Three key questions to consider for 2024’s Senate contest.
Kyrsten Sinema, the country’s newest independent senator, didn’t exactly surprise Washington when she announced earlier this month that she was leaving the Democratic Party. Arizona’s senior senator has had a long streak of bucking her old party’s line, frustrating Democrats in her home state and in Congress, while befuddling pundits, constituents, and journalists about why she legislates the way she does.
But her choice to go independent was shocking for many Arizonans, including some in the Arizona Democratic Party and former campaign volunteers and canvassers, who were expecting a drawn-out primary fight to ensue ahead of the 2024 general election, when Sinema’s seat will be one of 23 Democrats have to defend to keep a Senate majority.
Even before Sinema’s announcement, Arizona’s 2024 Senate contest was shaping up to be chaos: Potential Democratic challengers were mobilizing, and the state’s Republican Party is in the throes of another civil war between its Trumpist, election-denying factions and conventional, business-friendly conservatives. Now, the prospect of a three-way Senate contest with a serious, well-funded independent incumbent during a potential Biden-Trump presidential rematch is almost hard to comprehend.
But while most attention since Sinema’s announcement has been on whether she would be a spoiler candidate for the Democrats or how angry people feel at her decision, there are a few other important questions to consider. Here are three of the most important.
Will Kyrsten Sinema run at all?
Whether Sinema runs again remains an open question.
At the moment, she has taken the perfunctory step of filing a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission to begin the campaign process, though she hasn’t formally announced a reelection bid. A spokesperson for Sinema did not respond to a request for comment.
Still, the conventional wisdom is that she will run, and that her decision to become an independent was a way for her to avoid having to run in a Democratic primary contest that she would almost definitely lose. Public and private polling by different pollsters and campaigns over the last year and a half all show that she is very unpopular among Democrats in the state, and generally unpopular across the board with white voters and voters of color, voters who are college-educated and not, and men and women.
In interviews during the media rollout of her announcement, she’s been cagey about saying whether she will run again. On social media, her personal Twitter account has promoted messages from Arizona local radio interviews in which voters say they would support Sinema in another race.
And on YouTube, her political account shared a campaign-style video explaining why she was leaving the Democrats on the day she broke the news. It included a line about how she expected Arizona voters to feel about her decision: “Arizonans across the state are going to say ‘Yeah, that’s the Kyrsten we elected. That’s who we sent to DC’,” she promised. But she came just short of saying that she hoped to be elected again, or of directing voters to donate money on her campaign website.
Arizona-based organizers, pollsters, and strategists I spoke to told me that at the moment, it seems like Sinema is testing the waters in her state, seeing what kind of appetite there is for an independent candidate, and waiting to see if state Democrats coalesce around one candidate.
“She has always been very strategic. She is two steps ahead of everyone else, of where she’s going,” Mike Noble, a longtime Arizona political strategist and the chief of research at polling firm OH Predictive Insights, told me. Her announcement echoed the decision her predecessor, former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, had to make in 2017 after breaking with Donald Trump, he said.
Sinema becoming an independent seems to dare national Democrats to sit out the statewide contest for fear of ceding the race to a Republican. In theory, that could mean her move is a way to get Democrats to support her in 2024. If Democrats choose not to support Sinema, and quickly unite behind one candidate, it could be difficult for her to find the support she’d need to win.
And in that case, there’s a chance that Sinema sees Democrats putting up a fight and ultimately decides not to run.
“I am not convinced that she will actually run,” Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona, a progressive Latino organizing group that worked to help Sinema get elected in 2018 (but opposes her now), told me. “She’s trying to figure out where her allies stand, who her people are, and party loyalty. I think she underestimates Democrats standing behind Democrats.”
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Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call
Gomez told me that she thinks Sinema is counting on disunity among Democrats and Republicans during the primary process to open up a lane for both disaffected Democrats and Republicans to back an independent. “She’s faced with a tall order now that she’s put herself in this corner.”
It’s still an open question of who Sinema’s base would be, and what infrastructure would support her 2024 run if Democrats do run their own candidate: Already, her TV ad maker and a top polling firm have stopped working with her, the Huffington Post’s Kevin Robillard reported. The tech firm that manages the state party’s voter database is cutting her access, and another top progressive consulting firm dropped her as a client this month. A general election campaign without access to the Democratic Party’s money, voter contact, and outreach apparatus, as well as its energized base during a presidential year, is a serious obstacle. (Sinema currently has about $8 million in cash on hand.)
