Sherrod Brown’s Data Center Attacks Frustrate Labor Allies

Sherrod Brown built a decades-long political career on support from labor unions. Now, many of those longtime allies shudder every time he mentions data centers.

The Ohio Democrat has flooded the airwaves in his Senate comeback bid with a tough-on-data-centers message and lambasted his opponent, GOP Sen. Jon Husted, as the state’s “point man” on the increasingly unpopular AI processing hubs.

But many unions, particularly in the construction trades, see data centers as job creators for their workers — and they’re not fans of his new tone.

“Was I tickled to death when I saw some of his commercials? Absolutely not,” said Dorsey Hager, the executive secretary-treasurer at Columbus/Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council, which endorsed Brown.

Any time that Brown airs new ads targeting data centers, Hager gets texts, calls and emails from members asking whether the campaign has first run the spots past labor groups, he told POLITICO.

“It's unhelpful whether it's him or anybody else that we've supported that's taking a [negative] stance on data centers,” Hager said.

Brown, who spent 32 years in Congress before losing a reelection bid in 2024, was once aligned with unions’ desire to bring data centers to Ohio. But growing voter backlash on the issue has led him to pivot — even as he looks to hold onto his support from a constellation of building trades, electricians, pipefitters and insulation workers that see a data center gold rush.

Brown’s union friends are in an awkward spot.

"It does put us in a conundrum,” Brett McElfresh, business manager at Plumbers and Pipefitters Local Union 94 in Canton, Ohio, said of Brown’s anti-data center ads. “At the end of the day, we’re a building trades local. We build things. If we’re not building things, our guys don’t make money and the economy isn’t growing."

It’s not only Brown — Husted also cheered on data center projects during his long career in Ohio. Both men now accuse the other, pejoratively, of bringing the projects to the state.

Unlike Texas Gov. Greg Abbott or New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, neither Brown nor Husted is calling for a pause on data center construction. Instead, they share similar positions on paper: They want tech companies to foot the bill for the massive amounts of power used by the facilities. And they think local communities should be able to decide whether or not the projects should be built. But they still blame the hubs for increasing costs to voters.

Most of organized labor in Ohio is still behind Brown, the man who has most villainized the biggest boom the state’s tradeworkers have seen in decades.

Organized labor is “all very supportive of data centers,” Husted said in a brief interview with POLITICO. “That's why some of them endorsed Sherrod Brown.”

Husted said Brown “was celebrating data centers coming to Ohio when he was a U.S. senator, and he did nothing, nothing, to try to address this issue when he was a U.S. senator for the last 32 years.”

Brown told POLITICO in a statement that “Husted led the charge to bring data centers to Ohio, forcing Ohioans to pay thousands more in higher electric bills and giving giant out-of-state corporations billions of dollars in out-of-control tax deals.”

“Ohioans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize these costs and Ohioans — not Jon Husted and his billionaire friends — should get to decide if data centers are built in their community,” he said.

His campaign did not answer questions about labor leaders’ frustrations with Brown’s public attacks on data centers and whether Brown was doing long-term damage to the industry in Ohio.

While the data centers boom began in Ohio around 2010, the need for the tech developments has accelerated in the past few years with the fast expansion of artificial intelligence. And unions have benefitted: The projects mean tens of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars for electricians, pipefitters, plumbers, sheet metal workers and insulators. Hager says his union has seen its annual working hours quintuple, from 4 million in 2014 to 20 million this year.

In recent months, union opposition has helped sink data center regulations in state legislatures across the country.

"For the last 50 years, I have heard people whine and complain about industry leaving America and going to foreign countries,” said Willie Koester, a political consultant and member of the Ohio State Association of Journeyman Plumbers & Pipefitters. “And now, data centers are the future, as much as people don't want to admit it. So now we're going to turn our back on this?"

In 2015, Brown celebrated the arrival of a data center in a Licking County suburb as “great news” for Central Ohio. In 2010, Brown brought home $2.8 million in federal funding for a research center in Dayton that was working on data center cooling infrastructure, the Ohio Capital Journal reported. The Brown campaign did not dispute that he secured the grant.

Husted, for his part, routinely welcomed the projects while serving as lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2025; the tech companies building the developments received state tax breaks, which Husted defended last year.

But more recently, Brown has pivoted hard to oppose them as it became apparent from a torrent of recent polling, memos and grassroots pushback that data centers are broadly unpopular with voters. His campaign has launched eight different ads attacking data centers, according to data from ad-tracking service AdImpact, and spit out a drumbeat of social media content that blamed Husted as responsible for the tech developments in Ohio.

Husted hasn’t aired any ads on the issue, per AdImpact. But he spearheaded legislation that would push data centers to pay for their own power use. The bill passed the House overwhelmingly, but has so far been blocked by Senate Democrats.

“Sherrod Brown and his friends would rather play politics and stick Ohio families with higher electric bills than pass a commonsense solution. It’s despicable,” Husted campaign spokesperson Amy Natoce said of the Senate result.

Husted’s own GOP allies at the National Republican Senatorial Committee acknowledged in an internal memo in August the issue of data centers had become an “anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.”

“Polling indicates that [Brown’s data center] messaging is significantly more effective than traditional messaging tracts, as it introduces new information on a highly relevant, emerging topic,” the memo reads. “This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.”

Brown’s attacks on the issue represents a calculated bet there won’t be significant pushback from longtime labor allies.

Several union leaders backing Brown pointed to his long record of support, like his pushes against a state bill that would’ve restricted public employees’ abilities to collectively bargain, his fight against efforts to repeal parts of the Davis-Bacon Act and his successful appeal for federal funding for multiple infrastructure projects during former President Joe Biden’s administration. Brown even pushed to make it easier for Senate staffers like his own to unionize.

“We may take umbrage with some of the messaging at times,” said Hager of the Columbus/Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council. “But I think at the end of the day, Sherrod Brown's with us.”

The solidarity between Brown and labor unions — in spite of his harsh data center rhetoric — was evident earlier this month at an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ event outside Columbus, where Brown joined about 1,000 attendees, many of whom were looking for jobs in the data center industry.

“He was just at a job fair that we had where we were bringing in people to go to work on data centers,” Austin Keyser, IBEW’s international vice president for the 4th district, said of Brown. Keyser said his union is bringing in about 1,000 new members a month, largely because of the data center boom. “He stood there with me while I gave the oath of the IBEW to almost 30 new members as they came in that night.”