Hazleton, Pennsylvania, was once the Power City: the third US city electrified by Thomas Edison, home to the world’s first coal-fired electricity plant, and the source of an electric third rail that inspired the Long Island Rail Road. In the 1880s, Edison targeted Hazleton — a plateau of poor immigrant miners — thanks to George Markle, the nation’s most powerful coal operator. His son, John, famously declared he’d “rather fight than eat” when bargaining with the miners who later staged the 1902 strike, the first in US history to require federal intervention. The miners won; Markle dimmed the lights and retreated to an opulent Manhattan life.

Last month, the descendants of those rebels won another battle in Hazleton. They were rebelling against a proposed data centre campus that would destroy the forests on a local mountain known for its globally rare flora. Local elected officials denied approval of the centre, known as Project Hazelnut, amid residents’ intense opposition. This revolt against data centres indicates a wider trend across Pennsylvania, from the central region’s farm communities to Harrisburg’s suburbs, with a new RealClearPennsylvania/Emerson poll finding that 42% of Pennsylvanians oppose data-centre development in or near their community, while just 34% support it.

Their objections are the same as those elsewhere in the country: rising electricity bills, environmental costs, economic scepticism, and a depleted quality of life. In Northern Virginia, for example, the formerly agricultural landscape has been transformed by the cloud-computing megastructures since the 2000s. Consequently, local opposition to new data centres fuelled Democrat John McAuliff’s unexpected state legislative victory in last month’s election. Meanwhile, in Georgia’s Monroe County, where Trump carried 73% of the 2024 vote, commissioners rejected a proposed $6 billion data centre due to community opposition. As a recent Data Centre Watch study found, the revolt is bipartisan, though 55% of politicians who publicly opposed data-centre projects in their districts were Republican, compared to 45% of Democrats.

Notably, many of the regions where data centres are surfacing are in areas which support Trump. In Pennsylvania, the President won pockets of Greater Hazleton by 50 percentage points. He enjoyed comparable margins just south in Schuylkill County, where another data centre was recently delayed. Meanwhile, just west in Montour County, which Trump won by 20 percentage points in 2024, the planning commission voted against agricultural rezoning that would assure data-centre development. “Small-town character defines our community,” a Republican commissioner told Reuters. “People aren’t anti-development — they just want growth that fits who we are.”

The proliferation of data centres — part of Trump’s explicit push to assure America’s global AI supremacy — is damaging to the President because there’s bipartisan anxiety about tech-driven disruption and persistently high costs. This is especially the case in competitive congressional districts, including in Pennsylvania’s northeast and Lehigh Valley, where Amazon fulfilment centres are a primary employer. The company, which believes it could replace more than half a million jobs with robots, is the top employer in Luzerne County, home to Hazleton. Republicans risk a perilous electoral path here and elsewhere if they tout data centres as job-creating opportunities.

Many years after Markle’s pugnacious declaration, an employee joked: “The only difference between Mr Markle and his employees is that while he would rather fight than eat, they have to fight to eat.” As economic uncertainty intensifies, residents of MAGA regions are fighting data centres out of fear for their future. In a sense, they’re fighting to eat. This intensity could lead to surprising electoral outcomes next November.