How to Talk to Your Neighbors About Data Centers Before November

Data centers are a wedge issue—and not just because they're bad for communities.

Across party lines, research shows they are the kind of issue that can actually change votes. That makes how we talk about them in the next seven weeks as important as anything else we do.

Here’s what we’ve learned:

1. Cost of living is the top issue in this election, full stop. When you’re talking to a neighbor, a phone bank contact, or the guy down the block who used to fly a Trump flag and doesn’t anymore, start there. Who pays the price when a hyperscale data center moves in? Not the tech billionaires getting the tax breaks. The people who live there—through higher power bills, strained water supplies, and public budgets drained of money that should be going to schools and healthcare. Arizona is giving data centers $60 million a year in tax exemptions. As one state senator there put it: we’re not broke, we’re being robbed.
2. The second frame is democracy and local control. What communities are experiencing is a loss of control over what happens in their own backyards—decisions made in backroom deals, under non-disclosure agreements, pushed through on timelines designed to outrun public organizing. Voters should have a say when massive projects reshape their communities. That’s not a left or right position. It’s a basic expectation of democratic life that data center developers are systematically working to deny.
3. The third frame is simply: too much, too fast. In Reno, a data center was approved in the center of a mixed-use neighborhood, next to apartments and trailer parks, with minimal public input. In Frederick County, Maryland, the county council doubled the land zoned for data centers—against the recommendation of the Planning Commission, the Farm Bureau, and every environmental group in the county—in the first week of the year. In Arizona, developers rushed permit applications before a moratorium could take effect. The pace is not accidental. Time is the one resource these companies don’t have unlimited supplies of, and they know it.

There’s ways all of us tend to lean on when we talk about our work with people who agree with us—like leaning on climate impacts or the evil of fossil fuels. We know why we care about those things, and they motivate us profoundly. But when talking to persuadable voters or our neighbors who don’t think like us, research shows us that these frames just don’t work as well as we think they do. Consider pivoting away from fossil fuels. Keep using affordability, democratic accountability, and community protection as ways to connect. That’s not a compromise of our values. It’s an understanding of what we share with people who may not yet understand all of our concerns. And it’s a way to bring folks along so that one day, they can also feel care and concern about climate and fossil fuels, too.

There are ten weeks until Election Day. Early voting starts sooner. Go talk to people. Talk to your next-door neighbors as well as those a few streets down from you. Talk to weird people you encounter that you don’t always talk to. Our democracy needs all of us.

Pony Knowles

Pony Knowles is an organizer at Third Act. For talking points, candidate endorsement information, and upcoming events, visit thirdact.org.