Arizona’s voter pool is split into nearly even thirds between both parties and independents, and Republicans still hold a plurality of registered voters. But those voters with no party preference make up the second-largest group of voters, making them pivotal in statewide elections. In theory, those independent voters would form Sinema’s base, but they have tended to split pretty evenly between both parties in statewide races.
There are a number of viable alternatives Sinema could pursue if she doesn’t run, ranging from an appointed position to transitioning into private sector consulting work. She’s already a lecturer at Arizona State University. Whether she pursues any of these hinges on the question of why she even wants to be senator.
Who would run against Sinema in a general election?
Next year’s primary elections in Arizona might determine whether the state sees a three-way race. It’s a little early for any candidate to officially announce right now — donor networks, polling, and staff hiring must be activated first — but there are plenty of potential candidates.
Among Democrats, the most obvious challenger to Sinema’s nomination is Rep. Ruben Gallego, the longtime Congress member from Arizona’s recently redrawn Third District. He represents the most Democratic district in the state, which stretches across Phoenix and into parts of Glendale, and has been a vocal critic of Sinema for the last few years. A former Marine, he’s a progressive but considers himself less ideological and more practical in his work in Congress, and often criticizes his party for not defending its economic proposals to working-class people harder.
Rep. Greg Stanton, a more moderate Arizona Democrat, has also been floated as a possible contender by state political strategists as well as national and local media (he fueled that speculation with a tweet showing what appeared to be internal polling showing how he’d perform against Sinema in a primary). A former Phoenix mayor and city council member, he has served in Congress for slightly less time than Gallego, running for Sinema’s old House district in 2018 when she ran for Senate, in the new Fourth District. He’s a member of the New Democrat Coalition and has a more centrist identity, but like almost every other Arizona Democrat, he has voted in line with the president’s agenda every time.
Other possible competitors in a Democratic primary include Phoenix’s current mayor, Kate Gallego, and Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, though they haven’t spoken about the race.
Republicans are much more divided. Coming out of a bruising election year that saw Republican candidates lose nearly all top statewide offices, the party faces a civil war between its current Trump-aligned leadership and the more traditional types that have long succeeded in statewide races. Though the state’s marquee races have been certified and decided, the 2022 campaign is still not over — Kari Lake, the election-denying Republican loser in the gubernatorial race, launched a legal challenge to the results of the election. But she and outgoing Gov. Doug Ducey are probably the two Republicans with widest name recognition in the state.
Ducey comes from a more conventional, pro-business conservative tradition that has a history of victory in the state. He served two terms as governor that he won by large margins, including during the 2018 blue wave that also saw Sinema elected. But his sheen has dulled in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when he stood up to Trump’s demands to overturn the results of the presidential election (and faced an onslaught of Trump criticism), endorsed Lake’s main opponent in the 2022 gubernatorial primary, and was used by Lake as a foil for her candidacy (she called him “Do-Nothing Ducey”). Plenty of congressional Republicans want him to run, but just last week he told local reporters that he’s not considering a Senate run.
The primary opponent Ducey and other establishment Republicans supported against Lake is also a potential contender: Karrin Taylor Robson, the lawyer and housing developer who lent herself $18 million to run a largely self-funded race, has been especially vocal about the need for Arizona’s Republican Party to change directions before losing another general election. She’s criticized the state party, called for the state chair, election conspiracist Kelli Ward, to step down from leadership, and has branded Lake a fake Republican and a grifter.
“Our party, in particular in Arizona, was hijacked by fake Republicans,” Robson told me. “I’ve said now, many times: Kelli Ward, and the Arizona GOP, has been an unmitigated disaster. And we have to get back to a place where we know how to win and we do it based on conservative principles.”
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Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Robson told me she is not ruling out running for statewide office again: “I was taught to leave my options open and give myself as many options as possible. But it’s too early to say.”
Whether Ducey or Robson can win a Republican primary will depend on how Arizona Republican voters decide to answer the central, existential question that faces them: to continue backing Trump, Lake, election denialism, and more divisive, right-wing politics, or return to the kind of mainstream conservatism represented by John McCain and the pre-Trump Republican Party.
There are plenty of names that could occupy the former space: Lake, Ward, Rep. Andy Biggs, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, and failed 2022 Senate candidate Blake Masters.
There aren’t many who could champion the latter.
Who benefits from a three-way race?
