Teresa Benitez-Thompson just became the first Democrat to win Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District. Her state campaign finance record shows years of contributions tied to the same data-center and utility interests now seeking federal attention.
Former Nevada Assembly Majority Leader Teresa Benitez-Thompson won Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District in the Nov. 3 election, becoming the first Democrat to hold the historically Republican northern Nevada seat.
State campaign finance filings reviewed earlier this year showed Benitez-Thompson’s state legislative campaigns accepted at least $9,000 from Switch-related interests, lobbyists and companies involved in Nevada’s data-center tax break debate, along with $23,000 from NV Energy, Nevada Power and Sierra Pacific Power between 2010 and 2020.
Benitez-Thompson voted for the 2015 legislation that created Nevada’s data-center tax abatement framework during her time in the state Legislature. She has since become a more vocal critic of the industry’s rapid growth, saying no one anticipated artificial intelligence would drive data-center expansion to its current scale when the original framework passed.
Nevada has approved roughly $457 million in projected data-center tax abatements under the framework Benitez-Thompson’s 2015 vote helped establish, a program that predates the current AI-driven data-center boom by nearly a decade.
As a member of Congress, Benitez-Thompson will now have a role in federal oversight and policy affecting the same data-center and utility interests that contributed to her state campaigns for more than a decade, including questions around federal land use, energy infrastructure and tax policy that touch the industry directly.
Congressional financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules differ from Nevada’s own state-level requirements, and apply to Benitez-Thompson for the first time as she transitions from state to federal office.
Benitez-Thompson’s win makes history for Nevada’s 2nd District. It also means a decade of campaign contributions from the data-center and utility industries follows her from Carson City to Washington — this time into a seat with far more direct influence over the federal rules that industry answers to.
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