The Anti-Data-Center Movement Is Reshaping Michigan Politics
Will Lawrence is one of the founders of the Sunrise Movement, a grassroots climate activism group. Now, he’s running for Congress in a Michigan swing
Will Lawrence is one of the founders of the Sunrise Movement, a grassroots climate activism group. Now, he’s running for Congress in a Michigan swing district, one of a growing handful of candidates around the country calling for a moratorium on data center development. Senator Bernie Sanders has endorsed him, calling Lawrence a candidate who will “demand real accountability for big tech and AI companies.” And the backlash to data centers, Lawrence says, is helping him understand rural resistance to another kind of large-scale industrial project in the state: utility-scale renewable energy. Lawrence’s campaign sees data centers as a potent topic to rally voters to his side in the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 7th district, to be held in August. Internal polling conducted by Data for Progress of likely Democratic primary voters in the district shared with WIRED shows that more than 40 percent of respondents were “much more likely” to vote for a candidate who opposed data centers. The message resonated even more with respondents under 45: Almost 80 percent of younger voters said they’d be much more likely or more likely to support an anti-data-center candidate.
(The 7th district includes the college town of Ingham.) Data centers “certainly [weren’t] the issue I expected to be talking about on the campaign,” Lawrence tells WIRED. Voters, he says, started organically approaching him at town halls and other meetings after he announced his candidacy last summer, asking for his advice as a longtime organizer about how to channel the anti-data-center energy among their neighbors into something productive. “People feel like they’re being utterly disrespected by the companies and the local officials who are welcoming them into town,” he says. The Data for Progress poll put Lawrence ahead of both his opponents in the primary. Another poll commissioned by one of his opponents and released in April shows Lawrence winning the primary, though it also shows the vast majority of voters remain undecided. Lawrence also remains a distant third in fundraising. There are at least 11 data centers planned throughout Michigan, according to the clean-energy database Cleanview. Significant local pushback in two townships in the 7th district have stalled at least two planned projects over the past year.
But data center developers have found ways around local opposition elsewhere in the state. After a township in the 6th district voted against an Oracle data center earlier this year, the company sued, and the town let development begin rather than engage in a costly court battle. Earlier this month, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer appeared at the opening of the Oracle data center, where she was photographed smiling next to OpenAI’s Sam Altman and praised the $16 billion investment. “Any candidate worth their weight knows that these data centers are toxic,” says Cooper Teboe, a Democratic strategist based in California. Candidates that don’t recognize this, Teboe says, “are not candidates that are going to win.” Christy McGillivray, the executive director of Voters Not Politicians, a Michigan-based democracy reform organization, says that Whitmer’s appearance at the opening was a major misstep for the governor, who’s been floated as a 2028 presidential contender. “It literally blew my mind,” she says. “I was like, ‘Are you trying to hurt the entire Democratic party?’” While on the campaign trail, Lawrence says that he met with data center protesters who differed significantly with him politically.
The BriefWire