Campaigns and outside groups have spent more than $45 million since January on ads about data centers, and the coverage of that spending has skipped the one place the fight was already settled.
On July 9, 2025, a full six months before the ad war began, Ohio’s utility regulator approved a tariff that forces large new data centers to pay for the electricity they reserve whether they burn it or not.
That absence is the story. NPR’s analysis of AdImpact data, syndicated this weekend across dozens of public radio sites, carefully documents the money, the bipartisan convergence and the polling. It never names a public utility commission. It is a long piece about electricity rates that does not mention the bodies that set electricity rates, and that omission flatters every candidate in it.
The Order Nobody Ran an Ad About
The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approved a data center tariff for AEP Ohio in the summer of 2025. Trade coverage of the order laid out terms that are considerably more aggressive than anything a thirty-second spot has promised. New or expanding customers above 25 megawatts must pay for a minimum of 85% of the capacity they subscribe to, every month, for as long as twelve years. There is a four-year ramp. Leave early and an exit fee equal to three years of minimum charges comes due.
The point was cost-shifting, stated plainly. Regulators wrote that the framework keeps the expense of reinforcing the grid on the customers who caused it rather than spreading it across the utility’s other 1.5 million accounts. AEP itself framed the approval as consumer protection. The stipulation behind it was signed by the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association Energy Group and Industrial Energy Users-Ohio, which is to say by the parties who actually pay the bills in question.
It was not universally loved. The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association went on to challenge the billing structure that fall, and reasonable people disagree about whether a twelve-year minimum charge is protection or a subsidy dressed up as one. That is a real argument. It is being had in a docket, in front of five commissioners, and it has attracted roughly zero dollars in television advertising.
What the Office Actually Controls
Here is the part the ads depend on you not knowing. A governor does not set your electricity rate. A senator does not set your electricity rate. In every state that regulates its utilities, rates are proposed by the utility and approved, modified or rejected by a public utility commission, and those commissioners sit for fixed terms or stand for separate election. A governor appoints some of them, eventually, as seats turn over. The effect of that arrives in years, not in a first term.
So when a Wisconsin PAC spends $634,795 in a single month telling voters that its candidate will “stop AI data centers from making your energy bills skyrocket,” it is describing something the office does not do. When a Florida PAC puts $2.5 million behind a promise to “fight for a ratepayer protection plan,” the plan it is describing is a docket item. The Georgia governor’s race alone absorbed $12.8 million of this, across nine ads, in a state where the Public Service Commission is elected on its own ballot line.
The federal version is worse, because the receipts are public. We wrote in August that the one energy bill nobody has voted against still has no floor date. That has not changed. The Senate campaign generating the loudest data center advertising in the country is being run by and against people who could have moved that bill and did not.
Husted Spent Six Years Building the Thing He Now Manages
Ohio is where this gets specific enough to be uncomfortable. Sherrod Brown’s supporters have spent millions calling Republican Senator Jon Husted “the face of data centers,” and on the facts, the label fits. Husted was lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2025, spent those years selling Ohio as a Midwest tech hub, and backed the tax exemptions that came with it. Ohio then lost roughly $1.6 billion in tax revenue to data centers in 2025, more than eleven times what the state had projected, and Governor Mike DeWine has since paused new exemption applications. Husted has defended the record rather than run from it, which is at least honest.
Our position: the defense is not available to him, and the promise is not available to Brown either. You do not get to spend six years recruiting an industry with public money and then campaign as the check on it, and you also do not get to tell voters that a Senate seat will lower their utility bill when the lever sits in Columbus with the PUCO. Both candidates are running on a mechanism neither of them operates. The Ohio Capital Journal, to its credit, put the two visions side by side in August and the gap between what each man is promising and what each man can deliver survived the comparison intact.
The Tell Is in the Memo
The strongest evidence that this is a messaging exercise rather than a policy fight comes from the Republicans running it. An internal National Republican Senatorial Committee memo obtained by NPR called data centers a “sleeper issue for the entire election cycle” and warned the technology industry that a Husted loss would make politicians nationwide wary of them.
Read that again. The committee is not telling donors how it plans to lower anyone’s bill. It is telling an industry what a lost seat would cost that industry. The ads are pointed at voters and the memo is pointed at the sector the ads attack, and both things are true at once because attacking a windowless building in a field is the cheapest possible way to be seen fighting about electricity prices. Attacking a regulated monopoly’s rate design is expensive, slow, and full of people who fund campaigns.
The public anger is real and it is earned. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in June found 77% of Americans worried that data centers will raise their electricity costs, with only 14% comfortable having one built nearby. We argued a month ago that this stopped being a zoning fight the moment the costs got socialized across a whole grid region, and that reading has held up. What has changed is the money, and the money has gone somewhere useless.
Forty-five million dollars has bought a genuinely bipartisan agreement that data centers are a problem, and not one commissioner, not one tariff, not one rate case. Ohio got its ratepayer protection from five people most Ohioans cannot name, in a proceeding no PAC bothered to advertise against, thirteen months before either Senate candidate started talking about it. If the next $45 million goes the same way, voters will get a second season of ads about a fight that already ended, and their bills will be set the same place they were always going to be set.