Five candidates angling to replace Gov. Gretchen Whitmer sat down Thursday in East Lansing to answer questions most of the frontrunners have avoided, and data centers dominated the conversation in ways that cut cleanly across party lines.
The Michigan Press Association hosted the forum at the Kellogg Conference Center during its annual conference. On the panel: state Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt, former Attorney General Mike Cox, businessman Perry Johnson, pastor Ralph Rebandt and Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson, the only Democrat in the group. Swanson’s presence made this the rare 2026 campaign event where a Democrat and four Republicans shared the same table. John James, Jocelyn Benson and Mike Duggan, the candidates who have led most public polling, did not attend. Former Republican state House Speaker Tom Leonard dropped out of the race the same morning and skipped the forum entirely.
Craig Mauger of The Detroit News moderated, pressing the candidates on press freedom, transparent government and the prospect of a federal takeover of Michigan elections. Then journalists in the room got their turn.
When Michigan Advance asked about data centers, the candidates moved fast and without much disagreement on the basics.
Nesbitt went first and set the frame. “We should be open for business, but not for sale,” he said. He laid out two hard rules he’d push as governor: no government subsidies for tech companies and no data centers outside industrial zones. He was direct about his skepticism of the industry’s biggest players. “The first thing with these big tech companies is, I don’t trust them,” Nesbitt said. “They have plenty of money. The government shouldn’t be subsidizing.” He also called out what he described as facilities eating up “hundreds of thousands of acres of farm and forest land” across the state, a concern that’s become central to opposition organizing in rural Michigan communities.
Cox took a different approach, one rooted in local government authority. He pointed out that while the Whitmer administration stripped municipalities of siting decisions for battery power, wind and solar, that authority hasn’t been touched for data centers. Every community, Cox said, already has the ability to put a moratorium on new facilities and he’d encourage them to use it.
That distinction matters. It means the fight over data centers in Michigan isn’t just a Lansing question right now. It plays out township by township, at planning commission meetings and county board sessions, without a unified statewide framework to guide any of it.
The opposition Nesbitt and Cox are responding to isn’t theoretical. Across Michigan, an unusual coalition has been organizing against large-scale data center development, pushing back on noise, water consumption, energy demand and the conversion of farmland to server infrastructure. Rural conservative Republicans and urban progressive Democrats don’t agree on much, but they’ve found common ground here. That coalition has grown louder and better organized through the first months of 2026, showing up at public hearings and pushing local elected officials for answers the state hasn’t provided.
Data centers demand enormous amounts of electricity and water to keep servers running and cool. The U.S. Department of Energy has documented the sector’s rapid growth in energy consumption nationally. In Michigan, that intersects with a grid already managing the transition away from coal and a farm economy where land conversion is a generational concern.
None of the five candidates on Thursday called for an outright ban. But the consensus that emerged, at least from Nesbitt and Cox, pointed toward tighter zoning, no public subsidy and more deference to local communities to set their own terms.
What’s missing from that picture is any detailed plan for how a future governor would build a statewide framework that doesn’t leave every township making these calls in isolation, without consistent environmental review standards or energy impact assessments. The candidates who didn’t show up Thursday, the ones with larger campaign operations and more name recognition, haven’t answered that question publicly either.
The Michigan Press Association forum doesn’t carry the weight of a televised debate, but Thursday’s session gave voters something the 2026 race has been short on: five people with actual policy positions willing to defend them on the record before a room of journalists, on a question that’s moving fast through communities from the Upper Peninsula to the Downriver suburbs.
The next major candidate forum has not been scheduled as of April 25.
