On June 15, Montgomery County Presiding Commissioner Ryan Poston stood beside state officials and Amazon representatives to celebrate a $10 billion data-center campus planned near New Florence. With Google already building its own $15 billion complex across Interstate 70, Poston predicted that Montgomery County was about to become an example for the rest of Missouri.

“Montgomery County is going to show the rest of the state of Missouri how to lead,” he said. “Because that’s what we do in Montgomery County. We lead.”

Fifty days later, Montgomery County voters chose someone else to lead them.

According to the county’s unofficial election-night report, all 13 precincts had reported by Tuesday night. Of 6,579 registered voters, 3,389 cast ballots—a turnout rate of approximately 51.5 percent.

In the Republican primary for presiding commissioner:

Harry Cope received 1,954 votes.

Ryan D. Poston received 1,367 votes.

Cope won by 587 votes, taking nearly 59 percent of the vote and defeating a longtime incumbent by almost 18 percentage points.

The result was not close enough to attribute to a few adjacent landowners, one unusually motivated precinct or a small circle of online activists. Cope won a decisive countywide victory in an election that brought more than half of Montgomery County’s registered voters to the polls.

The comparison with the previous August primary makes the turnout even more striking. Missouri’s official 2024 results recorded 2,451 primary ballots in Montgomery County. This year, 3,389 people voted—an increase of 938 ballots, or roughly 38 percent.

An election is not a scientific referendum on a single issue. Voters are not required to explain their reasoning, and no honest analysis should claim that every Cope voter cast a ballot solely because of Google, Amazon or the county’s handling of the projects.

But elections do not happen outside their political context.

This race unfolded after months of packed meetings, public-records battles, legal action and organized opposition to two of the largest industrial developments in Missouri history. It came weeks after a countywide survey documented intense public resistance. It pitted the incumbent most publicly associated with welcoming the projects against a farmer who had made transparency, fair taxation and local stewardship central to his campaign.

The result does not tell us why every individual voted.

It does tell us that the political cost of the AI factory next door is no longer theoretical.

The public had already answered

Before the election, Montgomery County residents had already been asked directly what they thought about data-center development.

The Missouri Rural Crisis Center said it mailed a survey to registered voters throughout the county. It received 1,461 responses:

• 1,239 opposed
• 154 supported
• 68 were undecided

Approximately 85 percent of respondents opposed the development, compared with roughly 10 percent in support and 5 percent undecided. MRCC reported a response rate of approximately 27 percent—far above the 10 percent or less it typically receives from similar mail surveys.

The survey was not an online poll that could be flooded by people outside the county. It was not an informal show of hands at a meeting organized exclusively by opponents. It was a countywide attempt to measure the opinions of registered voters, and nearly 1,500 people took the time to respond.

When MRCC announced the findings outside Amazon’s June open house, organizing director Olivia Stockman explained why the response mattered,

“People who live, farm and work at the front lines of this rapid, massive industrial encroachment have the most at stake.”

Lifelong Montgomery County resident Tammy Ridgley pointed to a promise residents said Amazon had made early in the process,

“Amazon told us early on that they only went where they were welcome.”

The survey provided a difficult answer to that claim.

Amazon held its public open house after site preparation had already begun. Inside the school gym, representatives arranged informational booths on water, electricity, acoustics, jobs and community investments. Outside, residents held a press conference arguing that the essential decisions had already been made.

Amazon’s community engagement manager said the company wanted to answer residents’ questions face-to-face. When asked about the survey and public opposition, however, she declined to address those subjects directly and instead emphasized the company’s proposed local contributions and employment opportunities.

Resident Tom Westhoff summarized the problem,

“An informational meeting at this time, when all the contracts have been signed and construction is already underway, is almost pointless.”

The survey and the election measured different things.

One asked residents directly about development. The other asked them to choose between two candidates for county leadership.

They cannot be treated as interchangeable data.

But they belong to the same political sequence.

First, residents said they opposed the developments.

Then, at their first major countywide opportunity to choose new leadership, they removed the presiding commissioner who had publicly promoted them.

