I run pressaudit.org. It's a news site that does real-time analysis for article bias and quality, reviews government policy actions, shows you things underreported in the US or by the right vs left. One of those "monitoring the situation" type things. It also tracks every federal rule open for public comment, and it tracked elections. One of the things I keep there is an interactive data center dashboard: 2,636 US facilities on a map you can play around with. https://pressaudit.org/dashboards/datacenters Hilariously, before the election the research was mentioned by both sides, far left and far right national news outlets... which kind of proves the entire thesis that if you get your news from any one place, you are going to get an incomplete picture. - The New Republic (left outlet): [Trump? Diesel? ICE? Corruption? All of Those. But Mostly—Data Centers.](https://newrepublic.com/article/216376/midterms-data-centers-trump-diesel-ice-corruption) - The NY Post (right outlet): [Data-center fury is a campaign dud](https://nypost.com/2026/11/02/business/data-center-fury-is-a-campaign-dud) Both leaned on the same number: about a quarter of the data center proposals in competitive House districts had been paused (23%, against 13% nationwide). TNR's takeaway was that there was a massive bipartisan backlash. TNR looked at the data of the massive shift in sentiment, with cratering support amongst republicans, to conclude that the public are really unpersuaded by tech companies pitch and that was evidence data centers were the issue of the midterms. For NY Post it sat in a column calling the issue a dud. She saw the same data on the massive shift in sentiment, and she seized upon the fact that people are very willing to change their minds quickly, and at this point, want a better deal. Her conclusion was that maybe the issue had already played out and therefore wasn't a factor in the elections. Neither of them was inaccurate. Maybe incomplete. Now that the votes are in, I added the election results to the map. Open the map library and pick "2026 Elections" to see them under the data center dots. Click any state and you get the data center news for that state specifically. Maybe you say this is correlation, not causation, and data centers weren't a major factor. Fine. But you cannot deny that people were talking about it, and the media was talking about it a lot: I count 1,378 articles on data centers and the midterms since mid July. Even if your position is that data centers should not have mattered, you cannot disagree that it was a major campaign issue. Happy to answer questions about how the map is built or where the data comes from, or how it is the case that this got picked up by national media on both sides.   submitted by   /u/mediadotgames [link]   [comments]