Democrats Are Winning Their Fight for the States
The diverse roster of groups working in this space is spread across the country, but most share several top-priority states, where there’s a good chance to flip a chamber or where the legislature plays a role in redistricting decisions. Thus the four states that are seeing the most investment are North Carolina, where there’s a chance to shift the House and Senate; Arizona, where both chambers are likewise in play; and Texas and Michigan, whose Houses may be up for grabs. Fights are also underway to turn the Minnesota Senate, the Iowa and Ohio Houses, and both Pennsylvania chambers. Wisconsin and Georgia are getting attention, too.
And with a late, unexpected surge of first-time candidates, Florida has emerged as a fascinating laboratory for building Democratic infrastructure on the ground. Republicans hold a trifecta in state power—hapless Governor Ron DeSantis as well as both legislative houses—and they have botched the pandemic response beyond belief. Groups like Sister District, Forward Majority, and the DLCC are starting to spend money there to at least build a working Democratic Party in red areas, if not flip a chamber. “Running up the margins” in blue districts and preventing Republicans from doing so in red districts “can help Joe Biden win the state,” says Fergie Reid Jr. of 90 for 90, a group formed to honor his father, Fergie Reid Sr., who was elected in 1967 as Virginia’s first Black state legislator since Reconstruction, on his 90th birthday. (He’s now 95 and going strong.) It is one of the groups behind Virginia’s turnaround, by registering voters and recruiting Democratic challengers. Now it has helped inspire the late surge of Florida Democratic candidates.
For a lot of groups, North Carolina is the big prize. “This is a microcosm of Trumpism. It all started in North Carolina,” says Christine Bachman of Our States Matter, who is widely credited with focusing national activism on Virginia in 2017 and is mainly working with the Tarheel State this year. In 2010 wealthy right-wing North Carolina businessman Art Pope helped bankroll an assault on state Democrats, working with Republican strategist Karl Rove and the notorious GOP Redistricting Majority Project, along with Charles and David Koch. The team won Republican control of both chambers of the state’s General Assembly for the first time since 1870. “North Carolina was the original red state laboratory, where they created all their extremist legislation and then spread it everywhere,” Bachman laments.
Jessica Post, who now heads the DLCC, was a junior staffer with the organization in 2010. She saw what went down in North Carolina and elsewhere around the country that November. “In 2010 the [Democrats’] focus was on maintaining control of Congress. The feeling was that top-of-the-ticket turnout would trickle down,” she says. The opposite happened. “Karl Rove did this in plain sight.” Indeed, in March 2010 he announced in The Wall Street Journal, “Republican strategists are focused on 107 seats in 16 states. Winning these seats would give them control of drawing district lines for nearly 190 congressional seats.” Post says, “We lost 21 chambers across the country that night. I remember crying on the sidewalk, saying I never want to feel this way again.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-elections-statehouses/
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