Politics

Shapiro tests Democrats’ data center strategy

Published

9 months ago

February 19, 2026

PHILADELPHIA — Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a bellwether Democrat on AI and data centers, is tempering his message ahead of his reelection campaign.

Shapiro, a swing-state Democrat and a 2028 presidential prospect, has staked his state’s economic fortunes on the tech industry. He wooed a $20 billion investment from Amazon along with major investments by Microsoft and Google. Shapiro has backed President Donald Trump’s call for more nuclear and natural gas plants to power new tech hubs.

He’s now trying to hedge his bet as data centers absorb a nationwide backlash from voters increasingly concerned about their impact on electricity bills.

“Pay for your own power, so it’s not saddling local businesses or homeowners with higher costs,” Shapiro said in an interview with Blue Light News earlier this month from a union hall in Philadelphia.

It’s an unmistakable pivot by a leading practitioner of data center politics who along with other Democratic governors has been trying to bring under control rising electricity prices that could be political kryptonite for both parties. Household electricity bills are rising at twice the rate of inflation. In recent weeks, Shapiro has joined Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and other Democrats who are sharpening their tone and putting new policies in place to try to claw back taxpayer expenses, increase pressure on utility companies and address local backlash against development.

“Too many of these projects have been shrouded in secrecy, with local communities left in the dark about who is coming in and what they’re building,” Shapiro said in his annual address to the Pennsylvania General Assembly earlier this month.

Shapiro, who is riding high in the polls as he launches his reelection campaign, is pitching the AI and data center boom as a source of union jobs during the yearslong construction phase — but also trying to manage the boom’s potential to alienate other voters.

Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, said Shapiro’s “get stuff done” political brand runs into trouble if voters tie energy affordability concerns to data center projects.

“People have started to connect the demand for AI and data centers to pricing,” he said.

Construction of the future Amazon data center site in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 17, 2025.

Jobs and energy

Few Democrats have anticipated the data center zeitgeist as deftly as Shapiro. Shortly after taking office in 2023, he ordered an analysis of where the state and U.S. economies were headed. AI jumped out as a key opportunity, a top adviser said.

“Not just because we thought it was cool, but because we have strengths,” said Rick Siger, a former Obama staffer who serves as Shapiro’s secretary of community and economic development.

Carnegie Mellon University, a top engineering and technology school, was a selling point. So was the state’s manufacturing base, which makes hardware for data centers and boasts tech companies that will deploy advanced AI. Shapiro’s team fixated on what major developers were after. “Speed matters, in particular to companies that are competing in AI,” Siger said.

In June 2025, Shapiro announced Amazon’s $20 billion investment in two data center complexes: one in the Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County and another south of Wilkes-Barre.

“The employees will be making, in some cases, double the average wage in that county,” Siger said, “to work in a high-tech job and be able to stay home and raise their kids in their hometown.” The data center piece of the AI juggernaut also works well for Shapiro’s union-heavy constituency. He toured Steamfitters Local Union 420’s training center in Philadelphia earlier this month, which is training apprentices to install cooling systems for the computer chips packed in wall-to-wall racks inside the cluster of AI factories being developed in Bucks County.

Rory Carroll, a 42-year-old steamfitter who was among the trainees greeting Shapiro, said he’s “tried everything” to make a living. “I sold cars, delivered pizza, managed a supermarket.” Now, he says he’s on a rising tide.

Local officials in Bucks County — which Trump flipped red in 2024, for the first time since 1988 — are wary but welcoming.

“Do I think the trend of technology replacing jobs will continue with the data centers? Of course I do,” said Erin Mullen, vice chair of the Falls Township Board of Supervisors. But she said the temporary construction jobs were worth pursuing. “This is a blue-collar township,” Mullen said. “So even though the jobs are temporary, a lot of families here survive on temporary jobs, and this is huge for the trades.”

Data centers’ demand for energy also works for Shapiro, who’s been touting the state’s large natural gas reserves in talks with tech companies. Last summer, he joined Trump and the state’s Republican senator, Dave McCormick, in Pittsburgh to announce multibillion-dollar commitments for restarting aging hydropower and expanding electricity generation from nuclear and natural gas.

Now, after cuts to federal renewable energy tax credits, he’s still touting Pennsylvania energy — with a partisan edge.

“I’m an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy governor,” Shapiro said in the Blue Light News interview. “Unfortunately, the president of the United States has cut hundreds of millions of dollars from clean energy development in this commonwealth, which has cost us 26,000 union trade jobs who were set to work on these projects.”

“I don’t think it’s an either-or — it’s a both-and,” he continued. “We need to generate more power. Yes, it will rely in part on Pennsylvania natural gas. We also need to generate more power with renewables.”

Power politics

Shapiro’s call for data center developers to pay for electricity infrastructure that could drive up utility bills echoes the Trump administration’s recent rhetoric exhorting them to “pick up the tab” — but Shapiro’s focus on power bills was a long time coming.

In July 2024, as Shapiro was chasing Amazon, mid-Atlantic ratepayers were hit with a $14.7 billion, one-year charge from PJM Interconnection, the region’s electricity grid manager. The double-digit cost increases in utility bills came as a result of projections that electricity supplies could fall short of demand across the 13-state region stretching from northern Virginia to Chicago.

