Five states that elected new Democratic governors on 3 November 2026 also produced some of the most detailed campaign documents of the cycle on data centers and electricity costs. The winners were Gina Hinojosa in Texas, who defeated incumbent Republican Greg Abbott, according to the Associated Press and the Texas Tribune; Amy Acton in Ohio, who defeated Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, according to the Associated Press; Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, who defeated Republican Rick Jackson, according to the Associated Press; Rob Sand in Iowa, who defeated Republican Zach Lahn, according to the Associated Press; and Aaron Ford in Nevada, who defeated incumbent Republican Joe Lombardo, according to a CBS News projection.
The Guardian's results page, which uses Associated Press calls, showed Democrats holding 28 governorships after a net gain of five, with 34 of 36 races called. Two governor's races remained uncalled on that page, in Alaska and Kansas. The same page showed Democrats with majorities in the Senate and the House heading into the 120th Congress, which convenes on 3 January 2027.
The five flipped states are not a sideshow in the U.S. power system. TEI summed their 2025 retail electricity sales from EIA Electric Power Annual Table 2.8 and divided by the U.S. total of 4,079,909 thousand megawatthours. Texas sold 533,260 thousand megawatthours, 13.1% of the national total. Ohio sold 161,909 thousand (4.0%). Georgia sold 153,163 thousand (3.8%). Iowa sold 58,953 thousand (1.4%). Nevada sold 39,842 thousand (1.0%). Together that is 947,127 thousand megawatthours, or 23.2% of U.S. retail sales.
The commercial sector, where utilities often classify computing campuses, moved faster than the all-sector totals. U.S. commercial sales rose from 1,450,941 thousand megawatthours in 2024 to 1,503,310 thousand in 2025, an increase of 52,369 thousand megawatthours, or 3.6%. In the five states, commercial sales rose by 20,139 thousand megawatthours. That is 38.5% of the national commercial increase, on TEI's subtraction from Table 2.8. Ohio's commercial sales alone rose 13.6%, from 50,814 thousand megawatthours to 57,727 thousand, and accounted for 13.2% of the U.S. commercial increment. Texas's commercial sales rose 6.4% and accounted for 20.0% of the national commercial increment. EIA warns that, starting in 2023, many changes in commercial and industrial sales reflect improved reporting of data center and cryptocurrency mining operations. The 38.5% figure is therefore a measure of where the commercial line grew, not a census of new server halls.
What follows is what the five campaigns said they would do, in their own documents, and the offices they will actually hold. Manifestos are not statutes. Governors take office in January 2027, and in each of these states the legislature, the utility commission and existing permits will bound what an executive order or a first-year bill can change.
Texas: Gina Hinojosa
The Texas Tribune reported that Hinojosa, a fifth-term Austin state representative, defeated Abbott, a three-term incumbent, and will be the state's first Latina governor. The last Democrat in the office was Ann Richards, who left after the 1994 election. The Tribune wrote that discontent over data centers was among the forces that made the race competitive, and that Hinojosa had vowed to force lawmakers to regulate data centers.
Her campaign's data-center page called for "an immediate moratorium on data centers to last until the legislature can meet to put in place real protections so Texans can have a seat at the table to decide if and how data centers come into their communities." It said Abbott should issue an executive order at once and call a special session "to end the giant tax giveaways he signed into law." The page attributed those tax breaks to House Bill 2712 of 2015, which it said gave hyperscale data centers 20-year tax breaks. That account is the campaign's. On 23 July 2026 the campaign published a further statement calling on Abbott to sign "an emergency executive order putting a moratorium on data centers until the legislature meets." Hinojosa said: "I'm calling for a moratorium until a legislative session that puts Texans first so that we don't have any more communities in Texas who are powerless against these global corporations."
The July statement listed priorities she wanted in that session: American union jobs and an end to "fast-track rollbacks"; a community role in deciding whether and how data centers arrive; an end to nondisclosure agreements; a requirement that companies prove households will not pay more for electricity or water, including hidden costs of grid upgrades, transmission and new capacity; an end to subsidies; and a rule that any water contract becomes unenforceable if it threatens a community's supply.
Texas has a large share of U.S. power demand, 13.1% of 2025 retail sales on the EIA table, and a separately documented large-load process at the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT. Hinojosa's campaign treated Abbott's late-cycle shift as insufficient. The data-center page said a temporary moratorium that the sitting governor could lift after election day would not protect residents, and that "the only way Texans are protected is when real laws are passed." The Tribune noted that Texas has a constitutionally weak governor and that Hinojosa's ability to change statute will depend on the legislature she faces. An executive order can direct agencies. Ending tax breaks and writing siting rules requires bills, or at least a legislature willing to send them to her desk.
