Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong’s
narrow defeat in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial
primary on Tuesday night
wasn’t just a stinging blow to the left — it marks a political loss for a nonpartisan anti-data center movement that has been picking up significant steam across the country.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley beat the odds to eke out a victory
by less than a percentage point
on election night, a surprise upset after Crowley, who would be Wisconsin’s first Black governor if he wins in November, dropped out of the race and then re-entered with the support of outgoing Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.
The race became dominated in
the final days by inane issues
like whether Hong believed that Thanksgiving should exist, based on old tweets criticizing the holiday, echoing and
accelerating
the annual Fox News
“War on Christmas” panic
. The sudden fury over old tweets was a distraction from a concrete
issue that Hong had made a key focus of her public talking points and likely drove her surge in popularity: data centers.
Francesca Hong’s “Thanksgiving-Gate” Shows Her Detractors Are Totally Out of Ideas
Hong’s campaign repeatedly
emphasized that she was the only candidate in the race to support a data center moratorium
, which would pause construction of any new data centers, giving the state time to create regulations and study their environmental and energy impact. The moratorium
would not extend to data center projects
already underway in the state.
“It’s time to press control+alt+delete to put a stop to this AI data center crisis, a full moratorium until we have the new regulations we need to protect our energy costs, our economy, our environment,”
Hong said in a campaign video.
By all indications, it’s a popular position:
A Gallup poll in May
found that seven in 10 Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their area, and politicians from
Maine
to
Texas
have had to grapple wi
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