The information gap came first

The conflict in Montgomery County did not begin when Google and Amazon publicly attached their names to Project Spade and Project Green.

It began when residents realized how much had already happened without them.

Brenda Buechele first became concerned after learning that something was happening to Buechele Road, the public road near her home named after her father. County officials initially discussed the matter as a road closure and said nondisclosure agreements had been signed to protect landowners.

What Buechele was not initially told was that the road issue was tied to sites being assembled for two of the largest technology companies in the world.

After connecting with me through Warren County Citizens for Responsible Development, Buechele began assembling the documents herself. She spent more than $2,000 obtaining public records and built binders showing how county officials, economic-development organizations, NorthPoint Development and the Missouri Department of Economic Development had advanced the projects over a period of years.

This is the pattern I have described throughout The AI Factory Next Door.

The AI factory is not merely the building where servers will eventually operate. It is the entire physical and political system required to place that building in a community:

The land assembly.

The road vacations.

The substations and transmission lines.

The water and wastewater systems.

The tax incentives.

The economic-development intermediaries.

The coded project names.

The public institutions asked to formalize decisions after much of the private planning is already complete.

As this publication documented in December, Project Spade was not simply one building described generically as a data center. Planning documents showed a roughly 900-acre industrial campus with three primary buildings exceeding one million square feet each, multiple substations, water infrastructure, security facilities, transmission easements and relocated roads and pipelines.

By the time the public understood the physical scale, residents were no longer being invited into a blank planning process. They were trying to catch up with one already in motion. Public participation is not meaningful merely because a microphone eventually appears, residents can be allowed to comment and still have no practical influence over the central decision. They can receive an informational presentation after land has been purchased, engineering has begun and public officials have spent years cultivating a project.

They can technically be heard while remaining politically late.

“Nobody asked us”

In December, roughly 400 residents filled the Montgomery City Elementary School auditorium for more than two hours of questions and public criticism concerning Project Green and Project Spade. The size and tenor of the gathering made clear that opposition was neither confined to the projects’ immediate neighbors nor limited to a small circle of activists.

Stephanie Garcia stated the democratic problem in its simplest form,

“Nobody asked us if we wanted this.”

Harry Cope confronted Poston directly,

“This is a crock—you got this community so divided.”

That meeting exposed the gap between two understandings of local government. County leadership presented the projects as economic-development opportunities whose principal questions involved infrastructure, jobs and revenue. Residents were asking an earlier and more fundamental question: Who authorized county government to commit Montgomery County to this future before the county itself understood what was coming?

That is why the controversy could not be reduced to water consumption, noise, taxes or farmland alone. Those concerns are real, but beneath them was a crisis of representation. The public was not only questioning what the developments would do.

It was questioning whose interests had guided the process.

What the deals actually contained

The size of the developments makes the representation problem impossible to dismiss as ordinary zoning friction.

Google publicly announced a $15 billion investment in May. Missouri officials described it as a historic commitment to infrastructure, workforce development and energy affordability.

The tax agreement approved by the Montgomery County Commission was larger than the headline figure suggested.

The county authorized up to $100 billion in Chapter 100 industrial revenue bonds. The cost-benefit analysis contemplated as much as $87.5 billion in equipment investment over the life of the project, in addition to an initial period involving approximately $24.5 billion in equipment and $13.4 billion in real-property improvements.

The agreement provides a 70 percent personal-property tax abatement for 25 years, from 2028 through 2052. The projected value of that abatement was estimated between $1.6 billion and $2.2 billion. In return, local taxing jurisdictions are projected to receive between $1.05 billion and $1.42 billion in payments in lieu of taxes.

The commission approved the package unanimously on June 8 despite continuing public opposition and pending litigation alleging violations of Missouri’s Sunshine Law.

Poston defended the arrangement as a negotiated improvement over other incentives Google might have used,

“You give a little over here to gain a lot over here.”

One week later, Amazon publicly announced its own $10 billion campus.

