Data Center Donalds

Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds loves data centers. Florida? Not so much.

I’ve been doing Florida politics longer than some of the consultants working this cycle have been alive, and I’ve seen “inevitable” candidates learn that “inevitable” is a word you use right up until it stops being true.

Byron Donalds is about to get that lesson, and the instrument of his education is going to be something nobody drew up on a whiteboard in Naples: data centers.

Let me start with what the money bought, because in Florida politics, the money (whether delivered as a political committee ad spend or in a paper bag) usually buys plenty.

Donald’s is the usual drop-to-his-knees MAGA ass-kisser. He won Trump’s endorsement, which helps in the primary but is increasingly poisonous in the general election. He’s been endorsed by roughly three-quarters of the Republican caucus in the state House, though not by Ron DeSantis, who still matters a bit in Florida’s GOP machine.

Donald’s has raised $90 million, spent $20 million of it, and importantly, has a super PAC seeded by OpenAI’s founders and the usual tech broligarchs dropping millions to protect him. He’s led every GOP primary poll by margins that look like typos.

On paper, this thing is over.

Except the general election keeps refusing to read the paper.

That $20 million he spent? The man is sitting in dead heats and single-digit races against David Jolly, a guy who left the Republican Party, and he’s running a campaign where Donalds cannot go: affordability, insurance, corruption, and…data centers.

Change Research had them tied at 37. UNF had Donalds up five, with a big margin of error. One poll put Jolly ahead by six. When you’ve spent that kind of money against an underfunded, underexposed opponent and you’re still trading the lead, that’s not a frontrunner’s number. That’s a warning light.

Here’s the thing, the consultant class in Tallahassee doesn’t want to say out loud: the primary that was supposed to coronate Donalds instead put his soft spot on television.

Paul Renner called for a moratorium. James Fishback wanted an outright ban. They’ve spent months hammering Donalds as the data center guy, the big tech guy, the one whose donors want to pour concrete over the aquifer.

He’s likely to win the primary, sure, but a primary where your opponents spend the whole time branding you as the tech industry’s bitch in Florida is not a clean win.

It’s a wound Donalds will carry into November.

And the data center issue is uniquely poisonous here, in a way that transcends the usual red-blue map. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

I’ve spent thirty years in Florida politics watching issues split predictably along partisan lines. Guns. Abortion. Taxes. Culture war madness. Pregnant pigs. (Look it up.)

The only parallel, ever, is offshore oil drilling. You’ll notice the “Drill Baby Drill” crowd gets really quiet when it comes to Florida. It has always been an 80-20 issue, a third rail as high-voltage as Social Security.

This one doesn’t. Look at where local governments are moving. Wakulla County, deep red, the kind of Panhandle county Republicans win 70-30, banned them outright. So did Walton. So did Jackson. Head up to Pensacola, over to Titusville near the Space Coast, and you hear the same thing from people who’ve voted Republican their whole lives: not here, not in my backyard, not with my water.

Blue Palm Beach banning them wasn’t a surprise. In Leon County and the blue precincts around Tallahassee, you get the identical message. When Wakulla and Leon County agree on something, pay attention: that rarely happens, and when it does, it means an issue has stopped being partisan and become elemental.

The UNF polling made it plain: 68% of Florida voters don’t want one of these things anywhere near them. Sixty-eight. You do not find numbers like that on anything anymore, except Donald Trump’s disapproval numbers on the economy.

Data centers have managed to unite Floridians across every line we normally see dividing them, and they’ve united them against the position Byron Donalds was bought for.

Oh, let’s be clear. He’s been bought. He might as well have a QR code on his forehead.

Byron is exactly the kind of creature the corruption factory in Tallahassee punches out like a car parts. Venal, transactional, casual, and causally corrupt. Republican control in Florida’s Capitol is cash-and-carry, fuck-you-pay-me mob action.

Byron became this year’s hungry bird, and the Big Tech mamma bird puked nearly $100 million into his eager maw.