Now consider this: If Sinema did run as an independent, against both Republican and Democratic nominees, would she pull votes away from the Republican, the Democrat, or both?
Plenty of reporting and punditry has assumed that a three-way race would hand the Senate seat to the GOP — that Democrats might nominate someone too far to the left to win a general election, which would push independents and moderate Democrats to vote for Sinema or the Republican.
But that ignores the very real problems Arizona Republicans are having right now: their inability to move away from Trump and his brand of politics.
Robson told me she hopes state leadership recognizes that most Arizona voters don’t want to keep this antagonistic, bombastic, and combative style of politics going for another cycle. “As I traveled around the state in my campaign, most people out there just want to live their lives,” she told me. “They’re tired of the fighting, and unfortunately, today’s Arizona Republican Party, led by Kelli Ward and magnified by Kari Lake, is all about dividing and tearing people apart, as opposed to bringing people together.”
For now, it doesn’t seem like establishment Republicans have the upper hand. But should they manage to coalesce around a figure like Robson, Ducey, or state treasurer Kimberly Yee (who just won reelection by 11 points with a more moderate tone), they would pose a serious threat to both Sinema and a Democratic nominee, Noble, the Arizona pollster, told me.
“Sinema is banking on Arizona voters to reward her in a hyper-partisan climate, and on filling that void of a Democrat version of John McCain,” he said. “Someone that is a center-right Republican versus the current MAGA Republican, that would be your biggest threat, because it makes the numbers much bigger of a challenge and much less feasible for her.”
Her best case is having Democrats choose a progressive like Gallego, and having Republicans pick a far-right candidate, giving her an opening for moderates from both parties to join independents in voting for her. No candidate needs a majority, so she could theoretically win a plurality.
For that to work, voters would need to disapprove of those candidates by a bigger margin than they currently dislike her (which, even among independents, is a high bar). Recent polling commissioned by Gallego shows that not to be the case — even with Sinema running, a theoretical Lake vs. Gallego vs. Sinema matchup is still a toss-up. All this happening during a presidential year means an even more difficult time trying to buy ad time, novel strategies to turn out voters who are thinking in binary ways, and running a campaign without institutional support.
Of course, the only way we’ll actually know any of this for sure is to see the campaign play out. Buckle up.
Death, supermarkets, and an airborne toxic event.
There’s a white noise machine in my bedroom. I got it to block the sounds of traffic from the busy avenue outside my window, but years ago we moved our bedroom to the back of the apartment. Now technically unnecessary, the white noise machine still goes on every night. I’ve downloaded two different apps on my phone to simulate the sound when I travel. That staticky low hum is imperative; I can’t sleep without it.
I hate depending on a machine for my basic survival, but without it I’ll stare at the ceiling for hours, contemplating my existence, and I guess that’s sort of Don DeLillo’s point in White Noise. The 1985 novel is a classic of postmodern fiction, long considered “unadaptable” for reasons that become more clear when you read it. It’s a funny novel that keeps shapeshifting, making the reader feel the friction between lives dominated by consumerism and consumption and technology on the one hand, and the weight of mortality on the other.
Noah Baumbach’s new film adaptation of the novel is a valiant attempt to capture DeLillo’s book, but the result is a movie so faithful to the original work that it comes very close to not working. It’s 1984 and Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a middle-aged college professor and head of the Hitler Studies department, which he created. He lives with his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) in a rambling old house full of their children, mostly from previous marriages. His courses in Hitler Studies — like a seminar, for instance, that examines his speeches — are wildly popular, and his colleague Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) wants Jack’s help in creating a parallel Elvis Studies department. But everything gets weirdly upended when a toxic cloud suddenly forms on the horizon, which the news calls the “airborne toxic event.”
People can, and do, write lengthy peer-reviewed papers and dissertations on White Noise, because it is not really just a story, though it’s plenty entertaining on the surface. It’s actually kind of amazing what DeLillo managed to pack into the novel. For instance: Hitler Studies? What a strange and largely unremarked-upon choice — but the movie and the novel treat this as if it’s a totally normal sort of academic department to found.
Or what about all of these lists and litanies of brands that pop up repeatedly? In the film, this translates into many scenes in a brightly colored supermarket with prominently displayed, period-appropriate products, laundry detergents and milk and particular types of gum. In the novel, we get periodic bursts in the text that become weirdly specific little lists. Following a musing on how much he loves Babette, Jack suddenly interjects, “The Airport Marriott, the Downtown Travelodge, the Sheraton Inn and Conference Center.”
