Sherrod Brown, the Democratic former senator from Ohio hoping to return to office in November’s midterm elections, has spent the past year traveling across his home state explaining to voters about all the ways the “system is rigged” against them. Recently, he’s been telling people about a trip he took across the north-west Ohio countryside.

“You’re driving on what looks like really good farmland, driving past fields, driving past barns, driving past milking parlors, and you see, all of a sudden, you see these huge cranes and you see these trucks coming,” Brown told a crowd of dozens at a coffee shop in the city of Lima earlier this month.

The construction site was for a datacenter, Brown said, a component of the AI boom in which Ohio is a national leader. Brown believes the massive installations that pop up without warning do little good for the people around them.

“Nobody knows they’re there,” Brown, speaking in shirtsleeves and without notes, said in his gravely voice, as the crowd murmurs in agreement. “They eat up our land. They swallow up our water … then once they’re built, our electricity prices go up.”

It was the latest iteration of an argument that Brown has been making his whole political career: that the most powerful people in the United States do not have the interests of Ohioans at heart. That message helped him win seven terms in the US House of Representatives and then three in the Senate, even as Ohio grew increasingly dominated by Republicans, and the working-class voters Democrats once relied upon deserted the party.

In 2024, Brown lost his bid for a fourth term in an election where Ohio voters backed Trump by an 11 percentage-point margin. “It’s not, I promise you, the last time you’ll hear from me,” he said in his final speech on the Senate floor, and months later, he announced another run for the Senate.

Now 73, Brown has made standing up to datacenter developers a centerpiece of this campaign, calling his Republican opponent, Senator Jon Husted, “the face of datacenters”. A report from Ohio’s chamber of commerce found the state gave $2.5bn in tax breaks for the facilities from 2017 to 2024, a period during which Husted was lieutenant governor.

“John Husted, I mean, he’s the guy that – he’s talking like he didn’t now – but he’s the reason these datacenters are here – 200 of them,” Brown said.

Whether the former senator’s message lands with voters is central to Democrats’ hopes of retaking the Senate and blunting Trump’s abilities to get bills passed and judges confirmed for the final two years of his presidency. Democrats must win at least four Senate seats to return to the majority, most of which will come from states that voted for Trump by double digits in 2024 – like Ohio.

‘The anchor hanging around Husted’s neck’

Brown has wrapped concerns over datacenters’ impacts into the broad message of affordability that many congressional Democrats are campaigning on nationwide. He peppers his speeches with references to the Iran war, tariffs, Medicaid cuts approved by the Republican congress and rising prices for Affordable Care Act plans brought on by their inaction. Asked in Lima to name an idea to lowercosts if he wins, Brown proposed a new expansion of the child tax credit, which reduced the poverty rate among children during its single year of enactment under Joe Biden.

As the election has drawn closer, Brown has intensified his efforts to tie datacenters to Husted, who Republican governor Mike DeWine appointed in 2025 to the seat JD Vance vacated when he became vice-president. Whichever candidate wins will serve out the remainder of his term, which expires at the end of 2028.

This week, Brown’s campaign announced a volley of billboards reading “See that datacenter? Jon Husted did that” and a website critical of the senator that offers voters a maps of the facilities in the state.

Amy Natoce, a campaign spokesperson for Husted, accused Brown of lying, saying that while serving as lieutenant governor under DeWine from 2019 to 2025, Husted “did not have the authority to grant tax breaks”. She also noted his championing of the Ratepayer Protection Act in the Senate, which would have required electric utilities toconsider standards that would make datacenters pay for their impacts on the grid. Though it passed the House with wide, bipartisan support, Senate Democrats called the proposal ineffective, and last month blocked its advancement.

“Sherrod Brown and his friends like to talk about affordability, but when the rubber meets the road, they’d rather play politics than actually lower Ohioans’ energy bills. It’s disgusting,” Natoce said.

There’s evidence that Brown’s attacks could be effective. Last week, the New York Times and Siena University released polling that found voters believed Brown would do a better job than Husted would managing the development of datacenters, by an 11-percentage point margin. The race otherwise remains tight, with the Democrat leading the incumbent by three percentage points, within the survey’s margin of error.

In August, a memo emerged from the GOP’s Senate campaign arm, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, warning that the issue could sink Husted.

“More than any other thing in this race, datacenters are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the memo read. “If he loses and datacenters get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice – and they will not go near the next one.”

DeWine and his predecessor have sought to encourage the development of datacenters. But political winds have shifted rapidly on the issue – nearly 140 communities in the state have put moratoriums on new constructions, according to the Ohio Capital Journal, and in May, DeWine announced a pause on tax exemptions for the buildings.

Last year, Democrats campaigned against datacenters to gain power in elections in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere, and are this year lumping their perceived impacts on electricity prices with the Iran war’s upward pressure on gas prices to argue that Republicans have failed to accomplish Trump’s promise of fighting inflation.

“Husted has been involved in datacenters prior to this election year, and … he’s just more exposed,” said Dan Birdsong, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Dayton.

It also offers Brown a way to appeal to rural voters who typically do not vote for Democrats, but are sensitive to the possibility of the datacenters being built nearby.

“He has a bipartisan voting base that he can appeal to with this issue that’s different than other issues in the state,” Birdson said of Brown.

Powerful enemies

An Ohio native who received a bachelors degree from Yale University, Brown had been in office almost without interruption from 1975 until he lost in 2024 to Republican Bernie Moreno. By the end of his time in the chamber, he was something of an outlier – the last Democrat holding statewide elected office in Ohio and still describing himself as a champion for workers even amid abundant evidence that they had soured on his party.

Brown argues that he has the accomplishments to back up his record. As a House member, he voted against implementing the North American Free Trade Agreement, concerned about its impact on Ohio manufacturers, and one of his last votes in the Senate was to pass legislation that boosts social security payments to public employees. Brown has been in politics so long that when Bowling Green State University polled the Senate race last month, a quarter of respondents incorrectly thought Brown was the incumbent.

He’s long courted the alliance of unions, many of whom have backed his comeback attempt this year, though some who supported him in 2024 are now behind Husted. His stances have also earned him deep-pocketed enemies: as chair of the Senate banking committee, he was an adversary of cryptocurrency, and this year, Fairshake, a Super Pac linked to that industry, plans to spend $30m against him, after helping Moreno to victory in 2024.

“We will be outspent for sure,” Brown acknowledged to reporters in Lima, echoing a reality for many Democratic campaigns in a year where Republicans are generally seen as having the fundraising advantage.

His campaign against datacenters also runs up against their own benefits to building trade unions, for which they have provided significant employment opportunities.

Lee Daher, the senior business representative at northwest Ohio’s Carpenters Local Union 351, said datacenters are “a really good source of employment for us”.

“It means a lot of work for our members, not only today, tomorrow, but for the years to come,” he said.

His local is backing Brown this year, as they did in 2024, and Daher said his comments about datacenters have not dampened that support.

“They’re coming one way or another, and is there some regulation that’s needed? I think so, but I think big tech is hearing what is being asked of them,” he said.

Asked to reconcile this tension, Brown insisted it was his emphasis on costs that would convince some of the same workers who turned their backs on him two years ago to give him another chance.

“Those unions support me in large part because their members don’t like higher electric bills. Their members don’t like having no say on these datacenters coming to their towns,” Brown said.

“I don’t think very many union members want the state to give these huge tax breaks to these out-of-state billionaires that are building these datacenters.”