Are you opposed to data centers? The Working Families Party wants you to run for office

Working families The party said Thursday it is putting out a specific recruitment call for people organizing against them Data centers in their communities to run for office.

The announcement comes amid a period of heightened political unrest around data centers, with some prominent Democrats wading into the fray. Earlier this week, three Senate Democrats sent letters seeking information from Big Tech companies about how data centers could affect electricity bills, while Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, became the first national politician to call for… Endowment Concerning the construction of the data center.

“We see our role as responding to what working families and workers are concerned about, what issues are keeping them up at night,” says Ravi Mangla, national press secretary of the Working Families Party. “We will be ignoring the needs of our constituents if we are not responsive to the issue of data centers and their impacts on communities.”

The Working Families Party was originally founded in New York in the late 1990s. It now has chapters in states across the country. While he (mostly) does not independently select candidates, progressive third-party endorsements and organizational strength can carry real weight in the races in which he chooses to run. She endorsed Zahran Mamdani in the New York mayoral race this year, as well as a string of other candidates. Successful candidates.

Opposition to data centers has risen dramatically in some areas of the country over the past year, as technology companies have ramped up their investments in building hundreds of facilities across the country. Polling from Heatmap port Released in September It shows that less than half of Americans of all political affiliations would welcome building a data center near where they live, while there are Last scan A private industry group shows that community opposition increased in the second quarter of this year, successfully stalling or halting billions of dollars in data center development.

In many areas of the country, affordability issues — including rising electricity bills — have become entangled with other concerns about data centers, such as concerns about climate and climate change. Water effectsOr even the noise coming from the centers themselves. Concern about data centers He played a role in a number of midterm electionsincluding taking into account several races in Virginia, which has the highest concentration of data centers in the country and faces growing power demand from more facilities expected to be up and running through the end of the decade. The political ripples around data centers have continued beyond the midterms, extending far beyond just Virginia. Last week, officials in Chandler, Arizona, voted 7-0 The proposed data center was rejected In the city, despite great pressure from former Senator Kyrsten Sinema, while voters in Georgia voted on Tuesday elected A newcomer to the state legislature who promised legislation that would make data centers “pay their fair share.”

Mangla says the Working Families Party decided to launch the recruitment effort after seeing how the issue developed in the Virginia election, and after noticing some intense local pushback across the country. “You can’t just fill a community center or a town hall organically,” he says. “Clearly there are people stepping up in their communities, organizing their neighbors, and leading the charge to push back against these data centers.”