WASHINGTON, DC – Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Jolly won Tuesday’s primary on a pledge to halt new data center construction statewide, joining a bipartisan wave of 2026 nominees and candidates in Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia and Kansas running against the infrastructure that already powers the AI tools, banking apps and streaming services consumers use daily.
The pledge landed the same week The Wall Street Journal reported that Big Tech is scrambling with listening sessions, job pledges and community grants to contain a backlash Gallup now puts at 7 in 10 Americans opposed to a data center in their own community.
These races prove is that voters are being misled on the case for technological progress in our country, and politicians are happy to exploit it.
“Florida just proved this fight is bipartisan: Republican Byron Donalds wants data centers to leave the public grid and pay their own way, Democrat David Jolly wants to ban them outright,” said Yaël Ossowski, deputy director at the Consumer Choice Center. “Only one of those is a policy, and it still falls short of championing innovation. The reality is that consumers feel this compute every day, on their phones, in their cars, and on their laptops. We need it more than ever. Politicians should be honest that a moratorium won’t refund a single electric bill. It will push jobs and the tax base to a state that still wants them, while making life less affordable for consumers.”
A Consumer Choice Center review of state-level data center rules found the sector uses roughly 4% of U.S. electricity today, while national electricity prices climbed 34% between 2020 and 2025 with little correlation to where data centers actually operate. The real bottleneck is permitting delays for new power plants and transmission lines, not server demand. Nashville hosts 27 data centers that ran for years without a single zoning dispute, until a moratorium campaign started there too.
“The need for more energy is not just isolated to the AI and computing industry, but to every sector of our economy. That gets lost in debates about data centers. America is a leader in AI and technology broadly because we have the capacity to build and deliver value, and giving in to the temptation to stall the same progress consumers rely on every day is not a winning strategy,” concluded Ossowski.
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About the Consumer Choice Center
The Consumer Choice Center is an independent, nonpartisan consumer advocacy group championing the benefits of freedom of choice, innovation, and abundance in everyday life for consumers in over 100 countries. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Brussels, Washington, Ottawa, Brasilia, London, Geneva, and more.
For more on the Consumer Choice Center’s work on tech innovation, visit consumerchoicecenter.org.
