John McAuliff, a 33-year-old small business owner and former civil servant, became one of the more surprising Democrats to win a seat in Virginia’s legislature this month, after running a campaign that sometimes sounded a bit like a Republican’s.
He joined the 13 Democrats who captured seats in Virginia’s elections earlier this month, contributing to a sweep that gave the party firm control of the state’s government. Coupled with victories in New Jersey, California and other states, the results lifted Democrats nationwide, just a year after Donald Trump and Republicans handed them major losses.
The northern Virginia district he aimed to represent — a mix of subdivisions, farmland and small historic towns — had not elected a Democrat to the house of delegates in decades. McAuliff rode door to door on an electric scooter, telling residents he was running “to preserve their way of life”. He rejected the term “woke” and criticized the “chaos” coming from Washington DC, located just over an hour away.
Fears over higher rates as Georgia moves to provide more electricity for AI datacenters
But he spent most of his time talking about a grievance that fit Democrats’ focus on affordability, yet stood out on its own: the harmful effects datacenters have 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.”
Loudoun county’s datacenters, which sit in roughly half of Virginia’s 30th house district and have the highest per capita income in the country, process more internet traffic than anywhere else in the world. They’re essential to the internet’s infrastructure and, as McAuliff insisted and many voters agreed, a major nuisance to live near.
Built like giant warehouses and filled with constant mechanical noise, the structures tower over tract homes in parts of Loudoun. Developers want to expand them into Fauquier county — the more Republican part of his district — and McAuliff said voters there feared losing the rural farmland the area is known for. Regardless of where he knocked, he heard complaints about their impact on electricity bills.
A 2024 report from the Virginia general assembly’s joint legislative audit and review commission predicted that the state’s energy demand will double in the next decade, driven mostly by datacenters and the “substantial amount” of new infrastructure required to serve them.
While Virginia’s rate structure “appropriately” bills the facilities for what they use, “energy prices are likely to increase for all customers” due to the added infrastructure and imported power needed, the report found. Earlier this month, state regulators approved an electricity rate hike — though smaller than what Dominion Energy, the state’s biggest power provider, 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 from a co-working space in Middleburg, Virginia, where his campaign office is located.
“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 faced Geary Higgins, a Republican elected in 2023. The race grew expensive fast: McAuliff spent just under $3m, while Higgins spent a bit more than $850,000, according to data from the Virginia Public Access Project.
His campaign touched on more than datacenters. With Democrats promising to codify abortion access if they won full control of the state government, reproductive rights became one of McAuliff’s priorities. He also pushed for higher teacher pay. And when a town government in his district fell apart, he criticized Higgins for refusing to return a donation from one of the politicians involved.
Still, McAuliff kept datacenters at the center of his message because he saw their influence as “the most salient issue we were dealing with that we could actually solve”. His consultants raised their eyebrows at the idea, and he admitted it’s “a fairly niche” topic. But during months of door-knocking, datacenters remained the issue voters brought up the most.
To weaken Higgins, the campaign created a website called “Data Center Geary”, tying the Republican — a former Loudoun county supervisor — to the industry’s sprawling expansion. Higgins and his supporters called the attacks inaccurate.
McAuliff won with 50.9% of the vote to Higgins’s 49%. In a statement, Higgins declined an interview and said 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.
Last year, when Trump’s name appeared on ballots nationwide, rural and exurban areas heavily favored Republicans, costing Democrats the presidency and Congress. McAuliff’s victory in a region like his has prompted party leaders to ask whether his approach offers lessons for Democratic candidates elsewhere.
Newsom, AOC, Harris? Potential Democratic contenders for 2028 run
“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.
Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, campaigned with McAuliff and praised him as “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 Abigail Spanberger outperformed him in her gubernatorial landslide, McAuliff’s margin still showed he persuaded some Republican voters to choose him over Higgins, said Chaz Nuttycombe, founder and executive director of State Navigate, a non-partisan election tracker.
“He ran ahead compared to other folks and that would be because of him winning over Republican-leaning voters,” Nuttycombe said.
Leave a Reply