In Archbald, a borough carved out of old anthracite country northeast of Scranton, data centers are rising on the same scarred ground that coal companies dug up and abandoned generations ago, becoming a barometer of voter sentiment as Pennsylvanians decide whom to support in November.
Kelsey Pazanski Wargo, a registered nurse who lives less than a mile from a proposed 400-acre data center complex, said in a text message that she has a simple test for the politicians presiding over the buildout: “Will NOT vote for anyone who hasn’t come out swinging against them.”
A hundred miles south in Skippack, health care advocate Peg Eitl — who not only voted for Gov. Josh Shapiro in 2022 but canvassed for him and says she has been registered as both a Democrat and a Republican in the past — has drawn her own line.
“I respect and appreciate many of his policies,” she said, “but I will NOT vote for him unless he pushes for a moratorium,” adding that she won’t vote for his Republican opponent, Stacy Garrity, either.
Neither woman is an outlier. A Muhlenberg College poll conducted in March found that 64% of Pennsylvania adults view data centers as a crisis or a problem. Anger over data center projects and skyrocketing utility bills has dragged the state’s long-simmering fight over its energy future — natural gas versus renewables, extraction versus regulation — out of committee rooms and into the center of the governor’s race.
Nationally, support for data centers has plunged in the last eight months. Back in December, 42% of U.S. voters said they oppose data centers being built in or near their community, according to a poll by Emerson College, but in its latest poll conducted in late July, that number had increased to 63%. The bipartisan tide of opposition to data centers has included environmental concerns — such as their massive water consumption for cooling, intense electricity demands that strain local grids and air pollution from backup generators — that has become a way for people across the political spectrum to discuss contentious topics like climate change.
“I think this is the first year in Pennsylvania where data centers have emerged as a highly salient issue,” said Chris Borick, professor of political science at Lehigh University, citing packed local meetings, protests and polling. “Data centers in particular have taken their place among the top tier of issues in this year’s cycle,” he said, fused in voters’ minds with the top issue of all: affordability.
Shapiro and Garrity, the state’s treasurer, offer competing visions, each claiming their plan would make energy more affordable.
Garrity, speaking before the Marcellus Shale Coalition in Hershey in June, promised a natural-gas-first agenda: She would lift barriers to drilling, fast-track permits for pipelines and power plants and roll back renewable energy and efficiency mandates. In a statement to Spotlight PA in early July, Garrity said she opposes the “clean energy mandate” in the state’s data center legislation. “We need to be utilizing the abundant natural gas resources under our feet that currently accounts for 60% of [the] Commonwealth’s electricity generation,” she said.
Shapiro’s evolution is itself a story. He began as a data center booster — “I’m comforted by the fact that thanks to Amazon, the future of AI is going to run right here through the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” he said in June 2025 upon the announcement that the tech giant would invest $20 billion to build two data center campuses in Bucks and Luzerne counties. But he has since pivoted, issuing proposed standards in June that would require data centers to power at least 32% of their operations with clean energy and sign community benefits agreements in exchange for existing tax breaks.
“We need to be selective about the projects that get built here,” he said in his February address to the General Assembly.
The tap dancing has a logic. “It’s fun to watch as they try to balance positions on the importance of Pennsylvania being a leader in AI,” Borick said, “while recognizing that among the electorate right now, it’s a perilous issue.”
The Stalled Bills
With Shapiro leading Garrity 50% to 28% in the latest Franklin & Marshall College poll — well outside the margin of error — the sharper question may be what a second Shapiro term would actually deliver. The answer is sitting in the state Senate.
HB 1834, which passed the House in March, would ensure the Public Utility Commission controls costs from data center connections so they aren’t shifted onto ratepayers. Its prime sponsor, Democratic Rep. Robert Matzie of Beaver County, has called it “a data center ratepayer protection bill at its core.” His legislation included a provision to appeal to skeptics: a data center could still get 90% of its electricity from fossil fuels, and the initial 10% clean energy requirement could be met with nuclear power, which already supplies 40% of Pennsylvania’s mix. It didn’t matter. It passed 104-95, every no vote a Republican, and has sat in a Senate committee since March 31.
A companion bill sponsored by Rep. Paul Friel passed 201-1 and would bar data centers from claiming public utility status — no preempting local zoning, no eminent domain.
Katie Blume, political director of Conservation Voters of PA, said the polling consensus is striking: People may not want data centers next door, “but if they’re gonna come, they want them regulated.
“Pennsylvania has an opportunity right now to do what we didn’t do during fracking,” she added, when the debate split into for and against “but everybody forgot about really strong regulations to protect workers, our communities and the environment.”
Blume suspects Republicans in the state Senate are responding to the same polling.
“We’re seeing people in the Senate introduce a bunch of bills to regulate data centers when a year ago they were introducing bills to welcome them with open arms and get rid of regulations,” she said. “People are pissed off with wealthy corporations coming in.”
Burned Before
The public backlash to data centers has scrambled the usual coalitions.
Construction unions, which have historically tangled with tech companies over organizing workers and been allied with Democrats, are “all in” on data centers, Lehigh University’s Borick said, “which makes for some strange bedfellows,” while MAGA voters and progressives have found rare alignment in opposing data center projects on the grounds that they allow wealthy outside interests to profit at local expense. A poll last fall found about 61% of Pennsylvania adults think data centers are likely to create new jobs in the state, but Borick says that they’re skeptical that those will be long-lasting jobs.
“Where I grew up in Scranton, there’s a kind of big hot spot of data centers right around the north side of the valley — old mining areas, places that have been kind of hit hard for years,” Borick said. “People are skeptical of energy interests to begin with. They’ve been burned a bunch of times. There’s that kind of simmering Pennsylvania skepticism about when industries come in, they take, and then they leave behind lots of problems.”
Garrity has tried to flip that script at Homer City, where a former coal plant is being converted to power data centers — proof, she has argued, that rural brownfields can benefit.
“It really is improving in the community. It’s going to add housing, it’s going to add jobs,” she told reporters at a data center listening session in Montgomery County in June, while conceding some residents are “not entirely happy with it.”
The stakes extend past the governor’s mansion. Pennsylvania has a divided Legislature, with Republicans in control of the Senate and Democrats in control of the House. Both chambers are in play in November, along with four congressional seats Democrats have targeted in the battle for the U.S. House of Representatives. Climate hovers over all of it, mostly unnamed — what Borick called policy made “through stealth means.”
Pennsylvanians are among tens of millions of Americans across the Midwest and East Coast that earlier this summer endured a heat wave scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” without global warming; Philadelphia hit 103 degrees and canceled its Fourth of July parade. Earlier this year a record number of Pennsylvania residents identified climate change as a crisis, with 44% of adults in Pennsylvania now saying it’s a crisis, up 15 points from 2023.
For Blume, public anger over rising utility bills fueled by data centers aren’t a distraction from climate politics — they’re the way in. “It’s hard to think about things like climate change when it seems so existential sometimes,” she said. “But when your utility bills are going up, or you have a data center that’s like, ‘I’m gonna take all your water,’ this makes those environmental issues much more tangible for voters.”
