Texas data center backlash shapes 2026 election races

TEXAS — Mason McCallister said it was an act of God that sent him down a gravel road near his home in Bells, Texas, one Sunday last December.

It wasn’t the normal route he and his family take back from church, but he decided to detour so his daughters could shout hello to their grandmother as they drove by her home.

What he saw that day catapulted him into a debate playing out around the country — and especially in Texas — over data centers. It’s one that may now affect the outcome of key elections in the Lone Star State.

As they rolled past, flashes of red caught McCallister’s eye among the lush green of the area’s gentle hills.

“Driving down that road, I just see survey markers everywhere,” McCallister, a real estate agent, told CNBC. “And I knew at that time what was happening. I could feel it” — a data center is coming, he said.

McCallister’s home is less than a mile from the survey markers, in a rural stretch between Dallas and the Oklahoma border. He and his wife, Heather, built the house on 26 acres, where they keep three horses and a donkey and host frequent family gatherings at a long farmhouse table on their spacious back patio.

The outcry over data centers — warehouses that contain the hardware for powering artificial intelligence and other technology — was only a faint murmur when McCallister first saw the survey markers. In the months since, it’s become a dull roar, as increasingly more projects are proposed and built, and general anxiety over AI and its potentially humanity-ending powers grows.

Across Texas and the country, people have flooded local meetings to protest proposed projects, citing concerns about the use of water and other resources, noise and light pollution, rising utility costs and falling property values. Some towns and cities have moved to block their development, as anti-data center advocacy groups and social media pages proliferate.

Polling shows the economy and cost of living are top of mind for voters in the runup to the 2026 midterm elections. But some political strategists say data centers are a potent enough issue that they could shift the balance of power in Texas, potentially paving the way for Democrats to win statewide for the first time since 1994. Democrats have their sights set on the governor’s mansion, as well as an open U.S. Senate seat, and the outcome of the Senate race could determine control of Congress.

Populists on both the left and the right — including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo. — were quick to try to rein in data centers and protect consumers against associated utility cost increases. But Democrats have broadly staked out a clear position against data centers, as President Donald Trump cheers development of new facilities.

That dynamic has left Republicans — including Texas Gov. Greg…