The AI data center push has roiled Kansas politics. It may also define the race for governor.

Cindy Holscher, the Deomcratic nominee for Kansas governor, listens to teachers during a campaign stop on Sept. 27 in Emporia. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

Cindy Holscher has something she would like you to know.

She changed her mind on data centers because she listens.

“The subject was coming up over and over again,” she said of the 80 or so town halls she held in the last 12 months across Kansas. “It seemed to me at the time that a lot of candidates were really wary of this subject and hadn’t figured out this was something people cared about.”

When Holscher, a state senator from Overland Park, won the primary to become the Democratic nominee for governor two months ago, it was partly fueled by her call for a state moratorium on new data center construction. Since then, public concern over data centers and alarm about artificial intelligence have accelerated, turning a wild card in the primary into what may be a defining issue for the governor’s race in Kansas and midterms across the country.

The data center divide is just one disagreement among many between Holscher and her opponent, Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican. But in a political climate where party lines have been scrambled because of populist resistance to big tech, it may prove a bigger factor than anyone would have guessed just a few months ago.

Masterson’s campaign acknowledged, but did not otherwise respond, to an emailed request from me for an in-person interview about data centers.

“You know, there’s a lot of great possibilities with A.I.,” Holscher told me during a Sept. 27 campaign stop at Emporia, “but when I talk to people like the teachers who were just here, it’s about the anxiety in terms of what it might mean for the future, what it might be in terms of job loss. And that’s something that’s not talked about much, because the focus has been on energy and water usage.”

Holscher had just spoken to a group of local educators about their concerns. She did more listening than talking, sometimes jotting notes, at other times offering a few words to acknowledge what the teachers were saying. Listening is not an easy skill, but Holscher looked at ease doing it.

She defeated Democratic rival Ethan Corson by 10 points in the August primary. Corson, a Johnson County attorney and political moderate, attempted to frame the contest in a PBS Kansas gubernatorial primary debate as a choice between someone who could hold the governorship for the Democrats in a deep red state and somebody who could not.

Corson was endorsed by outgoing governor Laura Kelly, a Democrat at the end of her second term. Kelly was propelled to office by voter distaste for the legacy of the failed economic tax-cutting “experiment” of former governor Sam Brownback, but she was often stymied during her tenure from expanding Medicaid and other issues by the Republican supermajorities in the Kansas Legislature. Kelly, a promoter of bipartisanship and big-ticket economic development, embraced some big-ticket initiatives, including coaxing the Kansas City Chiefs across the state line with a tax incentive package that included a billion dollars in public funding.

Holscher opposed the final deal to bring the Chiefs to Kansas.

It wasn’t the only time she and Kelly were at odds.

Holscher revealed some internecine fighting when she vented on social media that she and two other Democrats were told by the Kelly administration to stand aside for another candidate, a claim the governor’s chief of staff told the Kansas Reflector was a mischaracterization. Holscher said that such insider manipulation has frustrated many voters about Kansas Democrats.

After her primary win, the New York Times described Holscher as an “outspoken populist” who took on data centers and the political status quo. Some of the criticism leveled at Holscher by fellow Democrats during the primary campaign, that she was perhaps too far left, has been taken up and amplified by Masterson.

During the gubernatorial debate last month at the Kansas State Fair at Hutchinson, Masterson called her a socialist and the “most radical liberal progressive that’s ever been on a ticket.” Holscher responded by reminding Masterson to his support of the Brownback experiment, which defunded Kansas schools “to the crisis point.”

Masterson also challenged Holscher’s change of mind on data centers.

“My position has never changed,” Masterson said about data centers during the televised debate. “It’s about guardrails first.”

Masterson said guardrails were already in place thanks to S.B. 98, enacted in 2025. It shields consumers from electricity rate increases, he said, and protects the water and the land from pollution. He also urged decisions on data centers to be made at the local level.

“Let the locals decide,” he said. “There are places where they don’t make sense and places where they do make sense.” Why wouldn’t a city want significant property tax relief through data centers, he asked.

Holscher was an example of a “perfect politician” who flip-flips on an issue, he said, because she originally voted in favor of the measure encouraging data centers and now opposes them.

Masterson bowed out of two additional televised debates with Holscher, saying the public had already seen them together in multiple platforms. Both parties claimed victory in the state fair debate. So far, Masterson’s campaign has been largely conventional for a Kansas Republican, driven chiefly by a promise to stop “runaway” property taxes.

Masterson, who has the endorsement of Donald Trump, might have a difficult time changing his mind on data centers even if he wanted to. Allowing any daylight between himself and Trump, who has doubled down on data centers, could be taken by the president as a sign of disloyalty. And Trump’s enthusiastic messaging on data centers and artificial intelligence offers little room for nuance.

Communities that reject data centers, Trump said recently, will end up “backwards and poor.” But a Gallup poll from earlier this year indicates that about 70% of Americans don’t want AI data centers in their areas. More recent polling says 58% of voters believe new data center construction will have a negative effect on the country.

