Data centers — giant facilities that store, process, and distribute tech and cloud-based data — are popping up across the country, increasing in prevalence with the rise of AI. These facilities, while useful, are also costly and extremely harmful. They have a massive environmental footprint, polluting neighboring water sources and jacking up utility costs for nearby residents. Regular people and elected leaders across the country are increasingly saying "no" to new data centers in their communities, and MVP partner Working Families Party (WFP) just joined the fight.
WFP is recruiting candidates who oppose data centers to run for office. As WFP National Press Secretary, Ravi Mangla, recently told Wired, "We see our role as responding to what working families and working people are concerned about, what issues are keeping them up at night. We would be ignoring the needs of our constituents if we were not responding to the issue of data centers and their impacts on communities."
The move comes after watching how data centers became a central issue in the 2025 elections, especially in places like Virginia, which has the highest concentration of data centers in the country and is facing more demand to build new ones. Residents living in areas near data centers or where they are being proposed have waged full-scale, successful campaigns in opposition. These campaigns are generally run by regular people living nearby, often in rural areas, who simply do not want to bear the brunt of the impact, including skyrocketing utility costs passed on from Big Tech companies at a time when affordability is Americans' top concern.
Because the issue of data centers hits, literally, so close to home for so many people, WFP is seizing the opportunity to recruit and train candidates who are taking this issue seriously and already organizing around it. This strategy is one way that MVP partners are building power with homegrown, local organizers already fighting against data centers to up their skills and take their fight to the next level by running for elected office.
WFP is recruiting potential candidates from across the country, but will focus its efforts in regions with the highest prevalence of data centers and where WFP has a strong presence — northern Virginia, the upper Midwest, and the Southwest. WFP hopes to expand to other regions where there is already significant organizing against data centers, like Georgia, where two Democrats just won statewide office running on platforms of lowering utility costs, decreasing environmental pollution, and addressing concerns about data centers.
