Artwork by Laura Passalacqua
words by miranda green
Environmentalists have struggled for years to connect the public’s concern about climate change with the ballot box, frequently losing to candidates who promised job growth and cost cuts. But Tuesday’s elections indicate candidates have found a new way to win on the economy: by reframing clean energy as the cheaper, fairer choice.
Candidates in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and Georgia who ran on platforms of electricity affordability won across the board Tuesday. Their top issues and pledges included challenging data centers’ increased electricity demands, utility rate hikes, and the dismantling of renewable energy options.
In New York, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won the mayor’s race with more than 50% of the vote and a campaign that centered climate change in his affordability plan.
“Climate and quality of life are not two separate concerns,” Mamdani told The Nation. “They are, in fact, one and the same.”
In New Jersey, Democratic Mikie Sherrill beat off her Republican challenger for governor with an affordability agenda that included a freeze on new rate increases and a speeding up of approvals for solar energy projects. (Rates this summer rose 22% from last year.) Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli’s master energy plan included natural gas, nuclear, and solar power, but he also shared a plan to ban wind farms from being built off the coast. The Trump administration in August moved to halt an offshore wind project off the state’s coast.
Further south in Virginia, Abigail Spanberger won the governor’s race after pushing back on her state’s rising number of data centers—Virginia has the most in the country, and nearly double the next state—and challenging skyrocketing electricity prices due to demand from those data centers. Residents saw a roughly 11% increase on their power bills this year, and the state’s largest electric utility in September proposed yet another rate hike.
Other, less publicized races also flipped for Democrats based on affordable energy.
In Georgia, two open Public Service Commission seats flipped blue. It was the first time since 2000 that a Democrat has won a Public Service Commission race in the state. The PSC is an under-followed government body that wields outsized authority when it comes to setting electricity prices and approving the financing of electric infrastructure projects. These projects include the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, a nuclear power plant that opened in 2023—seven years behind schedule and $17 billion over budget.
In a Mother Jones investigation I co-reported last year, we found that PSC candidates often take donations directly or indirectly from the very fossil fuel and power companies the PSC is tasked with regulating. We found that elected candidates receiving those donations often approved requested rate increases.
“Although Georgia law bars utilities from donating in PSC elections, nearly one-third of the campaign contributions to its commissioners since 2014 have come from fossil fuel and utility interests. Among the donors are Georgia Power executives, regulatory attorneys with business before the commission, and construction companies that specialize in utility work,” the investigation found.
Georgia Democrats this year ran on platforms of energy bill affordability after the commission approved six rate increases for Georgia Power, the state’s largest electric provider, in the past two years.
Democratic strategist James Carville famously galvanized campaign workers behind Bill Clinton’s first presidential run around a singular message: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
That focus catapulted Clinton ahead of George H.W. Bush; ever since, the refrain has stood as a blunt reminder that the economy is the main issue for most voters at the ballot.
That stood true for last year’s presidential race. While Democrats warned voters of what could happen under Trump (much of which has happened, such as increased deportations, expanded fossil fuel drilling, and pardons of close allies), Republicans instead highlighted what was already hurting voters: the price of gas, the price of housing, and the price of eggs.
A September Searchlight Institute study found that while 61% of voters polled said climate change was a very serious issue, only 6% ranked it as their top voting issue. Instead, battleground voters were most concerned about economics: affordable prices, affordable health care, and jobs and wages. “While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them,” Searchlight found. Meanwhile, Pew Research Center polling shows that 56% of Republican-leaning voters think climate policies usually hurt the economy.
Climate change is also waning in the public lexicon, with one Grist story finding that the term has dropped year over year in Google search results since 2023. It doesn’t help that several media outlets have also gutted their climate news teams, including last week’s cuts at CBS and layoffs at HuffPost earlier this year—a team I was part of.
But climate change and energy might be becoming more immediate voter concerns, thanks in large part to the growth of AI and the related energy demands of data centers to power it—demand that’s driving a race to find more power sources, whether coal, nuclear, or alternative energy.
Democrats and environmental groups have been testing out a political focus on affordable power across various states this summer. As Heatmap reported, billboards and digital ads from Reno, Nevada, to Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, not to mention TV spots and partnerships with Instagram influencers, were all part of a concerted, multi-pronged campaign by environmentalist organizations to reframe climate change as a budgetary issue.
“They promised to bring down prices, but instead our congressman, Derrick Van Orden, just voted to make our monthly bills go up,” an ad on YouTube told Wisconsin voters. “It removes clean energy from the electric grid, creating a massive rate hike on electricity,” another digital ad warned voters. These efforts were part of a $12 million campaign backed by EDF Action, Climate Power, and other advocacy groups.
The League of Conservation Voters’ Political Action Committee spent more than $3 million in Virginia to help elect environmentally minded candidates. They spent $1.9 million on the New Jersey governor’s race, more than any single race in the organization’s history.
The committee’s ads and mailers built off data from polls showing that utility and electricity prices are just behind groceries as the top economic worry for battleground voters. After Tuesday’s wins, LCV hailed electricity bills as “The Kitchen Table Issue Driving Dem Wins.”
“Candidates who ignore rising energy costs do so at their own peril. This election was a decisive rejection of the Trump Administration’s ban on clean energy, multi-million dollar taxpayer bailouts for expensive, dirtier energy sources like coal, and other ineffective proposals that will make costs go even higher,” they wrote in an emailed statement.
Ben Beachy, former special assistant to Joe Biden for climate policy, told a panel in July that the message climate candidates should run on today is: “Affordability, affordability, affordability.”
Tuesday’s elections show that Democrats and environmental activists are taking a page out of Republicans’ playbook to champion an issue that could be a litmus test for the 2026 midterm elections: the price of electricity.
It’s estimated that the U.S. has more than 4,000 data centers and counting, though there is no official source that documents the exact number of how many exist. Last year, the U.S. hit its highest electricity consumption, and data centers gobbled 4% of it—an amount equal to the electricity used to power the entire 251-million-person country of Pakistan.
In tandem, U.S. energy prices rose at nearly double the rate of inflation in the past year and by more than 30% on average since 2020.
A surge in new data centers amid the AI boom is driving up electricity demand, and the resulting costs aren’t felt equally. Communities hosting these energy-hungry facilities often bear the brunt.
Some politicians argue that expanding renewable energy could help keep prices down, while others insist that cheap natural gas and fossil fuels are the answer.
And while some local leaders want to curb new data center construction or make companies pay a higher share of their energy costs, others are actively courting them for their promised economic benefits.
Electricity affordability in the age of AI has become a political flashpoint, and what to do about it is not clearly black or white–nor red or blue. The arguments about what to do about it don’t always fall neatly along party lines, making this new wedge issue worth watching.
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The Power Play That Paid Off