Trump has relied on tech oligarchs for money, influence, and the 2025 chainsaw attack on the federal government. A cheerleader for AI (which he would like to rebrand as “super intelligence”), Trump recently announced an “accord” in which tech giants agreed to police themselves on AI safety and development. But self-policing hasn’t worked for the Catholic Church, Wall Street, or the police. It didn’t work with nuclear weapons. We shouldn’t expect it to work for the players in the new AI smarts race, especially when humanity already seems to be lurching toward a silicon-spawned human extinction event.

That catastrophe seemed closer to hand Oct. 1 when the Trump Pentagon named Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, the wielder of the DOGE chainsaw and the owner of xAI, to co-lead a 120-day project on the future of technology in warfare. This move is especially alarming, considering the U.S. and Russia recently colluded to block progress on a United Nations draft of an AI weapons pact, according to the Washington Post. Language that would have required human approval before AI pulled the trigger on enemies it had targeted were removed.

Presumably Masterson does not want to unleash autonomous killer bots on humanity, but he’s not urging caution, either. Aligning oneself with the Trump administration’s stance on AI leaves little room for a thoughtful consideration of the ethical and humanitarian concerns. As for Masterson’s call for allowing locals to decide whether to allow data centers in their communities? That sounds reasonable until you consider that some local governments in Kansas are vigorously pursuing data center projects, public opinion be damned.

In my town of Emporia, city officials have so far advanced a proposed data center at every step since it was announced June 2, despite fierce organized resistance. There were sign-waving protests, testimony at public hearings that ran about 8-1 against the project, and a flurry of petition drives. Two of those petitions were successful and resulted in Nov. 3 ballot measures that would, if they survive legal challenges, ban high-impact data centers and battery energy storage systems for 10 years. Other petitions seek a grand jury investigation and changing the city’s form of government.

Questions about data centers are also on the ballot in other Kansas communities, including Ottawa and El Dorado. Citizen-led groups elsewhere, including De Soto and Edgerton, are also seeking to place the issue before voters.

Resistance to data centers is a new phenomenon, and a year ago it wasn’t on the radar of pollsters and politicians in Kansas. A Democratic lawmaker from central Kansas told me in an informal conversation recently that when he voted for S.B. 98, he didn’t hear a peep of opposition from anybody.

Most state legislators voted for the measure, enacted in 2025, which provides a 20-year state and local tax exemption for data centers that meet certain criteria, including an investment of $250 million, a 10-year electrical utility partnership, and a promise to create 20 full-time jobs within two years of commencing operations.

During the final vote in the Kansas Senate on April 11, 2025, only one senator – Tory Marie Blew, a Barton County Republican – voted against it. In the Kansas House, the month before, 15 Democrats and two Republicans voted “nay.”

In the Fall 2025 “Kansas Speaks” statewide opinion survey, released a year ago this month, questions about artificial intelligence were limited to how people used the technology in their daily life and in their work. There were no questions about how state residents regarded the technology or whether they would support construction of a data center nearby.

In fact, the term “data center” does not appear in the survey.

Thirty-seven percent of respondents in the 2025 survey said they did not use AI at all. Another 18% were unsure if they did, and the remainder — about half of all respondents — said they used generative or non-generative AI in their daily lives.

The “Kansas Speaks” survey for Fall 2026 has not yet been released.

Holscher told me the gubernatorial race was a choice between a candidate who represented the people and one propped up by money from big tech companies. AI super PACs had spent more than $800,000 in support of  Masterson’s campaign, she said. When she mentioned the money she seemed a bit less at ease, perhaps because she’s being badly outspent.

She’s also trailing in the polls, according to the New York Times.

But the difference is single digits.

As Bob Beatty, a political science professor puts it, Holscher is an underdog who must do what no Democrat in 144 years of state history has done: replace a fellow Democrat as governor who is leaving office. Holscher, he said, is Rocky Balboa to Masterson’s Apollo Creed. As Beatty reminds us, Rocky didn’t win in the first movie.

Since 2016, I haven’t put much faith in polls, as we’ve been badly misled too many times. We’re also still a month out from the election, which is almost forever in political time.

Holscher told me the affordability crisis is still foremost among the issues for her campaign, but that the more she learns about artificial intelligence and data centers, the more concerned she becomes. She wasn’t optimistic about meaningful national regulation on AI, she said, considering the current administration.

She would reconsider her vote on S.B. 98 if she could.

“At the time, it was presented as a picture of all the potential economic development it would bring, what it would do for our communities,” she said. “But things look different, 15 or 16 months later, with new information and hearing from people across the state.”

Those who are pushing back against data centers and demanding more transparency from local governments are going the right thing, Holscher said, because the system is meant to turn on citizen engagement. She said she didn’t set a time limit for her moratorium, because she did not yet know how long would be enough to get some clarity. It might take six months, she said.

It might take longer.

The important thing, she said, was for the state to take the lead in establishing better safeguards for new data center construction so that communities could follow.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.