A new campaign ad from former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown criticizes Republican Sen. Jon Husted over the growth of data centers in Ohio, using footage of a Google-owned facility in Lancaster as its backdrop. But campaign finance records show Brown’s own campaigns have accepted tens of thousands of dollars in contributions tied to Google.
The ad, released Sept. 4, features an Ohioan blaming Husted for pushing to bring data centers to the state and tying their expansion to rising electric bills. The facility shown in the ad opened in Lancaster in 2023 and is owned by Google.
Records reviewed by Fox News Digital show Google’s corporate PAC has given Brown $20,000 over the course of his political career. Brown has also received thousands of dollars from individuals who lobby on Google’s behalf, including two whose firms have worked on issues such as permitting, grid reliability and energy affordability.
Among the donors are Google lobbyist Lisa Kountoupes, who gave Brown $3,500 in March, and Google lobbyist Michael D. Smith, who has contributed $10,200 to Brown since 2017, according to Federal Election Commission records. All the contributions went to Friends of Sherrod Brown, his principal campaign committee.
Kountoupes’s firm, Kountoupes Denham Carr & Reid, was hired by Google in December to lobby on permitting reform tied to the company’s data center needs, according to previous reporting by Politico. Smith’s firm, Cornerstone Government Affairs, has lobbied for Google on permitting reform related to grid reliability and energy affordability, federal filings show. FEC records also show Brown received a combined $6,000 over the past decade from three other Google lobbyists.
Campaign Reaction
Mehek Cooke, a Republican strategist and attorney in Ohio, said the donations undercut the ad’s message. “Apparently Google is terrible enough to put in a campaign attack ad, but perfectly acceptable when the political contributions are coming in,” she said in a statement. “That is the contradiction Brown needs to answer. If Google’s Lancaster investment is so bad for Ohio, why was Google political money acceptable to Sherrod Brown?”
Cooke called the situation “Jekyll-and-Hyde politics,” saying Brown has long presented himself as a working-class populist while his Washington record tells a different story.
Lauren Chou, a spokeswoman for Brown’s campaign, defended the ad’s focus on Husted’s role in the state’s data center boom but did not directly address the campaign contributions. “Husted is a ‘chief reason’ Ohio has 226 data centers and is ‘the face of data centers’ in Ohio,” Chou said. “Ohioans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize these costs and Ohioans – not Jon Husted and his billionaire friends – should get to decide if data centers are built in their community.”
A History of Mixed Messages
Brown, who served in the U.S. Senate from 2006 until losing his 2024 reelection bid to Sen. Bernie Moreno, is now seeking to return to the Senate in a race against Husted. This is not the first time his campaign has faced questions about conflicting positions on data centers.
In 2015, Brown celebrated the construction of an Amazon data center in central Ohio, saying in a press release at the time that the facility “is great news for New Albany and central Ohio.” He has since become a vocal critic of the state’s expanding data center industry, an issue that has become prominent in Ohio politics ahead of the midterms.
Cooke argued the broader debate matters beyond any single facility. “America is in a global race for AI, computing capacity and energy infrastructure,” she said. “China is not slowing down because American politicians discovered that attacking data centers makes a convenient campaign commercial.”
Husted campaign spokesperson Amy Natoce criticized Brown’s record, saying he failed Ohio families during his time in Washington. “The House overwhelmingly passed Sen. Husted’s bipartisan legislation requiring data center companies to pay for the power they use, but Senate Democrats blocked it,” Natoce said. “Sherrod Brown and his friends would rather play politics and stick Ohio families with higher electric bills than pass a commonsense solution. It’s despicable.”