Ohio: Amy Acton
Acton's campaign published a data-center priority page that supports "a conditional moratorium on data centers to ensure they cover one hundred percent of their utility costs, exclusively build with union labor, operate with full transparency, support the needs of local communities, live by Ohio's environmental standards, and bring jobs to former industrial areas that have been left behind." The page then states: "Ohio is open for business, but we are not up for sale. My message as governor will be if you do not meet these conditions, we do not want you in Ohio."
The conditions are spelled out as a governing program rather than a calendar pause. Data centers and their investors would cover all costs for gas, water and electricity; invest in their own generation; and prove that a project would not raise electricity prices or harm regional reliability. The page says the goal is to lower regional costs and strengthen infrastructure, and that the campaign would "prioritize low cost, carbon-free and net-zero energy options, accompanied by storage." Long-term tax incentives would be reined in, with clawbacks. Nondisclosure agreements would end. New sites would have to be built on brownfields or previously developed industrial land, "not farms or in the hearts of our communities." Air-quality and groundwater standards would not be loosened, and the page calls for "responsible and modern water-management systems."
Ohio's commercial electricity sales rose faster in 2025 than the national commercial average, on the EIA figures above. The state also sits inside PJM Interconnection, where large-load rules and capacity costs have been a federal and multi-state argument for more than a year. Acton's page does not promise an immediate, blanket halt of the New York type. It promises that projects which fail her tests will not be wanted, and that the governor's office will write guardrails, appoint or press regulators, and bargain over incentives. Whether "conditional moratorium" becomes a statute, a utility-commission order, or a set of permit instructions will be a first-year choice for her administration and for the General Assembly.
Georgia: Keisha Lance Bottoms
The Associated Press reported that Bottoms was elected Georgia governor over Jackson and described her as the first Black woman elected to that office. On 31 August 2026 her campaign issued a statement on a WRBL interview in which she said: "My position is that we need to pause on new construction of data centers. There is too much out there that is of concern to people about the impact on our environment, on our utility costs. Just about what the long term impact will be. We are amongst the highest in the country in terms of states, in terms of building data centers." In the same remarks she called for the state to "take a pause on new construction and reassess," and to convene "those who are building data centers, the experts, the environmental experts, our community leaders."
After the election, 13WMAZ reported on 9 November that Bottoms had said in an interview with CBS Mornings: "I will sign an executive order for that pause and then we will determine what else we need to do administratively to take that pause into effect." The station also quoted her saying, "A lot of data centers are being built in Georgia because of the incentives attached to data centers." Residents in Jones and Twiggs counties told the station that data center proposals had influenced how they voted. A lawsuit by 18 Jones County residents challenging a January zoning amendment that allowed data centers in M-2 industrial zones was allowed to proceed after a judge denied the county's request to dismiss it, the station reported. In Twiggs County, a proposed Pine Ridge Technology Center on a 291.5-acre site in Dry Branch was under appeal.
Georgia sold 153,163 thousand megawatthours of electricity in 2025. NCSL listed Georgia HB 1059, which would forbid local governments from permitting data centers until December 2028, as introduced rather than enacted. Bottoms's own route, as described after the election, begins with an executive order and then whatever further administrative steps are needed to make a pause real. An order can instruct state agencies. It cannot, by itself, rewrite every county zoning code, which is why the Jones County litigation and the local votes described by 13WMAZ will still matter after inauguration.
Iowa: Rob Sand
Sand's campaign page, "My Plan to Hold Big Corporations and Data Centers Accountable," says that as governor he will "make sure anyone building in Iowa is contributing to Iowa, not extracting from us." The first legislative request on the page is a bill "to make sure these data centers pay their own way, including covering any increase in costs on utilities so that your bills don't go up one cent." The second is an end to data-center tax breaks, including "huge sales tax breaks on everything inside the data center." The page states, as the campaign's fiscal backdrop, that Iowa faces "a nearly $1.4 billion budget deficit."
Beyond costs and taxes, the plan would implement integrated resource planning, which the page says Iowa does not now use, so that utilities pursue the lowest-cost option and customers, including data centers, "only pay for what they need." It calls for measurement and public disclosure of water and energy use; construction by Iowa union workers; a ban on nondisclosure agreements for new projects; public disclosure of building size and acreage, permanent and construction jobs and average pay, water sources and efficiency, and energy use including peak demand; public hearings or town halls in affected communities; local control of the final siting decision once a statewide floor is in place; and setbacks so that existing homes do not have to hear a data center or have lighting disrupt the property.
