It’s almost impossible in these times to find a specific policy issue on which Democrats and Republicans agree, but there is one: opposition to data centers in their backyards.

This bipartisan concurrence, I hasten to add, is found chiefly in areas where data centers have already been built and begun to operate. Proximity, it appears, breeds contempt.

A Washington Post/Schar School poll released yesterday shows that the share of Virginians saying they’d be “comfortable” if a new data center were built in their community has plummeted to half the level it was at just three years ago. In 2023, 69 percent of state residents said a new data center was fine with them; today, that figure stands at just 35 percent. Democratic support for such data centers has collapsed from 72 percent three years ago to a bare 28 percent today; Republican support has sunk by a smaller but still impressive 20 percentage points, from 67 percent in ’23 to 47 percent in ’26.

The poll unpacks some, but not all, of the reasons for this air-out-of-the-balloon deflation. The share of Virginians saying that these centers increase their “energy” bills—by which it’s safe to assume most respondents took that to mean electric bills—was 57 percent. While Washington, D.C.’s exurbs are home to the nation’s highest density of such centers, vast areas of the state still don’t host any, so that 57 percent doubtless reflects far higher levels in those regions where those centers proliferate.

Local proliferation also engenders another reason for center-phobia: yet another manifestation of the ever-popular “there goes the neighborhood” sentiment, particularly when these massive centers are built on the open fields and undeveloped spaces that can give such neighborhoods a more bucolic feel, or are actually bucolic in themselves.