John James, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, has built his data center message on one idea. He said it at a gubernatorial debate in early July:

"My priority is frankly local control, protecting our water, protecting and preventing pollution, making sure that electricity bills do not go up... We absolutely cannot have an additional data center until we protect the people and communities."

He said a version of it again on CBS's Face the Nation days before the Michigan Advance published its findings: "My position is we need to have a plan to protect our communities. Until we do, then we have to make sure that we have local control."

In Congress, he voted for a provision that would have taken local control away — for ten years, from every state and town in America — three times in committee, and a fourth time as part of the bill on the House floor.

The provision

The Michigan Advance went back through the votes. In May 2025, James voted for the House version of H.R. 1, Trump's budget bill. Buried inside it was this:

"no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce, during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act, any law or regulation of that State or a political subdivision thereof limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce"

Ten years. No state law, no county ordinance, no township rule that singled these facilities out. The bill's own definition of an artificial intelligence system is "any data system, hardware, tool, or utility that operates, in whole or in part, using artificial intelligence" — a data center, in other words. A Michigan community that wanted limits on one would have had nowhere to go.

James did not just vote for the overall bill and let the fine print slide past. He sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where the language was written, and he voted for that specific moratorium three times:

• Twice to advance it out of committee.
• Once against an amendment that would have stripped it out of the bill.

Someone handed him the chance to delete it, and he voted no.

He was told exactly what it would do

This was not an obscure provision whose effects only became clear later. The National Conference of State Legislatures — a bipartisan group representing state legislatures of both parties — wrote to the Energy and Commerce Committee warning against it.

The ban, its CEO Tim Storey wrote, would "circumvent their authority to regulate the permitting, construction and operation of data centers within their borders," and would "severely limit the ability of states and localities to make decisions regarding the siting and operation of these large-scale projects, raising costs for ratepayers, jeopardizing zoning decisions that protect our mutual constituents and impacting existing infrastructure such as power grids and generating facilities."

Rising ratepayer costs. Zoning stripped. That is the list James now campaigns on protecting Michigan from. He was warned it was the list, and he voted for it anyway — three times in committee.

The moratorium did not survive into the final law. That is not a defense of the votes; it is a description of what happened to the provision after he cast them.

What his campaign said when asked

The Advance put the votes to James's campaign. Spokesperson Alyvia Bailey's answer:

"John James voted for H.R. 1 to deliver historic tax relief to working families across the country. His approach to data centers has been clear: no new data centers until we protect our people."

The Advance reports that Bailey did not directly address the questions about the moratorium votes.

That is the whole answer. He voted for the bill for a different reason, and his current position is his current position.

Michigan is not confused about where it stands

An EPIC-MRA survey taken August 22 through 28 found 73% of Michigan respondents opposed the federal tax breaks and policies designed to speed up data center development.

Meanwhile the head of James's party is on the other side of that. In a Truth Social post on Monday, August 31, Trump said the country should "let Data Reign," and that communities that push back "want to end up being backwards and poor." James has aligned himself closely with Trump and took his endorsement in the primary.

So James is running as the local-control candidate against a president who just called the people asking for local control backwards and poor — with a voting record that matches the president rather than the campaign.

Michigan Republicans keep discovering this issue late

James is the second Michigan Republican we have caught running as a data center skeptic after voting for the AI moratorium.

Tom Barrett's ad says he "stood up to my own party" on data centers. The vote in that ad is from 2015 and was about a single building in Grand Rapids; since then he voted for the tax breaks that handed six AI companies $83 billion, backed the same ten-year state-regulation ban, and took money from Musk, Thiel, and the corporate PACs of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle.

James has his own version of the money problem. He took nearly $50,000 from DTE, Consumers Energy's parent company and their employees while both utilities were asking regulators to raise rates on Michigan families — the same electric bills he now promises to hold down.

He is not alone nationally either: three out of four Americans now oppose a data center near their home, and a run of Republicans who spent the last year helping the build-out along have recently discovered concerns.

What the record shows

John James is campaigning for governor of Michigan on local control over data centers. In May 2025 he voted for a budget bill containing a ten-year ban on any state or local government regulating AI systems, and as a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee he voted for that specific ban three more times — including against an amendment to remove it. A bipartisan group representing state legislatures had warned Congress in writing that the provision would raise ratepayer costs and override local zoning. His campaign, asked about those votes, did not address them.

Source

Katherine Dailey, "As James pushes local control on data centers, past congressional votes sought to limit just that", Michigan Advance, September 2, 2026. Photo by Katherine Dailey/Michigan Advance.