Iowa's 2025 retail sales, 58,953 thousand megawatthours, are smaller than those of Texas, Ohio or Georgia, but they rose faster than the national all-sector increase: 7.3% from 2024, when sales were 54,930 thousand megawatthours, compared with a 2.6% national increase, again from Table 2.8. Commercial sales in Iowa rose 6.4%. Sand's program is closer to Acton's than to a calendar moratorium. It assumes projects may still be built if they pay full freight, disclose their use of water and power, hire union labor and survive a local hearing. The tax-break repeal and the integrated-resource-planning requirement are the items that most clearly need legislation.
Nevada: Aaron Ford
CBS News projected that Ford, who has been elected statewide twice as attorney general, defeated Lombardo and will be Nevada's first Black governor, and the first Black governor elected in a state west of the Mississippi. Ford's campaign data-center page says he "will not allow data centers to raise costs on Nevadans by one penny" and "will stop awarding tax breaks for data centers until they prove that they're holding up their end of the bargain." Once he is governor, the page says, "data centers will need to bring their own clean energy, electrical grid infrastructure, and water."
The detailed planks are an audit-first pause rather than a construction ban. Ford would pause new tax abatements while the Governor's Office of Economic Development audits whether existing data centers have delivered promised jobs, tax revenue and economic benefits, and would make those figures public. He would require data centers to pay for the energy they use and for the grid updates needed to deliver a larger total supply, and would require them to use clean energy. He would insist on prevailing wages and "strongly encourage" project-labor agreements. On water, he would "extend Southern Nevada's ban on evaporative cooling statewide" and require closed-loop or similarly current technologies. Each potential project would face a public hearing. The page also says he would oppose federal efforts to put data centers on federal land in a way that circumvented Nevada's labor, energy and water rules.
The same page claims that the Lombardo administration "has given data center companies over $200 million of Nevadans' tax dollars." That figure is the campaign's, not an audited TEI total. Nevada's 2025 retail sales were the smallest of the five states, 39,842 thousand megawatthours, and they fell 2.0% from 2024, when sales were 40,665 thousand megawatthours. Commercial sales were essentially unchanged, at 14,266 thousand megawatthours after 14,259 thousand the year before. A pause in new abatements would act first on the incentive ledger and only indirectly on interconnection. The clean-energy, grid-infrastructure and water conditions, if written into approvals or into statute, would be the pieces that change how a new campus shows up on the utility system.
Offices, legislatures and the federal bills
The five programs overlap more than they match. Hinojosa and Bottoms have promised pauses on new construction, Bottoms by executive order and Hinojosa by a moratorium lasting until the legislature writes protections. Acton has promised a conditional moratorium whose conditions, if enforced, would turn away projects that do not pay their costs, use union labor, avoid farmland and meet environmental tests. Sand has asked for a full-cost bill, an end to tax breaks and integrated resource planning. Ford has promised to freeze new tax abatements pending audits and to require campuses to bring their own power, wires and water. All five talk about ending secrecy around deals, and all five treat household electricity bills as the political core of the issue.
Their legal tools are not the same. A governor can typically direct executive agencies, make appointments to a utility commission as seats come open, and withhold or reshape discretionary tax credits that run through an economic-development office. Statutory tax exemptions, zoning, and many siting rules sit with legislatures and with local governments. New York's Executive Order 62, issued in July by a re-elected governor rather than by one of these five, is a reminder of both the reach and the limit of executive action: it can hold state environmental permits for facilities of 50 megawatts or more, and it says so expressly that it does not bind local permits.
At the federal level, S. 4214 and H.R. 9442, the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, remain the introduced texts referred to committee in March and June. Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, as reported from Associated Press calls on The Guardian's results page, create a path those bills did not have in a Republican Congress. They do not by themselves report a bill, schedule a vote or satisfy the further statutes the texts require before the moratorium could even be lifted. Governors who have promised to make data centers pay their own power costs would still have to live with whatever federal rule, or absence of one, emerges after 3 January.
The practical energy question for 2027 is how much of the commercial sales growth already visible in Texas and Ohio, and how much of the interconnection queues behind those sales, will be delayed, moved, or forced to arrive with matching generation and paid-for wires. EIA's November Short-Term Energy Outlook, prepared with modeling completed on 5 November, still sees U.S. electricity consumption rising from 4,216 billion kilowatthours in 2025 to 4,306 billion in 2026 and 4,371 billion in 2027. Those totals assume no sudden national halt. The five governors-elect will take office about a year into that forecast window, overseeing states that, in 2025, bought just under a quarter of the country's retail electricity.