Plethora of polls show ‘emotional response to arguments,’ says Port mayor
Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke said he isn’t at all surprised by new polling that suggests people in Wisconsin are more than ever opposed to data centers.
Despite promises by developers to pay their own way for the power and infrastructure they will need and the proven cooling technology that refutes claims that they will “drain Lake Michigan,” you can expect some people to never change their minds, Neitzke said.
Add to it that some of this development will be used for artificial intelligence, itself a subject of fear and misunderstanding, and it is little wonder politicians such as the City Council in Madison in January, state Democrat legislators last month and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, always, think it’s time to push the pause button.
The industry’s guarantees about electricity and water are really beside the point. People who are opposed to data centers and AI are people who are opposed to and fearful of progress, in the same way people opposed railroads, television and the internet, Neitzke, the former history teacher, told the Badger Institute.
“It’s like the farriers” — blacksmiths and hoof trimmers — “losing their livelihoods when Henry Ford figured out the auto assembly line,” Neitzke said.
The most recent Marquette Law School poll, released last week, supports recent national polling by data analysts Echelon Insights and Politico showing public opinion turning against data centers.
When asked in February whether the costs of large data centers outweighed the benefits, 70 percent of Wisconsin respondents said yes. Last October, the percentage was 55 percent.
But what most of the Marquette poll coverage overlooked is how little respondents actually knew about data centers. When asked, 84 percent of women and 75 percent of men said they either knew “a little” (63 and 60 percent, respectively) or “nothing at all” (21 percent and 15 percent, respectively).
Recent polling in Pennsylvania suggests the public isn’t very thoughtful about AI, either. The last question on one survey divided respondents into those who had and hadn’t seen “The Terminator,” the 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie about an AI attempt to take over the world.
Roughly 32 percent of those who had seen the frightening film said they considered AI a “significant threat.” Only 24 percent of those who had not seen it were similarly threatened. Sixteen percent of those who had not seen the movie considered AI “no threat at all,” while only eight percent of those who had seen it could say the same thing.
‘Emotional response’
Neitzke helped orchestrate the biggest data center deal in state history last year. He and the Port Washington Common Council made a point of introducing the company developing the center, Vantage, to the community in three public meetings that the public largely ignored.
When the deal was approved, some complained they had not been informed. They rewarded Neitzke with an attempt to recall him that fell a few hundred petition signatures short.
“What you’re seeing with the polls is an emotional response to arguments against data centers coming so fast that you can’t keep up,” Neitzke told the Badger Institute. “What we’ve learned is that you cannot combat emotions with facts.”
Tricia Braun, executive director of the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition, said the organization was created to inform the public of the benefits of data centers to Wisconsin companies all along the supply chain.
There is also FRWD, or Fair Rates for Wisconsin’s Dairyland, a group of unions and electricity providers with a website debunking myths about data centers. Organizers did not respond to Badger Institute.
The data center coalition has been swamped with requests to respond to negative publicity, Braun said.
“I believe reporters come to us looking for somebody to give them a different perspective. What I think you’re seeing is a point of view pushed on social media. You grab onto a vocal protester, you are going to have a very misinformed conversation.”
Last July, in the flush of data center deals in Port Washington and in Mount Pleasant, where Microsoft is building one, the Janesville City Council sent out a message welcoming offers to put a data center on the site of a former General Motors assembly plant, as the Badger Institute reported.
After an $8 billion offer came in, residents got the City Council to add a referendum to the November ballot to require that any development in Janesville valued at $450 million or more be put to a citywide vote.
“Not much unites Americans these days,” a group called No Janesville Data Center posted on Facebook on Feb. 19. “But a growing cross section of the public — from MAGA loyalists to democratic socialists, pastors to policymakers, nurses to filmmakers — agree on at least one thing: AI is moving too fast.”
The data center offer remains on what has become a shaky table.
“That GM site has been empty for years,” Braun said. “It needs environmental mitigation. They tried over and over with companies to make it work and it just wouldn’t. Then you get an offer that would take care of all that and people don’t want it. I can’t understand.”
Braun said she thinks the messaging is coming from outside of Wisconsin, although she isn’t sure of the sources. What is clear is that although organized opposition came a little late to Wisconsin, it has organized far faster than any organized support.
Data Center Watch canvassed the country between May 2024 and March 2025 and identified 142 anti-data center activist groups in Wisconsin and 23 other states.
Dozens more groups, including No Janesville Data Center, have organized in the past year, Data Center Watch says. And while many of them are grassroots, many others, such as Clean Wisconsin and Clean Economy Coalition of Wisconsin, are well established and well funded.
For these groups, data centers are just the latest sign of progress for them to stand athwart, like fossil fuels and the infrastructure needed to power a modern society.
Neitzke said the corporations that want to build data centers in a hurry have done themselves no favors keeping the names of the companies behind the offers a secret.
While he didn’t offer an opinion on Senate Bill 969 filed last month that would prohibit data center developments from compelling communities to sign non-disclosure agreements, Neitzke understands the sentiment of the author, state Rep. Clint Moses (R-Menomonie).
When Neitzke told Vantage the city would not agree to an NDA to keep the names of the future operators, OpenAI and Oracle, a secret, the companies kept their names from city officials until they announced them to the public, he said.
“I think these companies need to be better at telling us who they are,” Neitzke said. “They need to win over the communities they want to come into. We should be arguing about all of this in the sunshine.”
Mark Lisheron is managing editor at the Badger Institute.
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