State senate races tend not to be so nasty as to draw national news coverage, but a campaign just wrote an eight-page cease-and-desist letter over an attack ad last week. The letter demands a retraction and an apology.
Must be a pretty brutal ad, right? Are you picturing Epstein stuff? Picture AI instead.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the ad refers to the incumbent, Republican State Senator Frank Farry, as a “data senator”—which is diabolically catchy—and attempts to tie him to an Amazon data center via a client of his law firm.
The letter calls the add, “defamatory” and “demonstrably false.” According to the Inquirer, in response to intimations that there was some kind of conflict of interest, Farry gave a statement including an allcaps section: “I didn’t raise a conflict on the House floor in 2021 BECAUSE I DO NOT REPRESENT DATA CENTERS.”
Setting aside the truth or falsehood of the ad from the campaign of Democrat Eileen Hartnett Albillar, the letter makes a rather astonishing representative artifact for the present political era. Any good political campaign should weigh the tactical value of such a letter against the possibility of triggering the Streisand Effect—the potential to turn an attack ad against its candidate into its own news story.
Elsewhere this political season, tying one’s opponent to data centers is apparently worth taking political risks. For instance, amid the Georgia Governor race, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Democrat, Keisha Lance-Bottoms, is demanding that Republican Rick Jackson divest all data center-related holdings. It’s a potentially ill-advised move from someone who, as mayor of Atlanta, approved a tax break now being tied to a data center-affiliated company.
It’s quite safe to say these maneuvers are happening because, by any reasonable objective standard, the American public simply loathes data centers. In Virginia, where being America’s data center corridor was once a boast, they’re now about as unpopular as nuclear power plants. Nationwide, seven in ten Americans oppose data centers being built in their area.
So while data centers still aren’t a digestible, partisan political issue, they’re a political liability, and unless you’re running for office and your name happens to be Brent Spiner, you sure as hell don’t want the label “Data Senator” to stick.
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