Byron’s not clever enough to even nod and wink this thing away. Every special interest in The Process knew to call. They love the system in Tallahassee just as it’s been for decades. Write the check, and you’ll get the regulatory exemption you want. Write the check, and you’ll get your people installed on boards and commissions that regulate your industry. Write the check, and sure, pave that wetland, bro.

For Big Tech, this is simple. They acqui-hired Byron Donalds for pennies on the dollar.

The CAPEX from Big AI has to roll baby, and Florida is a place they’ve identified as a perfect location: cheap land, cheap power, cheap water, cheap taxes (none, to speak of), and of course, cheap public officials who can be bought for rounding error. They won’t let their paid political pony slow them down for a minute.

They can’t, or the whole AI CAPEX jazz hands dance falls apart.

But Florida isn’t just cheap everything. It’s also fragile, precious, and disappearing.

Because Florida isn’t West Virginia, it isn’t Oklahoma, and it isn’t the Arizona desert. We sit on a limestone aquifer that our drinking water, our springs, and our entire way of life depend on. Our power grid, aged and rickety, is controlled by a duopoly that spends lavishly in Tallahassee to avoid improving service, switching from oil and coal-fired power plants, or allowing home solar grid-tie in.

Even before Donalds allows thousands of data centers to be built, Florida is fighting saltwater intrusion, insane insurance costs, and a water table under pressure from hyperdevelopment. You want to drop a thousand facilities that drink water like a small city onto that? For Florida voters, water is visceral.

And Donalds knows it, which is why you now see him filing a show bill with no chance of passing called the “Protecting Ratepayers Act” and talking about closed-loop systems and on-site water treatment. Given that Byron is also a wholly-owned subsidiary of the aforementioned power oligopolies in Florida, it should be called the “Protecting Byron’s Ass Act.”

And then there’s the clip.

The one his own donors probably wish they could scrub off every server in the state. Donalds, on camera, making the case for using Florida’s land that’s “still pristine, available to use” to “build out that stuff.” Pristine.

He said the quiet part into a microphone. In a state where “pristine” means the Everglades, the springs, the longleaf pine woods, and the vanishing farmlands along the central spur of Florida from Hendry to Lake counties.

He says it in the clip: he’d much rather build a data center “or four” instead of a solar farm.

It means the exact thing every voter across every party line just told pollsters they want protected: Byron Donalds looked at pristine Florida land and saw a place to put a thousand server farms.

That’s the whole campaign in fifteen seconds, and it’s already living rent-free on TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube.

I’ve seen well-funded Florida candidates lose before.

It almost always comes down to one issue they couldn’t finesse because their donors wouldn’t let them. This is the issue. And no amount of AI money is going to explain to a retiree why her quality of life matters less to Data Center Donalds and his plan to let Big Tech build thousands of data centers farming AI slop. No horse farm in Marion wants to hear the screaming of a dozen jet engines all day and all night, forever.

It’s why this ad hits so hard:

I’m a fifth-generation Florida Man; my children are sixth; my grandchildren are seventh. There are a few of us in those categories, perhaps 5% of the state in mine, and 1% in theirs.

Florida, though, for all its insanity, all its corruption, all its mistakes and missteps, still has a magic to it. It still has those sugar-sand Panhandle beaches opening onto the Gulf, the rough power of the Atlantic just offshore on the East Coast, the wild edges barely preserved in the Everglades. It still has the Red Hills country where I live, long-leaf pines, and rolling landscape. It still has cowboys (we were first with cowboy culture, way before the West) working cattle in Central Florida. It still has our deep ties to Cuba and Latin America in Miami and Tampa. We’re the proverbial melting pot when it comes to food, music, families, and culture.

It has retirees coming to spend their last years somewhere without a harsh winter. Most worked their asses off to afford it, and don’t want to see a data center cratering their quality of life and their home values.

People are drawn here by something you can’t market, something you can’t just brand. A man like Byron Donalds, who looks at the pristine parts of Florida left after decades of letting developers pave it over, and knowing the destruction they’ll bring, and still wants thousands of data centers, has no business being its governor.