DUBUQUE, Iowa — When Steve Drahozal defeated incumbent Scott Nelson for Dubuque County Attorney on November 3, 2026, the race turned on prosecution. But one of the sharpest differences between the two men had little to do with courtrooms: data centers.

Drahozal won 22,230 votes to Nelson’s 20,071, a margin of 2,159 votes, or 52.5 percent to 47.4 percent. The data-center question was one of the few issues where the candidates offered clearly different answers — and in a county where opposition to a proposed data center in Peosta runs strong, that difference likely helped the challenger.

Drahozal did not take a simple for-or-against position on data centers. His pitch was about what the county attorney should do about them. In a campaign video released October 26, 2026, standing in front of farmland, Drahozal said a county attorney must give proactive legal guidance to county leaders, called data center zoning one of the biggest issues in Dubuque County, and pledged he would not “wait on the sidelines” but would work with county leaders to draft clear, enforceable ordinances to protect prime farmland, safeguard residential neighborhoods, preserve quality of life, and protect tax dollars.

He made the same point in candidate questionnaires published by the Dyersville Commercial and Cascade Pioneer, saying he would work with the Board of Supervisors to write a county data-center ordinance built to survive a legal challenge.

Nelson took the opposite view of the job. He said the county attorney has nothing to do with policy — that belongs to the Board of Supervisors — and that the job is public safety: vigorously prosecuting violent crime and gun crime, standing up for victims, and mentoring the assistant county attorneys. A letter to the editor supporting Drahozal also criticized Nelson for declining to help draft a data center ordinance while having described the zoning commission’s language as “flimsy” and lacking “solid ground.”

The issue was already one of the most heated in the county. A proposal by Karis Critical for a data center south of Highway 20 near Peosta drew about 87 percent opposition in a survey of roughly 300 respondents, and the Peosta City Council extended the city’s data-center moratorium to June 18, 2027. Data center regulation was also described as the dividing issue in the Board of Supervisors race, where Democrats Kristin Dietzel and Rick Dickinson won the two open seats.

Whether the data-center stance decided the county attorney race is a harder question, and no polling or exit data ties Drahozal’s win to that issue alone. His campaign also attacked Nelson over the Lovers Lane case, in which supervisors learned too late about a judgment that cost taxpayers money; over OWI sentencing; and over his promise to personally carry a caseload and publish quarterly public reports on the office’s work. Drahozal also won in a Democratic wave year, with Rob Sand, Josh Turek, and Lindsay James all carrying Dubuque County.

But the data-center pledge was one of his few policy proposals that was not an attack on the incumbent, it arrived in the final week of the campaign in a video built around farmland, and it landed in a county where the issue is deeply felt. In a race decided by about 2,200 votes, a popular stance on a salient local issue can matter.

What happens next is still open. The county attorney cannot approve or block a data center on his own — that authority sits with the Board of Supervisors and the zoning commission. Drahozal’s promise was to give those bodies the legal guidance to write an ordinance that holds up in court. Whether that ordinance gets written, and what it says, will be decided in the months ahead.

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