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CG Charlie Garcia Charlie Garcia Advised six presidents, both parties.

“The new issue in American politics arrived in people's mailbox every month, and that's the electric bill. If you look at just household power prices, they're up more than 20% since 2024. And meanwhile you've got the giant data centers rising out of the cornfields to feed artificial intelligence. And three out of four voters did not want them in their town. That was something new in this election. I was really surprised at how united people were against it.”

Energy News Beat · Climate & Energy · November 2026

“The new issue in American politics arrived in people's mailbox every month, and that's the electric bill. If you look at just household power prices, they're up more than 20% since 2024. And meanwhile you've got the giant data centers rising out of the cornfields to feed artificial intelligence. And three out of four voters did not want them in their town. That was something new in this election. I was really surprised at how united people were against it.” — Charlie Garcia, Energy News Beat

Context

The panel was discussing why the midterms went the way they did. Garcia points to electricity bills and local opposition to AI data centers as a new voting issue; the figures are his own.

Transcript

Energy News Beat
Stu Turley

One of the key things is it is now a statistical fact that blue states are 52% higher in electricity costs. So we may have had a blue wave. That blue wave is going to hit every single American's pocketbook.

Speaker 3

Look, we'll have a red wave in two years. I mean, look, we are at the end stage of empire type stuff where the electorate swings wildly because there is no mathematical solution to the problems that face us. And so this is go ahead, Charlie.

Charlie Garcia

It also swings because there's no middle. Like on the right or the left, you're at extremes now. And the other thing that, you know, the new issue in American politics arrived in people's mailbox every month, and that's the electric bill. So, you know, if you look at just household power prices up more than 20% since 2024, Ohio more than 20. And meanwhile, you got the giant data centers, you know, rising the cornfields to feed artificial intelligence. And three out of four voters did not want them in their town. And, you know, that was something new in this election. And That whole, I was really surprised of how united people were against it.

Stu Turley

And Texas has the largest backlog of data centers. And there are two impacting things that are going to be a huge thing going forward: Governor Abbott did put a pause on it. It's going to be interesting to see the governor incumbent coming in on what she does. She says that she is for business and…

Speaker 3

Yeah, so just to put a button on what a disaster it was before I attacked that, one thing I wanted to say in my answer as proof is one of the Texas Rail Commission seats just went Democrat. I mean, you want to talk about a rifle shot at the beating heart of American energy. You know, the Texas…

Charlie Garcia

No, I agree with you because if it were real news, it wouldn't have taken over a year to come out. But if you look at where it also came out and who is publishing it, you got to dive pretty deep into who, you know, in government, you have all the big Department of War competing against the…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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