West Virginia voters at county fair focus on data centers, local control

Since the 1950s, the Jefferson County Fair in West Virginia has been serving up prize pigs, hefty heifers and fried everything for a citizenry that still adores it. As politicians have long known, it is among the best places on Earth to take the temperature of the American voter.

Over the two days, while stuffing the old Marcus face with corn dogs and pepperoni rolls, I had expected the political talk to be about prices, or affordability, as the Democratic Socialists and the mainstream media call it. But what most people wanted to talk about was data centers.

“I’m a farmer,” Roy, who raises cattle nearby, told me. “Data centers, power lines, all of that, it’s a threat to us. All we’ve got is the land.”

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This is a sentiment I heard, not just from the regular folks of Jefferson County, but from those who seek to serve them.

Jenny Thacker and Marta Beck are both Democrats running for the House of Delegates. While they aren’t completely opposed to data centers in the county, both have issues with how the developments are being implemented.

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“We cannot afford to have water taken out of our system, so if we can make a law that says, ‘Yes, you can use surface water, but you cannot use well water,’ that goes a long way to protecting our ground water,” Thacker said.

For Beck’s part, her concern was that “They [the state] have taken away local control from the municipalities.” That word, “control,” really lies at the heart of this debate, not just in West Virginia, but everywhere I travel in the country.

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Also at the fair, was Tamara Thompson, vice president of We The People of Jefferson County, one of the original Tea Party groups still exerting power in the Mountaineer State. She said she has been getting an earful about data centers.

“I hear a lot of people being against it [data centers],” Thompson said, noting that many complain of noise pollution. “I like boots on the ground, so going there and hearing whether or not there is an export of extreme sounds was something I took personal, and I didn’t experience that.”

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One fairgoer, Sarah, a retired teacher, put it rather succinctly: “I guess we need ‘em,” she quipped holding up her phone, “but nobody wants ‘em.”

What became clear, through Tuesday’s demolition derby and Wednesday’s antique tractor pull, is that data centers are a real issue, but also the Platonic form of a first-world problem.

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That isn’t meant dismissively. Sometimes first-world problems are more intractable than third-world ones. But this is a crisis of opportunity, not lack thereof.

Mickey Reagan is running to be a Jefferson County Commissioner. I chatted with a few volunteers at her tent, and when I asked what the top issue they were hearing about from voters was, the answer was a telling single word: growth.

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With my eyebrows slightly knitted I said, “Wait, do you mean not enough growth or, like, too much growth and the county can’t handle it?”

Without a beat they said, “Too much growth.”

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It isn’t as crazy as it may sound. In the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, it seems a hundred new houses go up every day, but not a hundred new roads, or wells, or schools. Data Centers, on the other hand, can pop up like weeds.

The main takeaway I got from both Democrats and Republicans enjoying their funnel cake was that they want local control and they don’t trust big tech as far as a baby calf could pull it. How can we blame them?

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In the fast-as-lightning tech sector, when regulation lags behind innovation, we wind up with 12-year-olds watching hardcore pornography on their phones, not because we chose it, but because we let it happen.

For Republicans nationally, there is good news coming from the fair. Two years ago, before Trump’s restoration, all people could talk about at such events was how much everything costs, there was little time to spare for debate on the relative value of data centers.

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Today, for Americans in West Virginia, and across the nation, we are not in an economic crisis. We are doing okay. The issue is not keeping our heads above water, but rather how to responsibly ride the rising tide.

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