Rising Electricity Bills Could Power a Democratic Win, Clean Energy Advocates Say

Soaring electricity bills, along with broader questions about affordability and datacenters, could help Democrats clinch races in Ohio, Arizona and Michigan in November, clean energy and consumer advocates say.

In Arizona, where summer temperatures regularly hit triple digits, air conditioning can be a matter of life and death. This year, as the state recorded its hottest summer on record, Diali Avila's monthly power bill went up to $400, the highest it has ever been. Avila is the state director for Climate Power, an advocacy group.

Avila said the upcoming elections offered voters an opportunity to elect candidates who can ease their utility bills. "People are making the connection: they're looking at their electricity bills that they get at the end of the month, and then they're looking at their ballot, and they're [realizing], this is my moment to take action," she said.

Avila is among several clean energy and consumer advocates who say soaring bills such as hers could help move votes in November, as Democrats across the country seek to retake control of Congress.

"This midterm election cycle has the potential to become the first election cycle where electricity and utility bills become a top tier national political issue," said Charles Hua, founder and executive director of PowerLines, a national non-partisan non-profit that aims to modernize utility regulations. "We're entering a new politics of electricity."

National average electricity prices have increased about 10% in the last two years, according to federal figures, and a recent Pew survey found 74% of Americans said they were "very concerned" about gas and energy prices. A new poll from left-leaning Hart Research found that voters in battleground districts ranked utility bills among the three most important issues in the upcoming midterms.

The cost of energy has always been a political issue in America, but historically it has focused on the gas pump, said Hua. However, in recent years energy demands from datacenters, an ageing grid in need of repairs, climate emergencies such as wildfires and hurricanes that further weaken the grid, and the war in Ukraine have pushed up electric bills. The war in Iran, meanwhile, has raised the price of gas.

Power bills are one part of a broader concern about affordability that has dominated this midterm cycle, said Geoffrey Henderson, who has researched candidate messaging on climate and energy this election. "Utility bills were already on people's minds in prior election cycles, but what's changed is that datacenters are being proposed and advanced at such a fast rate, and there's been so much community-level opposition to the datacenters that I think it's elevating the utility bill question," Henderson said.

In several races, Democrats are tying their opponents to those high utility bills and datacenters. In Ohio, which has the fourth highest number of datacenters of any state, Sherrod Brown, the Democratic candidate for Senate, has run ads calling Jon Husted, his incumbent Republican opponent, the "face of datacenters", connecting his support for the industry to rising electricity bills.

Electricity rates have gone up by 34% in Ohio since 2022, according to state figures, and a new poll from Ohio Northern University found 55% of Ohio residents oppose datacenter construction; 79% believe datacenters will drive up water and electricity costs.

Husted served as lieutenant governor in an administration that offered tax breaks to bring datacenters to the state, but in July he introduced a bill he said would help prevent utilities from shifting datacenter costs on to ratepayers; Senate Democrats blocked the bill, calling it "toothless". In a leaked memo from 18 August, Republican strategists acknowledged: "More than any other thing in this race, datacenters are the anchor hanging around Husted's neck."

"This is an issue that has legs in rural Ohio, and I think it's going to really help [Brown] close the margin in some of those Republican areas," said Spencer Dirrig, vice-president of government affairs for the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund Pac, which backs more regulations on datacenters. "That could be the difference in the election."

In the state's tight race for governor, both candidates — Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy — say they would support halting new datacenters until new regulations come into effect. Acton has criticized Ramaswamy for holding investments in the datacenter-related industry, calling it a conflict of interest; Ramaswamy has said he would divest if elected. Acton herself held stock in companies tied to datacenters, but her campaign says she sold off individual stocks earlier this year to avoid conflicts of interest.

In Michigan, the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has sought to tie his opponent, Mike Rogers, to DTE Energy, the state's unpopular large private utility. El-Sayed has gone after Rogers for accepting donations from the company, which has been criticized for rate hikes and frequent outages as it signs contracts with datacenters. DTE did not respond to a request for comment, and Rogers did not respond to a request for comment.

A statewide ballot measure in Michigan would ban regulated utilities such as DTE Energy from contributing to politicians; El-Sayed has said he supports the measure, while Rogers has not taken a public stance.