country, and Ohio's neighbor could lead by example. 

On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order imposing new guardrails on data-center development. 

It requires developers seeking certain state permitting advantages to meet standards on energy costs, environmental impacts, water use and transparency, and to win local approval before receiving state approval. 

Data centers were also removed from Pennsylvania's fast-track permitting program.

The order stops short of an outright ban, but the local-approval requirement could effectively prevent some projects from moving forward.

For years, states competed to attract the enormous investments tied to AI and cloud computing. Now they are competing over something else: how much of the industry's cost their residents should bear.