There is a version of the data center fight that conservatives are about to lose by winning.

Across the country, the Right is discovering it can beat data centers at the ballot box. In Pennsylvania, the Republican candidate for governor is running to the incumbent’s left on the issue — demanding a total development pause after Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), playing catch-up with public fury, ordered what he described as the nation’s strictest restrictions. The politics are understandable. The mob at the county hearing is real; I’ve stood in front of it in Virginia. But let’s be honest about where “pause everything” leads: to a permanent regulatory apparatus, run by people who never liked private infrastructure in the first place, deciding forever what may be built and where. Conservatives are winning a battle whose spoils are a bigger administrative state.