Shapiro demanded a price cap in December 2024 on the fastest-rising part of PJM customers’ electricity bills — a headline-grabbing event in Pennsylvania. And he’s threatened to pull Pennsylvania out of the PJM market all together, a major uprooting of the way power is delivered in the region. He’s attacked PJM for its byzantine utility-heavy leadership structure that leads to a sclerotic response to rising power prices.

Top: Construction of the future Amazon data center site, in Fairless Hills. Bottom: An industrial facility near the same site, in Morrisville.

According to federal data, electricity prices in Pennsylvania rose roughly 20 percent between November 2024 and November 2025 — the highest rate in the country. And PJM has warned that states could face power shortages by the end of the decade if the construction of new data centers race ahead of the energy supply.

“PJM is broken,” Shapiro said in December. “They’re too damned slow. And the needs we have in this country to produce more energy to support everything from data centers to more manufacturing need to be met. And we are being held captive.”

The enormously complex market rules that affect power prices in Shapiro’s state are outside average Americans’ conversations. But Shapiro and Trump have tied a rising part of their political parties’ credibility to the outcome of their pledges to make data centers pay their own way.

In January, Shapiro went to the White House alongside other East Coast governors of both parties to call for PJM to control power prices — and for data centers to “bring their own power” through long-term contracts with new generation developers.

Big tech companies are starting to sign on. Trump used a Truth Social post in early January to announce the White House was working with tech companies to get more agreement on containing the public cost of energy infrastructure. Microsoft then pledged to shoulder more of those costs.

Shapiro’s tack could work for him, according to recent polling.

A POLITICO poll released last week showed an electorate still wrestling with the data center question. Respondents’ top concerns surrounding data centers were power prices and the risk of blackouts — yet they were generally willing to support a new data center in their area evenif it hikes their power bills.

In his address to lawmakers, Shapiro proposed a three-pronged strike against rising energy costs — proposing new rules for data center developers, electric utilities and the regional grid PJM. He pledged to “hold data center developers accountable to strict standards if they want our full support.”

Last week, PJM agreed to extend price controls on future electricity production into 2030.

Politics

Bernie’s populist moment

Published

1 minute ago

November 5, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Bernie’s populist moment

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Politics

‘This is an earthquake’: Latino voters rush back to Democrats

Published

16 hours ago

November 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

AUSTIN — Texas. Florida. Pennsylvania. Colorado. Arizona. Nevada. California.

The historic landslide of Latino voters toward Democrats hit battleground after battleground Tuesday, crumbling the coalition that helped carry President Donald Trump to victory just one cycle ago.

“This is an earthquake,” Democratic Latino operative Sergio Gonzalez told Blue Light News on the sidelines of Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa’s victory party in Austin. “Latinos were angry. They were angry this election.”

While the entire country shifted toward Democrats, nowhere shifted as dramatically as predominantly Latino areas. Across the nation Latino voters of all backgrounds — Mexican Americans and Central Americans in the Southwest, heartland and on the West Coast, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Pennsylvania, Venezuelans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans in Florida — unhappy with the economy and furious over Trump’s immigration enforcement fled the party in droves.

In a single cycle, Democrats appeared to reset Republicans’ gradual decade-long gains with Latino voters.

Latino voters who “broke for President Trump in historical numbers [in 2024] … had to make a hard change because their paycheck wasn’t moving fast and far enough for them,” said Trump’s former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer in an interview Tuesday night. “And Republicans ran out of runway on that.”

The epicenter of the earthquake was Texas, where a turnout surge — especially among younger first-time Latino voters — helped Democrats sweep Texas’ statewide offices — the first time since 1994 they’ve won any at all. Republicans won only one of the five House seats they had gerrymandered.

“What we’re seeing today is a political realignment,” said Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who romped to a 30-point victory Tuesday night in a newly redrawn district Trump carried by double digits two years ago.

“Republicans were renting the Hispanic vote — yet governed like they owned it,” said Giancarlo Sopo, the GOP strategist behind Trump’s viral2020 Spanish-language campaign jingle.

But Democrats have been here before. Then President Barack Obama and his Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton posted similarly strong numbers with Latinos, before Trump’s blue-collar populism helped break through for the GOP.

Some Democrats warn that their party should not misread this week’s results to assume that Latinos are once again loyal Democratic voters.

“Tonight ought to scare the hell out of both political parties,” said Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Business Council, on Tuesday. “Americans are running out of patience, and the politicians who keep mistaking their votes for unconditional loyalty are going to find themselves unemployed.”

Latinos’ swing right two years ago had been fueled by frustration over inflation combined with some voters’ dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s border policy. A cycle earlier, in 2020, Trump made significant inroads in Florida and Texas as well. But growing economic woes under Trump, combined with his hardline interior immigration enforcement, swung those communities hard this time around.

“In the Hispanic community, the hyper-aggressive ICE raids, I think, will go down as one of the darkest blemishes in modern history,” Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who cruised to reelection Tuesday in a seat Trump had won by 10 points, told Blue Light News Tuesday night. “The American people are struggling right now, and and and they delivered a very heavy punishment at the ballot box today.”

