Will Lawrence is one of many founders of the Dawn Motion, a grassroots local weather activism group. Now, he’s working for Congress in a Michigan swing district, certainly one of a rising handful of candidates across the nation calling for a moratorium on data center development.
Senator Bernie Sanders has endorsed him, calling Lawrence a candidate who will “demand actual accountability for large tech and AI firms.” And the backlash to data centers, Lawrence says, helps him perceive rural resistance to a different sort of large-scale industrial undertaking within the state: utility-scale renewable vitality.
Lawrence’s marketing campaign sees information facilities as a potent subject to rally voters to his aspect within the Democratic major in Michigan’s seventh district, to be held in August. Inner polling carried out by Knowledge for Progress of possible Democratic major voters within the district shared with WIRED exhibits that greater than 40 p.c of respondents had been “more likely” to vote for a candidate who opposed information facilities. The message resonated much more with respondents below 45: Nearly 80 p.c of youthful voters stated they’d be more likely or extra more likely to assist an anti-data-center candidate. (The seventh district contains the faculty city of Ingham.)
Knowledge facilities “actually [weren’t] the difficulty I anticipated to be speaking about on the marketing campaign,” Lawrence tells WIRED. Voters, he says, began organically approaching him at city halls and different conferences after he introduced his candidacy final summer season, asking for his recommendation as a longtime organizer about how one can channel the anti-data-center vitality amongst their neighbors into one thing productive.
“Folks really feel like they’re being completely disrespected by the businesses and the native officers who’re welcoming them into city,” he says.
The Knowledge for Progress ballot put Lawrence forward of each his opponents within the major. One other ballot commissioned by certainly one of his opponents and launched in April exhibits Lawrence successful the first, although it additionally exhibits the overwhelming majority of voters stay undecided. Lawrence additionally stays a distant third in fundraising.
There are no less than 11 information facilities planned throughout Michigan, in accordance with the clean-energy database Cleanview. Vital native pushback in two townships within the seventh district have stalled no less than two deliberate initiatives over the previous 12 months. However information heart builders have discovered methods round native opposition elsewhere within the state. After a township within the sixth district voted towards an Oracle information heart earlier this 12 months, the corporate sued, and the city let improvement start reasonably than have interaction in a pricey court docket battle.
Earlier this month, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer appeared on the opening of the Oracle information heart, the place she was photographed smiling subsequent to OpenAI’s Sam Altman and praised the $16 billion funding.
“Any candidate value their weight is aware of that these information facilities are poisonous,” says Cooper Teboe, a Democratic strategist primarily based in California. Candidates that don’t acknowledge this, Teboe says, “usually are not candidates which might be going to win.”
Christy McGillivray, the chief director of Voters Not Politicians, a Michigan-based democracy reform group, says that Whitmer’s look on the opening was a significant misstep for the governor, who’s been floated as a 2028 presidential contender.
“It actually blew my thoughts,” she says. “I used to be like, ‘Are you attempting to harm your complete Democratic occasion?’”
Whereas on the marketing campaign path, Lawrence says that he met with information heart protesters who differed considerably with him politically. These included individuals against information heart building who had been additionally against photo voltaic and wind initiatives being constructed on farmland.
Michigan is a hotbed of resistance to renewable vitality initiatives. A 2025 review ranks it because the state with the biggest variety of native restrictions: Greater than 60 native governments in Michigan handed ordinances, moratoriums, or different restrictions on wind and photo voltaic improvement between 2011 and 2024. Native opposition, the report discovered, had stalled or blocked no less than 28 initiatives throughout the state.
