Jon Husted Spent His Senate Term Defending Data Centers. Ohio Fired Him Over Them on November 3rd — and Six Days Later, the Senate Finally Moved.

Jon Husted spent the final nine days of his Senate campaign with Donald Trump standing next to him at two separate rallies. It wasn't enough. On November 3rd, Ohio voters sent Sherrod Brown back to the Senate seat he'd lost in 2024, unseating the Republican incumbent who'd held it for barely a year. Husted was appointed last year to fill the vacancy Vice President JD Vance left behind, and before that he spent years as Ohio's lieutenant governor making a specific pitch: data centers were the state's industrial future, the thing that would follow manufacturing the way manufacturing once followed agriculture. Brown's campaign spent months turning that pitch into a liability, tying Husted directly to the electric bills showing up in Ohio mailboxes as AEP and other utilities built out tens of billions of dollars in new capacity for data-center load. Data centers weren't the only issue in a race shaped by gas prices and a national mood on affordability. They were, by most accounts of the campaign, one of the ones that mattered.

What makes Husted's loss worth dwelling on, instead of just another name on a long list of midterm casualties, is that he saw the fight coming and tried to get out ahead of it. In September, he pushed his own answer to the ratepayer-bill problem: the Ratepayer Protection Act, which told state utility commissions to "consider" requiring large loads like data centers to pay the full, incremental cost of whatever grid upgrade their interconnection required, instead of spreading that cost across everyone else's bill. GridPermit covered that bill's House passage in September and the single word -- "consider" -- that quietly hollowed it out. The House passed it 417-3. The Senate did not agree so easily.

The bill that failed by three votes

Husted tried to skip the floor fight entirely on September 18th, asking for unanimous consent to pass his bill without a recorded vote, pointing to the lopsided House margin as proof the outcome wasn't in doubt. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico objected. His reason, stated plainly at the time: "It's not enough for us to tell states to consider making data centers pay for grid updates. Rather than voluntary pledges or suggestions to states, Congress needs to pass real legislation with real teeth." Twelve days later, on September 30th, the Senate took the bill up formally and rejected it, 57-43 -- three votes short of the 60 needed to advance. Four Democrats broke ranks to support it anyway: Maggie Hassan, Amy Klobuchar, Jon Ossoff, and Raphael Warnock. It wasn't enough to clear the floor. "Senate Democrats are the only ones who refused to take yes for an answer," Husted said after the vote. Sen. John Hickenlooper offered the Democratic counter-read just as bluntly: the bill, he said, "has no teeth."

Both men were describing the same document correctly. A bill that tells regulators to think about a problem, with no consequence attached to deciding not to, is a real step and a weak one at the same time, and the Senate split almost exactly down the line that distinction predicts. Heinrich's own alternative, the GRID Savings Act, aimed at a narrower target with a harder edge: it would have required the very largest electricity users -- data centers drawing 150 megawatts or more -- to pay the full cost of the grid upgrades needed to connect them, as a matter of law, not a matter of state discretion. It never got a floor vote of its own. For a few weeks, the fight over who pays for a data center's grid footprint looked like it was going to end exactly where these fights usually do: a real problem, two bills nobody could agree on, and nothing moving.

A bipartisan bill with the teeth the partisan one lacked

It didn't end there. The same week Husted's bill died, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Mike Lee, Environment and Public Works Chairman Shelley Moore Capito, and Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, a much larger permitting-reform package built around speeding up transmission siting and protecting finished project permits from being relitigated. Folded into it is a data-center provision closer to what Heinrich wanted than what Husted's bill offered: it directs FERC, within 90 days of enactment, to rewrite its transmission-pricing rules so that any new data center of 20 megawatts or more -- a lower bar than the 150-megawatt line Heinrich's own standalone bill had drawn -- pays the real cost of the service it uses and the grid upgrades its connection requires, closing off the current practice of charging customers for both the existing system and the new upgrade on top of it. Lee, not usually a man short on comparisons, pointed to the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge as projects this country once built in years, not decades, and said that's the pace the broader bill is aimed at restoring.

I think the contrast between these two bills is the real story, more than either one alone. Husted's bill asked states to consider something and couldn't get 60 votes even for that. The bipartisan package orders a federal agency to act on a fixed clock, with a lower threshold than either of the two earlier Democratic or Republican proposals, and it did it by wrapping a politically radioactive single-industry fight inside a much larger bill that offers something to almost every energy interest in the chamber -- faster permits for gas plants, for transmission lines, for the reconductoring projects utilities have been asking for all year. Whether that's a better way to legislate or just a more effective one is a fair question. It's also, so far, the one that's actually moved.

What moved, and what hasn't yet

Six days after Ohio voted Husted out, the Senate took its first real action on any of this. On Monday, November 9th, senators voted 73-25 for cloture on the motion to proceed -- widely described as the chamber's first major floor action since the midterm elections, which GridPermit has already covered in the context of the 41 local data-center measures that went to voters the same Election Day. That 73-25 margin is not final passage. The bill still faces floor amendments, a conference with whatever the House produces, and a data-center industry that hasn't lined up behind it the way the steel and chemical trade groups did behind an earlier version of the Ratepayer Protection Act. The Data Center Coalition, whose members include Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, has not endorsed the bill. President Trump has.

What happens to that 20-megawatt threshold between now and final passage is worth watching closely, because it's the number that decides how many projects a federal cost-allocation rule would actually touch. At 150 megawatts, Heinrich's original bill would have left most mid-size colocation and enterprise campuses outside federal reach, governed only by whatever their state's large-load tariff already says -- which, as GridPermit's own tariff coverage keeps finding, ranges from detailed and binding to effectively nonexistent. At 20 megawatts, a much larger share of the facilities this industry actually builds would fall under a single federal floor instead of fifty separate state answers. Nobody in Washington has yet said plainly whether that floor would preempt a state's existing tariff, sit alongside it, or simply give FERC jurisdiction at the transmission-interconnection layer where state commissions don't already reach. That's an open question, not a settled one, and it's exactly the kind of gap a Kill Test is built to flag rather than guess past.

Husted isn't on the ballot again for six years, and the seat he lost now belongs to a senator who spent his whole campaign arguing the industry Husted defended was costing Ohioans money with no accountability attached. That's one senator's verdict on one specific bill's failure to deliver what it promised. The Senate's answer, nine days later, was to try again with a bill that promises less politically and requires more legally. Whether it survives the floor is still genuinely unresolved. What isn't unresolved is the lesson sitting underneath both votes: telling ratepayers a company will probably be made to pay its own way, eventually, if a regulator feels like it, is no longer a position with much of a political shelf life. Someone has to actually write the number down, and increasingly, the voters deciding who sits in the Senate are the ones setting that deadline.