# Wisconsin GOP Candidate Is Exploiting the Data Center Backlash to Hit Solar, Wind > Source: > Published: 2026-09-21 09:00:00+00:00 *This article was produced by [Capital & Main](https://capitalandmain.com/trumps-deportation-crackdown-is-hurting-tourism), an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. It is co-published here with permission.* In January, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisconsin) called data centers “exciting new technology” and voted for a federal bill to speed their construction. But by May, as he was running for governor of Wisconsin, he was promising to repeal the state tax breaks that lure them. And within a week of the Aug. 11 Democratic primary in the Badger State, Tiffany’s campaign was on the air branding his opponent “Data Center David Crowley”—a Republican attacking a Democrat for being too cozy with Big Tech. The ad focused on a statement Crowley gave at [a candidate forum in November 2025](https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2025/11/07/wisconsin-gubernatorial-candidates-discuss-trump-data-centers-ai-and-marijuana-at-first-forum/) that Wisconsin had the opportunity to become a major artificial intelligence and data center hub “not only for the entire country, but for the entire globe and really sets us apart in making sure that we continue to invest in businesses and companies here.” But early this summer, Crowley began insisting that local communities should have absolute veto power to reject any such project and that data center developers should pay for all grid and infrastructure upgrades. Voters in the battleground state’s most important race could be forgiven for experiencing whiplash. Data centers are now what the Wisconsin Examiner called [the biggest issue in the governor’s race](https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2026/08/21/data-centers-are-a-big-political-issue-what-should-wisconsin-do-about-them/), and the public has [turned on them faster](https://www.maciverinstitute.com/news/marquettes-franklin-voters-dislike-data-centers-but-its-not-a-top-issue) than on anything the state’s leading pollster has measured in 15 years. And Tiffany has navigated that turn to outflank Crowley with tougher rhetoric, his own reversal notwithstanding. A longtime fossil fuel supporter, Tiffany is also using the unpopularity of data centers in service of a much older fight against renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar. He recently called for the state to not close coal-fired plants, [arguing](https://tiffany.house.gov/media/press-releases/tiffany-demands-psc-prioritize-baseload-power-sources-ensure-affordable-energy) that they “are a backbone of baseload power, and cannot simply be replaced with intermittent generation provided by wind and solar.” ### **Nothing Has Moved This Fast** “It’s been one of the fastest changes in public opinion that we’ve seen in Wisconsin,” Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, told Capital & Main. “We’ve been doing the Marquette poll for 15 years, and in that time nothing else has moved this fast.” When Marquette first asked about data centers last October, 55% of registered voters said the costs of data centers outweighed the benefits. By February it was 70%, and by August 78%. What struck Franklin more was the absence of a partisan split: 54% of Republicans, 55% of independents and 56% of Democrats were [all opposed](https://law.marquette.edu/poll/) last fall. “Almost nothing we see in Wisconsin shows that small a partisan gap,” Franklin said. That backlash reshaped the Democratic gubernatorial primary. At a [Milwaukee town hall](https://www.cbs58.com/news/all-five-democratic-candidates-discuss-data-centers-at-milwaukee-town-hall-trade-few-jabs) the week before the vote, five candidates competed to out-tough one another on the developers dubbed “Big Tech oligarchs” by Francesca Hong, a Democratic state representative who is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America party and a gubernatorial candidate. Hong made a one-year moratorium on data centers the centerpiece of her campaign, but she lost the primary to Crowley. ### **“Data Center David”** Tiffany, who had reportedly hoped to run on economic issues, moved fast to claim the voters Hong had galvanized. He pledged to end the sales tax exemption the state legislature adopted for data centers—a break the Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated could cost the state more than $2 billion. Crowley [countered](https://www.crowleyforwi.com/data-centers) with accountability framing. “They have to pay their own way,” [he said](https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2026/08/12/democratic-gov-nominee-david-crowley-shows-party-unity-while-tiffany-turns-his-attention-to-him/). “They need to pay for their own infrastructure, and they need to bring their own new clean energy.” Behind the ad copy, the two men actually agree on a lot. Neither supports Hong’s proposed moratorium. Both back the same guardrails: a ban on nondisclosure agreements between data center companies and local governments, a local veto over whether a project gets built and protection for residential rates. The general election is a contest over credibility and degree, not direction. What Crowley won’t do is promise to claw back the existing tax breaks, and that is the detail that Tiffany has zeroed in on. Tiffany’s central claim—that Crowley is “funded by the people building” data centers—is easy to misinterpret. The more than $350,000 in campaign contributions that an unnamed Tiffany spokeswoman [cited to the *Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel*](https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2026/08/19/where-tom-tiffany-and-david-crowley-stand-on-wisconsin-data-centers/91304078007/) came largely from building trades unions whose members would pour the concrete for data centers, not the tech companies that own the buildings. “David Crowley is honored to have the support of thousands of hard-working union members who are suffering from the affordability crisis MAGA extremist Tom Tiffany and Donald Trump created,” an unnamed Crowley spokesperson said in an email to Capital & Main. Tiffany, meanwhile, [accepted $5,000 in June](https://campaignfinance.wi.gov/browse-data/transactions?searchTerm=marchant%2C+robert&searchField=payer) from Robert Marchant, a lobbyist for the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition, which