Posted on 09/19/2026 9:55:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is running a new attack ad blaming Republican Sen. Jon Husted for bringing data centers to Ohio. The spot claims the facilities drive up electric bills for local families.
The ad features a Google-owned data center in Lancaster that opened in 2023. Brown’s campaign calls the industry a burden on ratepayers.
Campaign finance records show Google’s corporate PAC gave Brown $20,000 over his career. Brown also accepted thousands more from Google lobbyists who work on permitting and energy issues.
“ Apparently Google is terrible enough to put in a campaign attack ad, but perfectly acceptable when the political contributions are coming in,” said Ohio GOP strategist Mehek Cooke. “That is the contradiction Brown needs to answer. If Google’s Lancaster investment is so bad for Ohio, why was Google political money acceptable to Sherrod Brown?”
Google lobbyist Lisa Kountoupes gave Brown $3,500 in March. Another lobbyist, Michael D. Smith, has contributed $10,200 since 2017. Three more Google lobbyists added another $6,000 over the past decade.
Brown’s spokeswoman defended the ad by saying Husted is the face of data centers in Ohio. She did not explain why Brown accepted the Google money.
Cooke called the switch “Jekyll-and-Hyde politics.” Brown once celebrated an Amazon data center in central Ohio as “great news” back in 2015. Now he attacks the same industry.
Husted campaign spokeswoman Amy Natoce said Brown failed Ohio families for 32 years in Washington. She noted that Husted’s bipartisan bill to make data centers pay for their own power passed the House but was blocked by Senate Democrats.
President Donald Trump has warned that communities rejecting data centers risk falling behind in the global AI race. China is not slowing its buildout, and American families deserve reliable, affordable power.
Working families in the heartland want honest leaders who put American energy security and lower utility bills ahead of political games. When politicians take money from the very companies they attack, it’s time to send them home.
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
Nothing ever backfires on them because the Press is in their corner.
No doubt Sherrod Brown already knows that data centers already pay the cost of their own electricity. The only reason they issued this draft bill is to garner publicity. Electric rates are regulated in the public interest at the state level. There are a handful of regulatory models that the states pattern after. To my knowledge there is no existing model that allows data centers, or any commercial class of user to offload costs onto the consumer ratepayer. This is a problem that does not exist.
While the smart people here on FR and elsewhere debate actual pros and cons, don’t forget the political debate is entirely bereft of fact and 100% agenda-driven.
If I or someone note that PRC or DNC is pushing anti-data center, control-AI, slow-down tactics, it’s not that there aren’t concerns, it’s just that they want people to vote D while the PRC goes full speed and don’t care how they get there.
Did John Motgan care this passionately about the issue of legal access to marijuana? No. He wanted to support Democrats and Democrat strategists identified segments of apathetic voters who rarely voted, but if somehow motivated voted Democratic. They happened to be disproprtionately motivated by the issue of marijuana legislation. (We think of them as “stoners”.) so he dumped the money into the referendum race on the ballot and it As to the rest of the ticket, I doubt it could have had the desired effect outside of the referendum, because DeSantis rolled.
Similarly this “data centers are crushing American families” is a profoundly ignorant claim. But Dems must be running it because they think it will yield marginal voters.
That’s false. They raised our electric bills and they explicitly said it was because of the data centers. My bill went up 7%.
The DemonKKKrat Communists are throwing money around like drunken sailors in influence peddling. I’m tempted to be a rabid anti-AI spokesman and reap the $millions I would get spewing anti-AI lies as a Mid-Terms anti-Trump talking point.
As always, follow the money.
The closest thing I can imagine to a data center in an existing commercial use might be a pipeline. They use a lot of electrical energy in pumping whatever they are distributing, gasoline, oil, etc. They turn on and stay on 24/7, almost constant use. The costs of supplying that volume of energy with that characteristic (flatline baseload) are borne by a class of commercial users that might be called Commercial CP-1 (or something like that), and any consumer of power from that utility that met the defining parameters of that rate class could qualify to be served under that classification.
An entirely different rate class might be a Residential General (you see RG-1 in a lot of utility rate sheets). RG-1 customers pay rates based on the characteristics of their class and the cost of supplying that rate class. The most likely explanation for your rates, as a residential user, going up 7% might be fuel costs, but it could be a combination of a lot of things, none of which are a secret; they are all painstakingly accounted for in the ratemaking hearings that preceded your utility being granted authority to charge a particular rate.
It could not be from the costs of extending service to a data center or the costs of acquiring power that is sold to data centers, or the cost of adding generation facilities to power data centers. The rate structure of any utility I am familiar with, and the mission of any public utility agency I have ever studied has been to isolate the different types of customers and to make sure they are responsible for the costs their class creates. And no one else's.
That is why this bogus "data center" alarmism being generated for the midterms is so offensive. It is exploiting the ignorance of a lot of voters.
The “Press” has its weaknesses. We will find them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.