A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
All right, Steve, so tell us about your swing through the South.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Well, we're hearing voters in two big states here in the Southeast, here in Georgia and also North Carolina, which has a big Senate race. We took a North Carolina road trip, interviewed more than 50 people in cities and small towns, and often found them at random, so we'd get some ground truth.
MILTON GUEVARA, BYLINE: Testing. Testing.
INSKEEP: Our producer Milton Guevara followed me into a hardware store on the main street of Walnut Cove, population 1,600. Ryan Dunlap owns that store.
RYAN DUNLAP: It's a third-generation family business.
INSKEEP: Which explains his politics.
DUNLAP: I'm a Republican.
INSKEEP: OK.
DUNLAP: I mean, I don't know how you can be in business for yourself and not be conservative.
INSKEEP: He is not excited with how business is going. Amazon takes some of his customers, and so does inflation.
DUNLAP: You can't really price anything off the top of your head anymore like I used to could do. I say, hold on, let me look it up. 'Cause every time it goes up, you know, two, three, four, $5, and that's the state we're in now.
INSKEEP: And you're having to raise your prices...
DUNLAP: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...For your customers.
DUNLAP: And then shipping's up and all that. So it's just passed down.
INSKEEP: He says 2026 is his worst year. President Trump is not on the ballot but has been urging voters to act as though he is.
How do you think Trump is doing this term?
DUNLAP: I don't know, man. It's a lot going on. It's - I don't know. With the conflict and everything now. I will say, in this first term, we had some of our best years of business ever. And this - you know, with everything going on now, it's just kind of put the brakes on it.
INSKEEP: By the conflict, he says he means the war in Iran. Dunlap hasn't really paid attention to the millions of dollars' worth of ads in the North Carolina Senate race. He usually leans right but says he could vote either way. He's one of the people we met on a lively main street, which also has a theater and The Milk Bar, where Kristi Shirley (ph) was serving a busy lunch crowd.
It smells amazing in here.
KRISTI SHIRLEY: Well, thank you.
INSKEEP: What's the specialty? What's the best thing?
SHIRLEY: Today on the hot bar, we have meatloaf, fried tenderloin and gravy.
INSKEEP: We sampled both, of course, and sampled opinions at the tables. Most diners are voting Republican. We are in Stokes County, which voted 79% for Trump in 2024. But it's now divided over something Trump supports - AI data centers. A developer plans one at the edge of town, and that bothers Republicans, including Chris Simpkins (ph), a mailman who moved here to live on a farm.
CHRIS SIMPKINS: We're a little worried about it, yeah.
INSKEEP: What concerns do you have? How might it be bad for you?
SIMPKINS: Just the environmental - the water, noise pollution, air pollution.
INSKEEP: I guess if you moved out here to be away from all that.
SIMPKINS: Yeah. (Laughter) And it's following us out here. Yes, sir.
INSKEEP: The data center also bothers Bill Petree (ph). We found him at Walnut Cove's other hardware store.
Beautiful store.
BILL PETREE: Well, thank you. How much do you want to buy?
INSKEEP: I'll figure that out as we go.
PETREE: (Laughter).
INSKEEP: He is one of the Democrats in town.
PETREE: I'm not a fan of the Republican Congress. They don't stand up to Trump's corruption.
INSKEEP: Petree has circulated petitions and attended county commission meetings to object to the plan for the data center. He's concerned about the water use, the power cost and native gravesites on the land.
PETREE: So they fail to realize that this is not going to be an economic benefit to this area. It's just going to be a detriment to everything else.
INSKEEP: There will be tax revenue, I'm sure.
PETREE: There may be some tax revenue.
INSKEEP: He questions how much.
Does this feel like it is, in some way, an election issue this fall, like, people voting for Congress, people voting for Senate might have this on their mind?
PETREE: Around here, yes, I think they do because in the last year, I have not had a single person walk through that door that voiced approval of this data center.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATERFALL)
INSKEEP: You walk down these many stone steps here in the state park and you end up at Window Falls, one of the beautiful scenes in this county. The water flows down to a river that passes by the proposed site of the data center, and the beauty of this place helps to explain why many residents are opposed to that project. Our guide in Stokes County was April Laissle. She's covered the data center fight for our local member station WFDD. She showed us the land where the data center would stand, almost 3 square miles of fields and woods.
APRIL LAISSLE, BYLINE: You can see right in the background. That is Belews Creek steam station, the coal-fired power plant.
INSKEEP: Oh, really, this smokestack, this giant smokestack on the horizon?
LAISSLE: Yep. Yep.
INSKEEP: OK. So it is the power plant being nearby that makes this an advantageous spot for a data center.
LAISSLE: Yes. And the company has talked about building nuclear sites there as well.
INSKEEP: April has covered the public response all year.
LAISSLE: Where to start?
INSKEEP: The county commission held a critical meeting to consider the proposal.
LAISSLE: It seemed like the whole town came out to this meeting to see how they were going to vote. And it was very emotional. These county commissioners, really some of them it seemed like their backs were against the wall. I remember one commissioner, Sonya Cox, crying and saying, you know, that she understood why her neighbors were so upset, but she knew that the money generated from this could help them pay for ambulances. And they routinely would have to wait 45 minutes for an ambulance out here.
INSKEEP: The meeting grew tense.
LAISSLE: And there is a crowd downstairs outside in the parking lot yelling as the developer is giving this presentation.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) We don't want it. We don't want it.
INSKEEP: Then one commissioner invoked the name that once would have quieted all debate here.
LAISSLE: He was trying to, I think, galvanize the crowd by saying, hey, President Trump wants more AI data centers. He wants us to get ahead in this race with China. And it didn't land.
INSKEEP: The all-Republican county commission divided, voting 3 to 2 in favor of the data center. A lawsuit forced them to reverse that, but they later voted in favor again. In this recording, you hear the developer pitching his project to the commission as protesters outside chant no.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) No. No.
DREW NATIONS: So who we are. We're the developer ELS.
INSKEEP: We asked the developer to tell us his story.
NATIONS: We're going to be building a data center campus. It'll be a hyperscale data center campus. It's what you read about on the news. It's what's happening all across this country and all across the world.
INSKEEP: Drew Nations is a North Carolina resident who says he wanted to be a developer ever since he was 18. He founded his own company and sees data centers as the future.
Is this a financial risk for you?
NATIONS: Have you started a business before?
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
He says he has a lot at risk, and he wants to answer every concern. Though his buildings would cover millions of square feet, he contends they would be surrounded by forest, hardly visible and wouldn't use much water.
NATIONS: I don't want to see data centers using millions of gallons of water a day.
INSKEEP: He's promising to use closed-loop cooling, which draws on limited amounts of water instead of a constant flow.
NATIONS: We have to grow our way into a better future. And if you want a future, you have to invest in it.
INSKEEP: The project still needs state environmental approval and a giant AI firm to announce it will occupy the space, but the developer is determined to push forward.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, Steve, I mean, data centers are a big part of this election. How do Senate candidates in North Carolina address them?
INSKEEP: Yeah. Both of them have had to. Democrat Roy Cooper fits this into his broader theme of keeping costs down. He says people shouldn't pay higher power bills, for example. Republican Michael Whatley is pro-Trump and pro-data center, even has said the protests are being ginned up. But even Whatley says if a community doesn't want a data center, they shouldn't have to accept it. This is not likely to be the last election where data centers are an issue. And we have more voices from the Southeast throughout this morning.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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