The first mail-in ballots in the country should start going out at the end of this week. It’s entirely possible that the Trump Administration’s fight over them won’t be settled for several more weeks—possibly right up to Election Day on November 3 or beyond.

The uncertainty is leaving campaign hands from both parties exasperated as they debate what to tell voters. Even the possibility that some mail-in ballots may be ignored poses very practical questions for campaigns planning out millions of dollars in spending to boost turnout. Should voters still trust mail-in ballots will still be counted? Should they instead vote early in person if they can? Should they hold their votes until Election Day itself, just to be sure?

“We’re all flying blind,” says one Democratic campaign consultant. 

“That’s the 8 million-vote question,” responds a Republican consultant when asked about how their party is adapting to the legal limbo. 

For over a year, President Donald Trump has been laying the groundwork for the U.S. Postal Service to take on a new role in deciding which mail-in ballots get to be counted, working off lists of citizens created by the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a process that experts predict would likely lead to the disenfranchisement of many legitimate voters. Most of them, it’s worth saying, are Democrats.

Last week, the Supreme Court issued an emergency order that amounted to a procedural and preliminary win for Trump’s plan, but other courts have stepped in to block it on merits. The result is growing confusion over how, exactly, the votes might—or might not—be counted come November.

Some election experts insist that things are not as urgent as either side would have you believe. “I’m annoyed, but not freaked out,” says Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. “The court’s ruling was a procedural one, with a great deal of legal back and forth to come. The executive order is still illegal and still unconstitutional.” 

“For voters, so far, nothing has changed—and is unlikely to before Election Day,” he adds.

That doesn’t mean this isn’t a problem for campaigns at the nuts-and-bolts level. Significant resources often go into encouraging voters to request a mail ballot, and then reminding them to fill it out and return it. Should campaigns maintain their plans for that outreach, or redirect that money to get-out-the-vote efforts at early-voting sites and on Election Day? There’s no settled answer at this point, leaving a messaging mess for campaigns on the ground.

Democratic campaigns, in particular, are wondering if focusing as much on banking votes via mailed ballots is too much of a risk this cycle. Even if the Supreme Court ultimately strikes down Trump’s plan, anxiety over some other election-eve upset targeting mail ballots could deter voters from bothering to put their ballot in the mailbox. Perhaps putting more resources into in-person, on-site voting would make more sense? “This is not an easy conversation,” a long-time Democratic campaign adviser says. “We are all operating on assumptions.”

Republican campaigns separately risk running afoul of Trump if they push mail ballots too hard. In practice, GOP party strategists in Washington are advising campaigns to run their races locally and tune out the Washington noise. “Why would we not go after every vote on every day we can?” asks a second GOP operative.

How many voters cast ballots by mail?

Mail-in voting rules vary by state, but their use overall has been growing. In 2024, 29% of votes were cast by mail, accounting for tens of millions of ballots. Democrats vote by mail more than Republicans, but, depending on the analysis, as many as a quarter of Republicans voted by mail in 2024.

At the center of all this, naturally, is Trump, who has for years advanced debunked conspiracy theories that U.S. elections are rife with fraud from votes by foreign nationals, immigrants who don’t have the proper documentation, and dead people. It’s part of why he keeps insisting he won the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

In 2024, GOP advisers convinced Trump that dissuading his voters from using the mail-in option was self-sabotaging. This year, he’s swung back in the other direction, railing against mail ballots despite casting his own ballot that way for the Florida Republican primary.

The outlook around mail ballots is likely to remain muddled for at least a little while longer. But campaign managers don’t have that kind of time to settle on their plans for banking the most votes before Election Day. The first mail-in ballots are due to be ready for North Carolina voters this Friday.

Not even a year ago, state leaders of all stripes were clamoring for data centers, the A.I.-warehouses of the future. Incentives here. Promises of infrastructure there. Sweetheart deals all around. But as voters started to view the centers as a resource suck and potentially job killers, sentiment moved quicker than a ChatGPT prompt; between March and July, public opinion shifted 12 points against new data centers, according to one national poll. 

The result has been a massive reset of assumptions about the wisdom of these campuses of computing power. The backlash is stealthily turning midterm elections across the country into referendums on anxieties about an economy overrun by A.I., and specifically the role of those data centers that appear to be sending both electricity bills and NIMBY-ism spiking. The shift also sets in motion a messy collision between the GOP candidates adjusting to voter sentiment and the parochial whims of their party leader.

In Texas, Republican Ken Paxton rolled out a proposal on Monday to block data centers that could use Chinese technology and hold data centers responsible if those automated A.I. bots “undermine children’s safety.” It was the latest sign this month of Republicans in the red state recalibrating on the issue, following Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement of a pause on new data centers—after calling his state the “epicenter of AI development” in November.

In Michigan, GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers last week called for a one-year moratorium on new data centers after earlier supporting their construction. His opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, has called for data centers to cover their own power costs, limit water consumption, and work with local communities to give them a “meaningful say.” El-Sayed previously said Michigan shouldn’t move forward with such projects until there were “federal-level guardrails.”

