Last week, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro—a Democrat weighing a 2028 presidential run and up for reelection this fall—signed an executive order blasting what he called “predatory” data center developers as “running roughshod” over communities, pulling projects from the state’s fast-track permitting program, and banning developer NDAs. It’s a politically understandable reaction to real backlash. It’s also the wrong model and is not “progressive” by any definition of human innovation and progress. 

Shapiro courted this same industry a year ago; now, facing a Republican opponent calling him its “biggest cheerleader,” he’s flip-flopping—using executive fiat to punish an entire category of projects instead of building a durable, rules-based framework. Reacting to polling isn’t governing.

That’s the trap Democrats keep falling into: Court the industry when it’s popular, then torch it once it isn’t. New York’s Democrat governor Kathy Hochul went further, signing a one-year moratorium on hyperscale (e.g., data center infrastructure built at massive scale) construction. The ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee has floated a national version. None of this is leadership—it’s an escape hatch, and a bad one, because it doesn’t provide solutions.

The anger is real. A Heatmap Pro survey conducted by Embold Research found opposition to a nearby data center has swelled to roughly three-quarters of the public, underwater by 43 points among Republicans, 65 points among independents, and 75 points among Democrats. Opposition has moved 33 points in a year—arguably the most unifying grievance in the country right now.

But banning or punishing developers by decree doesn’t make data centers disappear; it just pushes them to the next state, with greater economic freedom and more jobs. Labor unions have broken with sympathetic governors over moratoriums for exactly this reason. And a major factor underpinning public fury—rising electricity bills—is not driven by data center facilities. In fact, states with data centers see prices stay flat or dip slightly. States with many data centers tend to have lower energy bills compared to states with fewer or none. State-level green energy mandates, rather than data centers, explain much of the utilities pain voters feel. Blue states with aggressive climate policies suffer higher electricity rates compared to red states without them. 

Chamber of Progress’s Data Center Development Playbook, part of its Democratic AI Opportunity Agenda, makes a better case than reactionary Shapiro and Hochul. Instead of embrace-then-punish whiplash, it proposes four durable conditions for any Democratic proposal: 

  • No public subsidies for facilities, since these hyperscalers are among the most creditworthy companies on earth 
  • A requirement that operators bring, build, or buy their own power instead of shifting costs to ratepayers 
  • Closed-loop water cooling: recirculating the same water through a facility’s cooling system on a continuous loop instead of continuously drawing fresh water from local supply
  • Enforceable community benefits—noise limits, wage floors, penalties—locked in writing before construction, not promised after the fact

These types of guardrails work. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, secured a binding agreement with noise limits, water caps, and a $20 million community payments before CoreWeave broke ground. St. Louis locked in twenty-year job guarantees and roughly $432 million in projected tax revenue, much of it earmarked for public schools. Loudoun County, Virginia—the densest data center market in the world—has cut its residential property tax rate every year since 2016 on the strength of that revenue. These are standards, negotiated in advance, not an order issued mid-backlash.

Polling suggests this approach can shift opinion, which a punitive order can’t. A Rainey Center survey found that when voters learn the truth about water recycling, support swings by 31 net points — the largest movement the pollster has recorded in three waves of surveying. Making the Ratepayer Protection Pledge binding law, mandating community benefits agreements, and emphasizing blue-collar jobs all move voters by double digits. Neither party owns this issue yet — trust splits roughly 38-38 — leaving a real opening for whoever offers accountability instead of a show of force.

That’s the actual progressive case: not the embrace-then-punish cycle Shapiro just modeled, and not a blanket moratorium either, but rules with teeth, set before the anger peaks rather than after. Democrats can be the party that makes hyperscalers pay their own way, protects water tables, guarantees real jobs, and forces transparency—without governing by whiplash.

It’s important to remember what’s riding on this infrastructure. As I shared in Inside Source, a satirical “No Data Centers Pledge” once challenged opponents to give up everything data centers quietly power—and no one would sign it:

  • Remote work and cloud storage
  • Amazon and online retail
  • Netflix and streaming
  • GPS and mapping
  • Online banking
  • Email
  • Emergency weather alerts

Tearing down infrastructure by decree isn’t progressit’s attacking an easy scapegoat. The truly progressive answer isn’t rejecting technology millions already depend on daily; it’s transparency and communication on all sides, protecting the water and power communities rely on, and putting those commitments in writing before the buildout—not in a press release after the backlash.