Sherrod Brown Makes Datacenter Fight Central to Ohio Senate Bid

Brown has spent the past year traveling Ohio with a message that the “system is rigged,” and in recent weeks he has told voters about a drive through north-west Ohio farmland where datacenter construction appeared suddenly. The construction site was for a datacenter, part of the AI boom in which Ohio is a national leader, Brown said. “You’re driving on what looks like really good farmland, driving past fields, driving past barns, driving past milking parlors, and you see, all of a sudden, you see these huge cranes and you see these trucks coming,” Brown told dozens of people at a coffee shop in Lima this month, according to The Guardian. He said the sites “eat up our land” and “swallow up our water,” and that once built, “our electricity prices go up.”

Brown, 73, has built his political career on similar populist arguments. He won seven terms in the U.S. House and three in the Senate before losing his bid for a fourth Senate term in 2024, when Ohio voters backed Donald Trump by 11 percentage points. In his final Senate speech, he promised, “It’s not, I promise you, the last time you’ll hear from me,” and months later announced another Senate run.

He is now running against Husted, whom Republican Governor Mike DeWine appointed in 2025 to the seat JD Vance vacated when he became vice-president. The winner will serve the remainder of the term, which expires at the end of 2028. Brown’s campaign has called Husted “the reason these datacenters are here – 200 of them,” pointing to a report from Ohio’s chamber of commerce that found the state gave $2.5bn in tax breaks for datacenter facilities from 2017 to 2024, a period when Husted was lieutenant governor. This week, Brown’s campaign announced billboards reading “See that datacenter? Jon Husted did that” and a website critical of Husted that offers voters a map of datacenter sites in Ohio.

Husted’s campaign spokesperson Amy Natoce accused Brown of lying, saying that while serving as lieutenant governor under DeWine from 2019 to 2025, Husted “did not have the authority to grant tax breaks.” Natoce also noted that Husted championed the Ratepayer Protection Act in the Senate, which would have required electric utilities to consider standards that would make datacenters pay for their impacts on the grid. The bill passed the House with wide bipartisan support, but Senate Democrats called it ineffective and blocked its advancement last month. “Sherrod Brown and his friends like to talk about affordability, but when the rubber meets the road, they’d rather play politics than actually lower Ohioans’ energy bills. It’s disgusting,” Natoce said.

Brown has folded datacenter concerns into a broader affordability message. He references the Iran war, tariffs, Medicaid cuts approved by the Republican Congress, and rising prices for Affordable Care Act plans. Asked in Lima for an idea to lower costs if he wins, Brown proposed a new expansion of the child tax credit, which reduced child poverty during its single year of enactment under Joe Biden.

The contest is central to Democratic hopes of retaking the Senate and limiting Trump’s ability to pass bills and confirm judges in the final two years of his presidency. Democrats must win at least four Senate seats to return to the majority, many from states Trump won by double digits in 2024, including Ohio. Last week, a New York Times/Siena University poll found that voters believed Brown would do a better job than Husted managing datacenter development, by an 11-percentage-point margin. The race otherwise remains tight, with Brown leading Husted by three points.