When I was in high school, I loved election time. I would debate topics and candidates with friends and classmates and even took a “fun” summer camp class on political parties. I also took nine hours of political science in college to supplement my journalism degree.

Despite my growing interest in politics, I have since soured on campaign season as commercials have gotten more negative and politicians’ rhetoric has become downright rude (on all sides). It hasn’t always been this bad. Negativity and, at times, false or misleading claims now fill the airwaves and social media feeds.

I am protective and proud to be part of the electric utility industry, and I don’t like people saying negative things about utilities. I realize there can be a reason for criticism. But from what I have seen covering this industry for 30 years, utilities generally want to provide reliability, security and resiliency to customers. The people working at utilities are customers, too.

There is plenty of debate around electricity affordability right now, and it’s hitting the campaigns. My antenna went up a couple of weeks ago, just before the primary election, when I heard commercials mentioning electric utilities in a negative sense. Data centers are one of the drivers, but affordability has become a central issue as economic concerns grow. You can probably just hear the dramatic voice-over now: “He made over a million dollars at a no-show job, gave tax breaks to data centers…”

Michigan has been particularly negative toward utilities in the recent primary campaign, according to a recent news story from Managing Editor Jeff Postelwait. Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed contended that opponent Haley Stevens had taken donations from political action groups affiliated with Consumers Energy and DTE Energy, which Stevens’ campaign denied. PBS NewsHour later rated the denial “mostly false.” Consumers Energy told Jeff its political contributions are transparent and that affordability is an issue it cares about.

That response gets to the heart of what is missing from the political conversation about electricity affordability: There are legitimate questions about what electricity should cost, who should pay for new infrastructure, and how utilities should prepare for load growth. But those are complicated questions, and they deserve more than a campaign commercial’s villain-and-victim narrative.

And I think we are going to hear a lot more of that narrative as we head toward the 2026 midterm elections.

Electricity affordability is an easy political target. Everyone has an electric bill. If that bill is higher than it was a year ago, voters notice. It is much harder to explain the combination of generation investments, transmission and distribution upgrades, storm hardening, wildfire mitigation, aging infrastructure, new demand and the enormous amount of capital required to keep the grid reliable.

Data centers make the story even easier to tell. They are big, visible and associated with some of the world's largest and most profitable companies. It is not difficult to turn “data centers need more electricity” into “data centers are making your electric bill higher.”

But the reality is considerably more complicated. Jigar Shah, who led the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office from 2021 to 2025, recently argued in Newsweek that data centers aren't what “broke” the grid. He questioned whether the utility regulatory model could encourage utilities to overbuild based on projected demand and argued for making better use of existing capacity through storage, flexible loads, demand response and competitive markets.

Shah’s commentary elicited quite a bit of discussion on LinkedIn. One response came from Frank Prager, a former senior vice president at Xcel Energy, who took issue with Shah’s op-ed. Prager pointed out that utilities are natural monopolies, but also highly regulated, and argued that the grid needs enormous amounts of new investment to meet growing energy needs. Attracting that capital requires investors to earn a reasonable return.

In other words, he wrote, “it ain’t the greed, it’s the need.” Prager also pushed back on the idea that utilities are resistant to innovation, pointing to the rapid growth of grid-scale storage and utilities’ efforts to find new technologies and unlock more capacity from the existing grid.

The exchange is interesting because it raised questions that are far more complicated than a campaign ad: How much new infrastructure do we need? Who should pay for it? How much risk should customers take? Can we get more out of the grid we already have? And are our regulatory and market structures providing the right incentives?

Those are the conversations I hope we see more of as the midterms approach. I expect we will see plenty of ads telling voters who is responsible for their electric bill, however.

The people making these decisions are dealing with a grid that has to work on the hottest afternoon of the year, during the coldest morning, through a major storm and as new devices, factories, and data centers are added. They have to plan years and decades ahead.

Those decisions have a very real impact on electricity bills. Our industry is having this debate and working on solutions because it has to. Just be wary of the 30-second commercial that turns a complicated problem into a villain.