fought the nondisclosure agreement ban and lobbied for the same tax exemption that Tiffany now vows to repeal. Campaign finance reports also showed donations to him from lobbyists for [OpenAI and Oracle](https://milwaukeecourier.com/news/2026/08/18/tiffanys-attack-ad-on-crowley-and-data-centers-is-misleading-at-best-as-gop-candidate-has-publicly-backed-them-in-new-audio) and a donation from Amazon, which is actively building data centers across the country. Capital & Main has reached out to the Tiffany campaign for comment. ### **Bulldozed Farmland and “Boondoggles”** Though he talks tough about Crowley’s policies on data centers, Tiffany hasn’t said much about his own views. “He rarely talks about opposition to data centers per se, but usually links it to the replacement of agricultural land,” said Franklin, the Marquette Law School Poll director. “One of his taglines has been, ‘I don’t want to bulldoze farmland for data centers.’” In Marquette’s polling, farmland loss ranks last among the five costs voters cite—behind water use, AI itself, increasing electricity costs and high electricity use requiring new power plant construction. “He needs his rural base behind him, and that’s a way to appeal to them,” Franklin said, “even though most of the data center construction is going on in the suburban counties in the southeast.” Farmland is also the ground on which Tiffany has spent years fighting renewables. In Congress he introduced the Future Agriculture Retention and Management (FARM) Act, which remains in committee, to end federal tax credits for wind and solar on agricultural land. He has called green energy incentives “[boondoggles](https://tiffany.house.gov/media/editorials-letters-and-articles/tiffany-re-introduces-bill-eliminate-farm-subsidy-solar)”; has championed oil, gas and coal; and has reportedly taken in more than $114,000 from oil and gas interests during his gubernatorial campaign, according to [State Affairs’ WisPolitics](https://www.wispolitics.com/2026/climate-power-wisconsins-gop-nominees-are-rubber-stamping-an-energy-crisis/). Alex Beld, communications director for RENEW Wisconsin, a nonprofit that promotes renewable energy in the state, has watched the two arguments fuse. “I wouldn’t say we’ve seen a significant shift in favorability for renewables because of the deployment of these large hyperscale facilities,” he said. “What we’ve instead seen is those same groups that have already been pretty strongly against renewables are now using a new talking point—that all of these renewable energy projects we’re seeing come online are all for data centers.” Tiffany “is tying both data centers and renewables to a land use issue,” Beld said. “He maybe isn’t directly tying the two always, but to some extent he’s talking about both in the same breath.” RENEW’s position is the mirror image—it wants data centers that do get built to run on clean power. “We don’t view it as, ‘Oh, this solar installation is just going to go to a data center,’” Beld said. ### **Two Gas Plants and a 40% Surge** The stakes in Wisconsin are physical. The state’s peak power demand is projected to [jump more than 40%](https://www.wibiz.org/2026/07/06/power-demand-in-wisconsin-projected-to-jump-40-in-six-years/) over the next six years, driven largely by data centers, according to the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin. The grid currently meeting that surge is about 65% fossil—32.6% natural gas, 32.9% coal—with solar at 6.3% and wind at 9.5%. We Energies, which serves more than a million customers in the state, plans two new gas plants, one of which would be the state’s second largest; the first hyperscale data center came online this summer in that area near Milwaukee. Meanwhile, utilities are walking back plans to retire coal plants, a point that public-interest lawyer Peg Sheaffer, director of communications at Midwest Environmental Advocates, pressed the candidates on at a town hall in August. And the Union of Concerned Scientists [estimated](https://www.ucs.org/about/news/powering-wi-data-centers-clean-energy-health-climate) that mid-level growth of data centers in the state could lead to more than 41 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2035—[equal to](https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator) the annual greenhouse gas emissions of about 9.6 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles, according to the EPA. Utilities are also asking the Public Service Commission for some of the largest rate increases in state history before any of the new data centers have been built and are operating. That is why, Beld said, “we’re starting to have more conversations about how renewable energy is tied to affordability”—a reframing with more purchase in a purple state than talk of emissions. A spokesperson for We Energies did not return requests for comment from Capital & Main. Joel Brennan, who served as secretary of the Department of Administration under Gov. Tony Evers and who ran for governor this cycle before losing to Crowley and Hong in the primary, watched that reframing from inside the race and saw where it stalled, he said. “The anger about data centers overwhelmed much discussion about other issues or the alternatives for energy production that would accompany any new data center construction,” he said. The debate “did result in some additional support for clean energy, especially since it is the cheapest and fastest way to get new production, but the conversation often stopped with the overall, and bipartisan, opposition to data centers across the state.” Whether any of it moves votes remains an open question. Marquette found that 78% of voters opposed data centers, but only 5% named them the most important issue; inflation and the cost of living sat at 43%. “I cannot fully square that,” Franklin admitted. In Ohio, the data center backlash [outran the legislature](https://capitalandmain.com/candidates-run-against-data-centers-but-ohio-legislature-didnt-get-the-memo). But in Wisconsin, the issue is overtaking both parties’ nominees—and the candidate who moved fastest to catch it may be using the backlash to bolster his long-held opposition to renewable energy. With fuel prices climbing over the Iran war and Strait of Hormuz conflict, Beld put the debate in terms that a rural voter might recognize. “The sun can’t be blocked by one particular country because of the conflict,” he said. “And the sunshine is always free.”