Virginia Democrat wins seat in state legislature by taking on datacenters

John McAuliff, a 33-year-old small business owner and former civil servant, was one of the more unlikely Democrats to win election to Virginia’s legislature this month, after a campaign in which he could, at times, come off a bit like a Republican.

McAuliff was among the 13 Democrats elected to the legislature in Virginia’s elections earlier this month, as part of a blowout victory for the party that gives it firm control of the southern state’s government. Along with wins in New Jersey, California and elsewhere, the results put some wind back into Democrats’ sails nationwide, a year after their drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the Republicans.

The northern Virginia district of subdivisions, farmland and quaint little towns that he sought to represent had not elected a Democrat to the house of delegates in decades, so McAuliff would go door to door on an electric scooter, informing those who answered his knocks that he was running “to preserve their way of life”. He repudiated the term “woke”, and decried the “chaos” coming out of Washington DC, an hour-plus drive away.

What he talked most about was a specific grievance in line with the focus on affordability many Democrats are taking these days, but with a unique twist: the deleterious effects of datacenters and their impact on electricity bills.

“Most of the year I spent knocking on the doors of folks we didn’t think were Democrats – either independents or Republicans, and once in a while, a Democrat. And so they would start to shut the door in my face,” McAuliff said.

“But then they wanted to talk about datacenters. They wanted to have that conversation, which gave me the opportunity to make that contrast, and you don’t get that many opportunities to do that.”

The datacenters of Loudoun county, which makes up about of half of the 30th district in Virginia’s house of delegates and also happens to have the highest per capita income in the United States, handle more traffic than any other concentration in the world. They’re vital to the functioning of much of the internet and, as McAuliff argued and many voters agreed, they’re also a pain to live around.

Built to the size of warehouses and whirring with the noise of the servers and equipment within, they loom over tract homes in parts of Loudoun. Developers want to bring them to Fauquier, the county that makes up the other, more Republican half of his district, and McAuliff said voters there were worried that they would be built on the bucolic farmland the county is known for. But no matter where he was, McAuliff said he heard complaints about what the datacenters were doing to electricity bills.

A 2024 report from the Virginia general assembly’s joint legislative audit and review commission projected that energy demand in the state will double over the next 10 years, largely due to the datacenters and the “substantial amount” of new infrastructure that will need to be built to meet their demand for energy.

And while Virginia’s rate structure “appropriately” charges the facilities for their usage, “energy prices are likely to increase for all customers” to cover the costs of new infrastructure and power importing they need, the report concluded. Earlier this month, Virginia’s utility regulator approved an electricity rate increase, though not by the amount Dominion Energy, a major supplier in the commonwealth, requested.

“The infrastructure costs, those huge transmission lines, the power substations – all of the infrastructure that powers these massive, massive users – are being put on the backs of the ratepayer,” McAuliff said at the Middleburg, Virginia, coworking space where his campaign keeps its office.

“They’re essentially an artificial tax on everyday Virginians to benefit Amazon, Google, some of the companies with the biggest market caps in human history. Which is not to say they don’t provide benefits to those communities, but we need to do a much, much better job of extracting those benefits, because the companies can afford them.”

McAuliff’s opponent was Geary Higgins, a Republican elected in 2023. Their face-off became an expensive one, with the Democrat spending just shy of $3m, and his opponent a little more than $850,000, according to data compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project.

The campaign was not just about datacenters. With Democrats pledging to codify abortion access if given full control of Virginia’s government, reproductive rights were a focus of McAuliff’s, as was pushing for higher pay for teachers. And when the government of a town in his district melted down, the Democrat criticized Higgins for not returning the donation of a politician involved.

But McAuliff endeavored to focus on the datacenters because he viewed their impact as “the most salient issue we were dealing with that we could actually solve”. The idea made the consultants he was working with raise their eyebrows, and McAuliff acknowledged it’s “a fairly niche” topic, but datacenters were the issue he heard the most about when door knocking.

To sink Higgins, his campaign even created a website called “Data Center Geary”, which sought to tie the Republican – a former Loudoun county supervisor – to the facilities’ spread. Higgins, along with his family and allies, decried the attacks as inaccurate.

McAuliff won with 50.9% of the vote to Higgins’s 49%. In response to a request for an interview, Higgins said in a statement that McAuliff’s “entire campaign was built on lies about me and my record”.

“Thanks to his outside money infusion and high Democrat turnout, he was able to create and narrowly defeat a completely false caricature of me,” Higgins said.

When Trump was on ballots nationwide last year, voters in conservative-leaning rural and exurban areas turned their backs on Democrats, costing the party the presidency and control of Congress. That McAuliff won where he did has some party leaders wondering if there is something in his campaign for Democrats to learn from.

“In an area that is generally very red, he was able to find the issues that Republicans and Democrats agree on, and also present the argument that he would be the one to solve them,” said Democratic congressman Suhas Subramanyam, who represents McAuliff’s district.

The Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin, campaigned with McAuliff, and called him “a remarkable candidate who won because he focused directly on the issues that mattered to his district”.

“Democrats can win everywhere, particularly in exurban and rural areas – with candidates who are relentlessly focused on the real needs of their neighbors. And what Americans need right now is to be able to pay their bills,” Martin said.

Though he did not outperform Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat who romped to victory in the gubernatorial election, McAuliff’s margin indicates he managed to sway some Republicans to choose him over Higgins, said Chaz Nuttycombe, the founder and executive director of State Navigate, a nonpartisan election tracker in Virginia.

“He ran ahead compared to other folks and that would be because of him winning over Republican-leaning voters,” Nuttycombe said.