In the Ohio Senate race, per a recent Fox News poll, Democrat Sherrod Brown currently has an eight-point lead over Republican Jon Husted — in a state that has, for roughly the past decade, been widely regarded as a Republican stronghold, and which President Donald Trump won in the last election by eleven points.
Via The Columbus Dispatch (emphasis added):
Brown leads Husted by 8 percentage points, matching his advantage in Fox News' June poll. The result suggests the race has remained steady in Ohio, a state Trump carried in 2024 by 11 percentage points. That year, Brown lost his reelection bid to Bernie Moreno 50% to 46%.
Brown is viewed more favorably than Husted, with a 51% favorable rating compared with 43% for Husted. Husted's unfavorable rating stood at 53%, compared with 47% for Brown.
According to Fox News, 87% of Republicans favor Husted, while 97% of Democrats back Brown. The Democratic candidate also saw 11% crossover support from Republicans overall and 25% among non-MAGA Republicans. Two-thirds of independents also favor Brown, according to the publication.
In an internal memo leaked to Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the branch of the Republican Party responsible for securing Senate wins, warns that the current messaging around data centers might be the primary driver of Brown’s unexpectedly strong polling numbers.
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From the internal memo (emphasis added):
Jon Husted and Sherrod Brown are in a dead heat. Private polling has been consistent: when voters hear Brown’s positions and his record, Husted pulls away. That is still the path in this race. The new ingredient(and the new problem) is data centers.
Ohio is one of the leaders in building these AI factories. Brown has made his opposition to them the centerpiece of his campaign against Husted. Brown is using it because it works. More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck. If he loses and datacenters get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one..
Data centers are the centerpiece in the case Sherrod Brown is litigating; he has made them his de facto opponent, and no one is correcting the record. Brown has put three unique television ads on the air and spent millions doing it, to the tune of more than 6,000 points on television. This is more than a month's worth of messaging during one of the most critical times in the race.
Our polling indicates that this messaging is significantly more effective than traditional messaging tracts, as it introduces new information on a highly relevant, emerging topic. This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle…
Campaigns or party committees can not [sic] fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy. The companies that need these projects built have to fix how Ohioans see them: who benefits, who pays, and why a community should want one. Until that happens, the issue will continue to dominate this race. If itis still this potent in November, elected officials everywhere will treat Ohio as their reason to work against data centers in the future. If voters' perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio…
While the perceptions of data centers are weak, the American people are with us. By overwhelming margins, the American people prefer a Republican candidate who wants to only let data centers be built in communities that approve them by a local vote of the people, and that pay for their own power, water, and other utilities versus a Democrat candidate who wants to stop data center construction altogether, which will cause America to lose the AI race to China.
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Speculatively, whoever leaked the memo is trying to cajole the AI companies into revamping their public relations and marketing efforts, which have been, by any objective metric, an abysmal failure.
The developers' tantalizing promises of massive jobs windfalls and yet-unproven breakthroughs in medical technologies notwithstanding, polling across the political spectrum, as well as anecdotal scenes of fury and chaos at local government meetings across the country, demonstrate that the public has not yet bought into the hype.
Unmentioned in the memo is the seeming geographical dilemma particular to the data center controversy, in that these facilities are mostly located in rural areas that typically vote red, exacerbating the disparate political cost to Republicans who are opposing popular Democrats.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats desperately try to stop it.
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