Will data centers determine control of the Pa. Senate?

August 20, 2026

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Good afternoon everyone,

It’s Thursday, Aug. 20, and welcome back to another edition of the Keystone Labor Report. You can find Tuesday’s newsletter here.

Here’s a quick programming note.

Starting next Thursday, we will be publishing the Keystone Labor Report once a week to help free up some space for covering the midterm elections, and I am looking forward to incorporating more coverage into the newsletter.

Here’s an ad worth watching from Brian Wrightson, a Democrat running for the Pennsylvania Senate in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Wrightson brilliantly highlights his career as a telecommunications worker by hanging on the side of a cell phone tower and using it as an opportunity to go after data centers for driving up electric bills.

Sean Kitchen

Political Correspondent, The Keystone

(AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Andrew Tupone, the alleged Green Party candidate running for Congress in the Lehigh Valley, had his day in Commonwealth Court on Thursday to defend his nomination petitions in order to stay on November’s ballot.

Democrats have accused Tupone of being a Republican plant seeking to spoil Bob Brooks’ chances of defeating Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Lehigh), and they have a laundry list of reasons to think that.

Tupone, whose candidacy is being challenged by the Green Party of Pennsylvania and Democratic voters living in the district, recently hired Wally Zimolong to defend the petitions he submitted. By law, he must have 4,704 valid signatures to get on the ballot. He sent in over 10,000, but enough are being challenged that he may be thrown off the ballot.

Zimolong introduced a lawsuit trying to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results, is representing Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s neighbors in a lawsuit about security upgrades at Shapiro’s Montgomery County home, and has donated $250 to Mackenzie’s campaign.

“After speaking with him I felt confident he was a good person to hire,” Tupone told the Allentown Morning Call in an email.

Read the latest on Tupone’s candidacy here

Data center polling is so bad that the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, is warning that the issue may tank the right’s chances of winning in Ohio, per Axios.
Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak has surpassed 300 confirmed cases since the beginning of the year, spanning over 21 counties, per PennLive.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) traveled to Allentown on Wednesday to campaign for Mackenzie and remains “bullish” that Pennsylvania will help Republicans retain control of the US House, per Punchbowl News.

(Paul Weaver / SOPA Images via Getty Images)

With data centers being a political liability, Shapiro went on the attack against state Senate Republicans on the issue, urging them to take legislative action. The governor signed an executive order which established some of the most stringent data center regulations in the country earlier this week.

Over 70% of Pennsylvania residents disapprove of data centers being built in their communities, but Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate have held up legislation regulating data centers and keeping lucrative tax breaks in place for developers.

Democrats only need to pick up three seats this November to flip the chamber and have a legislative trifecta in Harrisburg for the first time in more than 30 years.

“ It now really puts a spotlight on the Senate Republicans as the impediment to making sure that we have protections under law to protect communities from data centers,” J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist, said in an interview with The Keystone.