And in Florida, Rep. Byron Donalds, widely seen as the state’s next Governor after winning this month’s Republican primary, dumped more than $2 million on just one ad in his primary promising to “protect” the state from data centers. It was a stunning reversal from just a few weeks earlier, when Donalds mocked opponents of the data centers as yesteryear nostalgists. “There ain’t no bans coming,” he said. 

You’re not imagining the whiplash. President Donald Trump has remained a cheerleader for the data centers, seeing the prospect of high-powered computer chips cementing U.S. dominance across all industries. It also hasn’t hurt that the Trump administration has extracted ownership stakes in semiconductor companies in exchange for funds allocated during President Joe Biden’s term.

"Communities that don't take a data center, they're making a mistake,” Trump said of the swelling number of localities banning such sites during an interview last week.

It usually goes poorly for Republican candidates running counter to Trump. But on this issue, Trump's position will only make it tougher for Republicans to convince voters that they are really willing to push back on the A.I. buildout.

But it’s not just Republicans facing heat on the issue. In Wisconsin, the Republican nominee for Governor, Rep. Tom Tiffany, has labeled his Democratic opponent “Data Center David Crowley” and has been highlighting his own opposition to Wisconsin’s tax incentives for data centers. Crowley has tried to underscore the need for a balanced approach to the issue. As Crowley told me just this month before he won his primary: “All data centers are not all created equal.”

And in Pennsylvania, Republican Stacy Garrity, the state Treasurer running for Governor, recently backed a temporary moratorium on new data centers, after saying earlier this year that Pennsylvania should welcome more of them. Garrity’s new approach is actually a click further than incumbent Gov. Josh Shapiro, who last year touted an Amazon data center as the largest investment in state history, but has since revoked fast-track approval for new data warehouses. Garrity is now hitting Shapiro for welcoming “data centers in our backyards.”

A warning from Ohio

Ohio may be where the data center backlash is playing the most visible role in a topline Senate race, as Sen. Jon Husted is trailing the Democrat, former Sen. Sherrod Brown.

“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” Senate Republicans’ campaign arm wrote in a memo last week first reported by Axios.  

In one ad, Brown casts the data-center spree as a consequence of Husted’s advocacy when he worked as the state’s Lieutenant Governor. “Husted is a chief reason Ohio has so many of those centers,” the ad says. “He force-fed the massive energy-sucking facilities.”

Brown’s strategy here dovetails neatly into his long-standing reputation as a working-class champion, with data centers serving as physical manifestations of an A.I. revolution that is poised to cost workers’ jobs, concentrate power in the hands of the elite, and feed tech oligarchs who do not have middle-class worries at the fore.

The memo continues: “Brown is using it because it works.” 

In the Senate, Husted has introduced legislation to encourage states to require companies to pay for their own power and ensure that the cost of new transmission infrastructure is not passed on to consumers. 

To be clear, the leaked memo was the campaign equivalent of putting out a Bat Signal to deep-pocketed and influential A.I. players to do something, and fast, to counteract this backlash. If the industry doesn’t get the message, it may find itself fighting this with far fewer allies heading into the 2028 presidential cycle. 

"If [Husted] loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notices—and they will not go near the next one," the memo warns.

It’s not just the Senate race where data centers are dominating Ohio politics. In an unexpectedly close contest for Governor, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy has adopted a tough stance against free-riding data centers and thrown in one more populist proposal: “If a data center is built in your community, then … you will no longer have to pay for your home’s electricity.” The tech investor is running against Amy Acton, a former state health chief who has her own raft of demands for tech centers, including mandatory union workers.

The Data Center Backlash, By the Numbers

The speed with which the tech industry has moved to build out their computing power is quickly bumping up against the speed of communities now banning them. Last month alone saw 150 localities banning such data centers, bringing the total north of 500, according to the tracking project by The Information.

There are roughly 1,600 data centers in the United States these days by one count. They consume 4% of total U.S. electric consumption. The biggest hub is Virginia, with 184 sites—using enough electricity to serve 2.3 million homes, according to a Tyler, Texas,-based consulting firm that tracks the industry. Eisenbach Consulting’s tracking estimates a full 25% of Virginia’s energy now goes to data centers. 

The math gets fuzzy fast, though. Some counts put it at more than 3,000 data centers nationally with another 1,500 on deck. It’s that uncertainty that has helped make the murky topic even more potent for those who view the data center buildout as akin to a virus spreading across the heartland. (If one company has two warehouses on the same street, are they even separate?) 

Faced with the combined threats of resource depletion, higher energy costs, and potential job losses to motherboards, it’s no wonder this tech revolution has voters seeing a scary future. 

In politics, it’s seldom a bad instinct to find a villain and throw everything against it. But candidates doing a total 180 in the span of weeks may leave voters questioning its sincerity, especially when Trump has shown no willingness to join the spin.