Field Notes: On Primaries and the Data Industry
Republican challengers refused to make the primary a referendum on data centers. It's why they lost.
Looking back at the bitter fight over data centers in Scioto County and around the region, it’s clear the “gospel of economic” development I wrote about last fall was more prescient than even I thought.
Though public reaction against Google’s proposed data center has been strong, none of the primary candidates challenging Will Mault and Merit Smith pressed the issue. A head scratcher considering that nationally the industry is deeply unpopular, even in places it’s well established [1].
In the two weeks leading up to the final vote to offer tax abatements to Google, the short time the public had to respond to the surprise announcement, all members of the Scioto County commission remained steadfast that they would vote yes. The virulent reaction of the community made life mildly difficult for them, but they had made up their minds, and the soliciting of community input was ultimately a sham.
Scottie Powell, after getting shelled for weeks, picked himself off the floor before the final vote on January 21st to reveal it was Google in an attempt to mollify everyone. He abandoned the previous meeting formats, and then cut short community testimony after the vote. Considering how badly he and the rest of the commission were pummeled, it was predictable they wanted to avoid more punishment—even if cowardly. Had the commission moved their meetings to the evenings and a larger venue, they would have found out just how many people don’t want the data center industry in the region. The community meeting in Franklin Furnace was clear evidence of this.
The low point came when Powell was forced to admit that the Commissioner’s office was essentially copy-and-pasting on social media what Google told them to. More evidence that we have an economy planned by corporations and technocrat-dominated boards, who together with politicians throttle democracy to favor big business.
A year ago Powell opined how democracy was realized during Portsmouth’s LGBTQ+ safe-haven debate because there were more against it than for it, declaring the city’s council “did their job” by voting it down. Now, of course, we see the game for what it really is: Democracy, like scapegoating the vulnerable and marginalized, is useful only as a means to an end and can be rolled back to favor monied interests.
There were other ridiculous moments, too, like Powell asking the historically illiterate question of why the Appalachian Rust Belt has been “passed over” and left behind. Paternally answering his own question, Powell implied fear of change and opposition by grassroots activists as the culprit, which is revisionist history.
The Ohio Valley has never been “passed over” and does not lack “entrepreneurial spirit.” It has been used by industries for what could be extracted at the cheapest price. It was militant labor, like unions, that prevented the total theft of wealth after decades of organizing and bloody clashes. Even then, they didn’t get much.
The people of the region have been left behind by neoliberal policy, while absent corporations still have access to virtually whatever they want. A more honest question would have been that with all the immense wealth generated by extractive industry in the region, why are we so poor, so powerless?
As Ronald D. Eller writes in Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945, it was grassroots movements that pushed for better and more equitable development during the 1960s and 70s, but were defeated by entrenched local power structures like the one Powell helms now.
But in the present, Powell’s biggest ally locally were the unions. This shouldn’t surprise many people. Unions have hitched their economic fate to serving corporations, regardless of community impact, and are willing to do their bidding politically if need be.
During the meeting, in a moment of supreme irony, union official Joe Dillow described the treatment industry as “scandalous” and suggested the data center industry would be better for the county.
The problem with this framing is that the “treatment sector” supports thousands of jobs in the region and developed to address a crisis that has killed tens of thousands of our friends, family members and neighbors. The nonprofit sector has deep-rooted issues, but it was established to operate as a market system. They do not pay taxes, but that pales in comparison to the enormous tax incentives corporations receive despite being awash with cash.
The corporate data industry provides few long-term jobs and will take from our community while polluting and making us sick [2]—the opposite of what community behavioral health does. The time when unions embodied community solidarity is now ancient history. They are essentially captured. Why else would they support a tax agreement that didn’t require Google to hire local labor? Little wonder, with leaders like these, why unions and labor continue to get steamrolled by the corporate class.
Unions threw their weight behind Adrian Harrison, a Labor leader, to unseat Merit Smith for commissioner. The muddled positions of Harrison’s campaign were that he would have pushed for a better deal but still welcome absent corporations, but what people actually want are no data centers. It was the same market absolutism that every member of the commission espouses. That approach was not going to flip enough Republican voters away from a party stalwart like Smith, nor convince enough independent or Democratic ones to pull a GOP ballot for him.
And, after listening to the equivocating and platitudes offered by the other primary candidates looking to oust Mault, it’s pretty clear they would have done the same. Candidates claimed they would have been “better” or more “transparent” about the process, but none took a firm stance. Their failure to turn the primary, even with its deep flaws, into a referendum on data centers was a disservice to voters. It’s also why none of them won, because the one issue they could have used to create space between them and the incumbents they largely ignored.
To get Biblical: So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of My mouth.
This is why Google and its fixers lawyers at Bricker Graydon know they can get what they want here.
Only one candidate for commissioner has taken a clear stance, and that was Democrat Abby Spears when she emphatically told the commission it was the wrong kind of development for Scioto County. She also excoriated them, in person, for working harder to serve Google more than the people of Scioto County. That’s civic courage. Though Scioto County and many rural Democratic organizations are moving towards more populist positions—some of them even good— the staunch conservatism of the national Democratic party, and its obedience to corporations, has made it so unpopular it is only eclipsed by the disastrous war in Iran.
But Ohioans know they’re being told the sun is out when it’s raining. This piece written [3] by Leila Atassi does a good job explaining how the Ohio General Assembly has allowed the corporate pilfering of the state, promising the world and delivering nothing, while the retreat of democracy leads to scandals like H.B. 6.
“But it’s hard not to hear echoes of it now in the state’s headlong embrace of data centers — an industry sold to the public as an economic miracle, but one that increasingly looks like a boondoggle: draining public resources, shifting costs onto Ohioans and funneling even more business to the same utilities and power suppliers that helped build the system in the first place,” Atassi writes.
And there’s the announcement of another “technology” campus, this time at the PORTS site. The amount of jobs to be created is somehow even more fantastical [4], ranging into the tens of thousands. All of it predicated on a complex trade deal with Japan. And, of course, to be built on an irradiated site that has deeply impacted the health of the workers there and the surrounding community.
While some local “influencers” have parroted Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s hyperbolic claim the deal represents the largest investment in “human history,” Japan will likely not invest the entire half-trillion, of which 33 billion—not the entire tamale—is earmarked for southern Ohio. That’s the way blockbuster trade deals usually work out (especially if the people shaking you down with tariffs leave office).
This is what we get here in Appalachia and the Rust Belt: the promise of the sweet by and by if we would only believe in the gospel of economic development and jobs. Yet it never turns out how the powers that be promise, but I fear we haven’t learned the lesson.
Notes:
[2] https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2025/11/21/california-data-center-health-impacts-tripled-4-years
Loved this line..."Democracy, like scapegoating the vulnerable and marginalized, is useful only as a means to an end and can be rolled back to favor monied interests." Thanks for the good work, Scott.
Public discourse is needed so much now on the data center issue, the tech overlords know how unpopular they are and are pulling every trick in the book to get these projects started without the public's knowing as to prevent the locals from controlling their municipality. People who oppose these centers need to be vocal. It lets others know they're not alone in their opposition and starts conversations on how to stop Data Centers.