Heavily Latino counties swung more toward Democrats than any other type of place, according to preliminary returns. A handful of counties in Texas that are more than 90 percent Latino swung more than 25 points toward Democrats from 2024, the results show. Latino-majority Miami-Dade County in South Florida swung nearly 20 points.If current results hold, roughly half of the 10 Latino Republicans who served in the last Congress won’t be returning, while Democrats’ Latino caucus will grow significantly.

“We put in the hard work. Talk to Latino voters early and often, and they’re showing up,” Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ BOLD PAC, told Blue Light News. “They trust Democrats more on the economy now. They see us as real champions and fighters.”

Trump won Starr County, Texas — part of Cuellar’s district — with 58 percent of the vote two years ago, the first time in more than a century that a Republican had won a presidential election there. On Tuesday, Democrat James Talarico won 77 percent there.

That county, like many others in the Rio Grande Valley, had long favored Democrats but moved toward the GOP during the Trump era. That’s now all been erased, as Brownsville native Gina Hinojosa will become the first Hispanic governor of Texas since it became a U.S. state. “We’ve called the RGV a bellwether for so long,” Melissa Morales, the executive director of SOMOS PAC, told Blue Light News. “But to actually get the first Latina governor of Texas from the RGV I think is a bellwether in its own of what the next generation of leadership looks like.”

In California’s 22nd District, a Central Valley district which is roughly three-quarters Latino, progressive Democrat Randy Villegas was leading incumbent GOP Rep. David Valadao 66%-34% with roughly two-thirds of the vote in. A handful of rural majority-Latino counties in Kansas — Seward, Finney and Ford — that Trump had won by more than 30 points in 2024 were narrowly won by Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton. The counties were among those shaken by ICE raids earlier in the fall.

“Recent ICE activity in southwest Kansas turned around the electorate out here,” said Republican state Sen. Bill Clifford, who represents Finney County.

The results are a vindication for Democrats who’ve been clamoring for more investment into Latino voters.

“I think this would be a wake-up call to the Democratic Party in general that investing in Latino outreach, communication, and good candidates makes a big difference, especially in areas that you think were considered red back in the day,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) told Blue Light News Tuesday night.

Politics

Democrats sweep Texas

Published

1 day ago

November 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

AUSTIN — Democrats’ vision of a blue Texas is finally here.

James Talarico has been elected a U.S. senator and Gina Hinojosa as governor, the first Democrats to win either office in more than a generation. The four other statewide candidates are leading as ballots continue to be counted. Democrats further down the ballot are leading some red districts, changing the complexion of the state legislature, congressional delegation and courts.

“It’s something that I haven’t seen in decades, that none of us have seen in decades,” said former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, a moderate Republican.

It’s an outcome that even the most bullish Democrats didn’t dare enunciate in the late days of the election. But as results have poured in Tuesday night, the party is outpacing its expectations across the country’s second most populous state amidst a national romp.

Both Hinojosa’s and Talarico’s victory margins came by running up vote counts in Texas’ deep-blue urban centers and while also leading in the largest Republican-led county in the country, Tarrant County. They reversed Republican gains across the Latino-heavy Rio Grande Valley region, an ancestrally Democratic area that had swung hard to the right in recent years. Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez romped to a near-20 point victory in a seat Republicans drew to favor them during last year’s redrawing of the state’s House map, ousting a top Republican recruit who campaigned alongside Speaker Mike Johnson to begin election day.

It amounts to a set of remarkable results in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1988 and to the governor’s mansion since 1990. In recent cycles, Democrats have tried and failed to flip the state in presidential and U.S. Senate contests but have been largely uncompetitive for state offices. But Tuesday’s blue wave slammed into Texas particularly hard, as it combined frustrations over the economy, immigration enforcement, data centers and corruption with a collapse of Trump’s 2024 coalition.

“We reminded voters that Republicans have been in charge in Texas for 30 years. That every problem we have, was caused by Republicans,” Michelle Lowe Solis, chair of the Bexar County Democratic Party. “They aren’t going to fix the problems, they caused them.”

As votes continue to be counted, Democrats appear poised to blunt the impact of Republicans’ attempted gerrymander, likely sweeping the Rio Grande Valley congressional seats while holding onto another San Antonio-area district drawn to favor Republicans. In state Supreme Court races, they lead in all four seats up for grabs, potentially turning a 9-0 conservative majority into a 5-4 split. Among the first 36 state house races called by the Associated Press, 34 have gone to Democrats and just two to Republicans.“Voters aren’t dumb,” said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ BOLD PAC. “Even though the Republicans have tried to cheat with the series of gerrymanders, that has, I think, only made voters in those areas more willing to participate.”

Talarico’s and Hinojosa’s victories will be felt nationally. Texas Democrats, who have long asked for national money and resources in a state where elections are costly, now have a test case of how to win. And it will bolster their arguments that their state, with 40 electoral votes, should be treated as a presidential battleground.

Ali Bianco and Jonathan Martin contributed reporting.