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Netflix
Or what about the ever-present televisions? They’re everywhere in White Noise, set in an era when the internet hadn’t yet blanketed the world. “I’ve come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the American home,” Siskind tells Jack. “Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring. It’s like a myth being born right there in our living room, like something we know in a dreamlike and preconscious way.” On Friday nights, Jack and his family gather in front of the TV set not to watch movies or sitcoms, but to watch disasters happen on the news — “floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes.” They’re transfixed, because “every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.”
A colleague later tells Jack that this is because “we’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.” Reading or hearing that in 2022, in an age of constant manufactured outrage, it seems almost too prescient.
Other strange things happen throughout the novel, some of which pop up in the movie, too. Jack can’t really believe that a disaster would happen to him because he is a well-off college professor, not the kind of person to whom disasters happen — which is to say, a person on TV. The distance the TV has put between him and reality has seeped into his existence.
And yet, the frightening airborne toxic disaster ends rather abruptly; DeLillo (and Baumbach) give us the comical and disorienting experience of jumping right back into reality, Murray and Jack strolling through the grocery store again. As if “reality” — even reality as overwhelming as a toxic airborne cloud or, say, a pandemic — can’t impinge too long on the white noise.
This bleed between what’s on TV and what’s real is part of the fabric of the novel. Jack frequently muses on misinformation and disinformation (“the family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation,” he says at one point) — something that comes from the human brain’s inability to process everything flying at it, and our need to make sense of it with conspiracy theories. Characters suddenly start talking strangely, and you realize they’ve slipped into the cadence of a sitcom or a thriller. A group of college professors insults one another over their pop culture knowledge, which starts to make sense when you remember that pop culture is the lingua franca of modern life, the thing that feels more real than our own lives, the shared experience between us.
For the movie adaptation, Baumbach strips out a lot of the theoretical underpinnings of the novel, though they’re still there if you’re looking for them. He instead focuses on the larger existential point at the heart of the novel: that all of this white noise we’ve generated for ourselves — a drive to buy things, a fascination with catastrophes, technologies always humming in the background — is a way of distracting ourselves from the horrifying realization that we will die. Actual disasters bring us into confrontation with that inevitability, but we try to push them away as fast as we can. It’s why people become obsessed with celebrities (like Elvis) or leaders who falsely promise us the world (like Hitler); in becoming part of a crowd, in losing ourselves to the emotional high of the performer, we can stop the feeling for a while.
Frankly, this choice on Baumbach’s part is a little bit of a disappointment. Moving a story that’s about screens to the screen practically begs for some formal inventiveness, some way to not just make the audience watch the story unfold but feel it, to experience what the characters are experiencing, which could, in turn, enhance the emotional impact.
But it is, after all, a very talky and theoretical novel. And perhaps a faithful adaptation is all we can ask for, though it loses some of the humor and bizarreness of the source material thereby.
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Wilson Webb / Netflix
One omission, though, made me especially sad, because the key to White Noise lies in an indelible early scene in the novel. Murray brings Jack to a local tourist attraction that he wants to see, and that Jack has never gotten around to seeing. It’s called “the most photographed barn in America,” and they start seeing signs for it long before they get there. When they arrive, there are “forty cars and a tour bus” in the lot, and a lot of people standing nearby with photographic gear, taking pictures of the barn.
“No one sees the barn,” Murray tells Jack. “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” He paints it in almost religious terms: “Being here is kind of a spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”
In the end, he says, “They are taking pictures of taking pictures.”
Murray’s idea, this somewhat absurdist idea of a “most photographed barn” that’s remarkable simply for being remarkable, snaps the whole of White Noise into focus. There’s not too much difference between the tourists traveling to photograph an unremarkable barn and the ways we all snap pictures of things that have been photographed a million billion times: the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, whatever. Why do we do it? Because we’ve seen pictures of it, and want to prove that we were there too. “There,” not just in Paris or New York or San Francisco, but in the world. We want for a second to break our mediated reality and put down a marker. A photo is a way to stake a claim on reality, to put a frame around existence: We were here. We lived. We mattered.
And someday we won’t be here, but nobody wants to think about that right now.
At the end of the novel, and of the movie, Jack is in line at the grocery store again, watching people going about their business, looking through the rich array of consumer products. “Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks,” he concludes. “The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.”