The state said the AWS project would create approximately 400 permanent jobs and thousands of construction jobs. Amazon committed more than $7 million toward emergency dispatch, fairgrounds improvements and community programs. State officials also said Amazon would pay the costs of connecting the campus to the electric grid.

At the June open house, an Amazon representative said the completed campus would occupy approximately 850 acres. The first phase was described as four data-center buildings, a substation and a switching station. A second phase could add roughly a dozen more buildings.

Together, the two projects represent at least $25 billion in publicly announced investment, campuses spanning well over 1,700 acres, major new electrical infrastructure and industrial operations expected to shape the county for decades.

This was not a disagreement over one warehouse.

It was a decision about the future physical and economic structure of Montgomery County.

The incumbent’s case

Poston did not hide his support after the projects were announced. He argued that the tax agreements would generate substantial new money for schools, emergency services and county institutions. He said the projects would help reverse population decline while preserving the county’s small-town culture. He rejected claims that the developments would dry up the aquifer or pollute the ground.

When Amazon made its announcement, Poston described the investment as a tremendous opportunity for workers, businesses, schools and future generations. That was the case voters were asked to consider.

The incumbent argued that county leaders had negotiated responsibly, protected essential services and secured an economic future that Montgomery County could not afford to reject.

The opposition argued that leadership had committed the county to an industrial transformation without sufficient transparency, public participation or independent scrutiny.

The election did not occur before the deals. It occurred after residents had seen how the county’s existing leadership responded when challenged.

Harry Cope’s argument was not simply “no”

Cope’s campaign cannot be understood only as opposition to Ryan Poston.

Nor can his public life be reduced to a single industrial controversy.

He was already known throughout the county as a cattle farmer, conservationist, business owner and member of a family with deep roots in the land. His criticism of the developments focused on a combination of stewardship and political accountability.

At a June protest outside a government data-center summit in Jefferson City, Cope identified electricity and water as major concerns but placed the deepest problem elsewhere,

“The biggest problem we have is the lack of transparency with our commissioners.”

Speaking at another rally, he acknowledged that stopping the projects outright might no longer be possible. His demand was that companies of this size at least carry a fair share of the public cost,

“For God’s sakes, at least make them contribute their fair share.”

That distinction was central to his campaign.

Cope was not promising that one election could make two hyperscale campuses vanish. He was asking who residents trusted to oversee what happened next.

Who would scrutinize future requests?

Who would enforce the agreements?

Who would ask whether promised jobs and revenues materialized?

Who would demand public answers about infrastructure, water, emergency planning and additional expansion?

Who would represent the people after the announcement ceremonies ended and the long-term consequences began?

The farmer with the pliers

My favorite thing about Harry has nothing to do with a press conference or campaign platform. It is his pliers.

Someone once asked why he carried pliers on his belt where another person might carry a knife. Harry responded as if there were nothing unusual about it. He said the pliers were the second thing he put on every morning after his underwear.

He is a cattle farmer. Fences break. Equipment needs adjusting. Animals need tending. Something will eventually require repair, and when it does, he expects to have the right tool with him.

His reply struck me because there was no performance in the answer. He was not trying to create a political metaphor. To Harry, carrying pliers was simply part of being responsible for the things entrusted to his care. That is the most concise explanation I know for why people trusted him.

He tends land and livestock. He builds. He maintains. He repairs. His instinct is not to stand at a distance from a problem and describe it. His instinct is to reach for the tool.

That does not make him infallible, and winning an election should never place an official beyond public scrutiny.

But leadership is partly a question of instinct.

When something is broken, does a leader first protect the institution that allowed it to break—or begin the work of repairing the public’s trust?

Montgomery County voters were offered that contrast.

Their answer was overwhelming.

What grassroots power looks like

The result appeared all at once on election night, the work behind it did not.

It happened through months of ordinary civic labor: conversations between neighbors, candidate forums, community gatherings, fairs, parades, phone calls, signs, family group messages and reminders about an August primary that many people might otherwise have ignored.

Harry’s family carried an enormous share of that work.

His daughter brought steadiness, organization and attention to detail to both the campaign and the broader community effort. Campaigns are often remembered through the candidate’s speeches and election-night photographs. They are actually sustained by people who track the details, maintain relationships, answer questions and continue showing up after everyone is exhausted.

The citizens of Montgomery County did the rest.

They spoke with friends, relatives and neighbors. They explained why the race mattered. They placed signs along roads and in yards. They attended events. They participated because they believed that representation was still something they could influence.

Even the escalating roadside signs told part of the story.

A small Poston sign would appear beside a small Cope sign. Then someone answered with a larger one. Eventually, the contest expanded to full-sized roadside advertising and even a billboard sponsored by privileged friend.

But visibility was never the same as persuasion.

A billboard can place a name above the highway, it cannot reproduce a trusted conversation between neighbors. It cannot shake someone’s hand, answer a difficult question or persuade a voter who has watched the county change around them The campaign’s real infrastructure was relational. It was built from people who knew one another and were willing to take responsibility for reaching the next person.

Where the county line blurred

My own place in this story began outside Montgomery County. My children and I live in Warren County, but near Jonesburg the boundary between Warren and Montgomery is more definite on a government map than it is in ordinary life. People cross that line for work, school, family, worship, shopping and community events. We travel the same roads and increasingly face the same industrial buildout along Interstate 70.

What happens in Montgomery County does not remain neatly inside Montgomery County.

During one parade, my children climbed into the campaign truck and threw candy for Harry. I walked beside it, shaking hands with people along the route. It was a proud day—not because a parade determined the election, but because my children experienced civic participation as something tangible. They were not sitting through another discussion about permits, tax abatements or public-records law. They were part of a community gathering around a candidate it believed in.

Where the county line blurred, we were encouraged to participate.

When Harry won, my children got to see that public work does not always disappear into another meeting agenda. Sometimes people gather, organize and vote—and the outcome changes.

Festus was the first warning

Montgomery County’s election did not happen in isolation. Four months earlier, voters in Festus removed every incumbent city council member whose seat was on the ballot after the council approved an agreement for a proposed $6 billion data center.mTurnout increased 129 percent over the previous April election, and all four challengers won by substantial margins.

Festus became a national story because it showed that data-center agreements could carry direct electoral consequences.

The situation in Montgomery County is not identical.

Festus involved a city council, a single proposed development and four incumbents up for municipal election. Montgomery County involves two separate hyperscale campuses, county government and a Republican primary for presiding commissioner.

The similarities are nevertheless difficult to ignore.

In both places, residents argued that major decisions had advanced without meaningful public participation. We saw officials emphasized investment, jobs and revenue while opponents focused on transparency, local control and long-term physical consequences. Residents organized outside the formal government process and in both places, the first significant election following the controversy produced a decisive rejection of incumbent leadership.

Festus showed that the political response could sweep through a city council.

Montgomery County has now shown that it can reach the top countywide office.

One result can be dismissed as a uniquely local conflict.

Two decisive Missouri elections begin to look like a warning shot heard round the nation.

The political cost belongs in the calculation

Economic-development plans calculate the price of land, labor, construction, power, water, tax incentives and public infrastructure.

The Montgomery County result adds another cost.

When residents discover that essential planning occurred before they were informed, there is a political cost. When public meetings are held after the practical decisions have already been made, there is a political cost. When documented opposition is treated as background noise rather than a crisis of consent, there is a political cost.

In Festus, the cost was four council seats.

In Montgomery County, it was the presiding commissioner’s office.

Google and Amazon still possess extraordinary resources. They have capital, attorneys, consultants, utility partners and relationships throughout state and local government. They also have projects that will not disappear because of one election.

But they do not possess the vote.

Montgomery County residents were not given a direct ballot question asking whether they wanted Project Spade or Project Green. They used the ballot question available to them. They chose who they trusted to represent them through everything that comes next.

The companies secured their agreements.

The people demanded their government back.

On August 4, they won.