White Noise is about the barriers between us and reality that we’ve built to distract ourselves from our own mortality. But like the white noise machine I need to sleep, even though there’s nothing to drown out anymore, we’ve become so dependent on our cultural white noise that the idea of living without it is almost unbearable. Call it the human condition or whatever you want: It’s how we deal with the ways we all stare at the ceiling, contemplating existence, hoping we will have meant something, in the end.
White Noise is streaming on Netflix.
Democrats’ wins in the Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania state legislatures are fragile.
Democrats had good results in the November midterm elections, but particularly so in state capitols. Whether they can repeat their performance remains an open question.
They defended slim majorities, and flipped a few chambers in the key battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota.
It’s the first time since 1934 that the party of the incumbent president didn’t lose a single state legislative chamber. This year’s midterms were an uncharacteristically strong showing from Democrats, who have previously struggled to compete with more than a decade of Republican dominance at the state level. Democratic state legislatures now govern more people than those controlled by Republicans, even though the GOP still won marginally more seats overall.
But people who have been working on building Democratic power in the states for years say it’s not a transformation that occurred overnight, nor is it complete. The majorities that Democrats held and won are narrow and vulnerable. They face a persistent problem of down-ballot roll-off, where Democrats at the top of the ticket outperform state legislative candidates. And Republicans still control a big majority of state legislative chambers, with a well-oiled political machine designed to help them maintain that control.
It will take more investment — in terms of time, money, and organization — to not only shore up those Democratic majorities, but to go on offense. The stakes have perhaps never been higher, as state legislatures are ground zero for some of the biggest political questions facing the country, including the future of abortion rights and elections.
“Democrats are tardy to the party,” said Lala Wu, the co-founder and director of Sister District, a group that aims to flip Republican-controlled state legislative chambers. “Republicans have been working to get these ideas into folks’ heads, from the academy to mass media to voters. They’ve always talked about local and state control and federalism. And Democrats have unfortunately just rested too much and overrelied on federal power.”
How Republicans consolidated power at the state level
Republicans have long dominated at the state level, controlling more state legislative seats than Democrats since 2010. They have become incubators for national Republican policy, with states like Texas and Florida recently leading the way on controversial topics, including, for example, limiting discussion of racism and LGBTQ issues in public schools.
Republicans’ success at the state level is the product of a multi-decade effort that dates back to at least 1994. That year, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich debuted his “Contract with America,” which set a unified, 10-point agenda for GOP candidates nationwide that focused on increasing defense funding, welfare reform, an expansion of US prisons, and delivering tax cuts, primarily for corporations and wealthy Americans.
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Erik Freeland/Corbis via Getty Images
Republicans went on to win the US House for the first time since 1954 that year, and captured both chambers across 19 state legislatures. Those victories paved the way for a network of conservative organizations — including the American Legislative Exchange Council, also known as ALEC — to flourish, bolstering a policy-focused approach to Republican politics at the state level.
Founded in 1973 by right-wing activists and state legislators, ALEC became what Gingrich has described as the “the most effective organization” at developing state policies that advance conservatism and federalism. It functions as a membership-based organization for corporations and state lawmakers to cooperate in drafting model legislation that can be easily replicated and adapted across the nation. An investigation by USA TODAY, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity found that, from 2010 to 2018, model bills developed by ALEC were introduced almost 2,900 times and ultimately became law in over 600 cases.
“They’re really effective at originating and then disseminating and experimenting with conservative legislation and having it transfer around from state to state,” Wu said. (ALEC did not respond to a request for comment.)
That sort of centralized policymaking and planning boosted Republicans as they pursued their so-called “REDMAP” strategy, or “Redistricting Majority Project,” in 2010. Under that plan, the party poured money into unseating vulnerable Democrats and flipping chambers in the leadup to redistricting, the decennial process in which states — usually led by legislatures — determine legislative districts based on census data. And the work of ALEC, and others, gave the party a unified message to run on.
It was a seismic shift in terms of how Republicans approached redistricting, ushering in a new era of state and national coordination, said Jason Cabel Roe, a GOP strategist in Michigan. Their nationalized policy platform also helped Republicans foster confidence among the electorate, and to cement their reputation as the party of fiscal responsibility: “People generally will trust Republicans to be better stewards of tax money and delivering services,” Cabel Roe said.
That year, Republicans took control of both chambers in 25 states, including several that they hadn’t controlled since the 1870s. Consequently, they were able to preside over the redistricting in 2010 and again in 2020, creating electoral maps that would make it hard for Democrats to claw their way back into power.
“The Republican REDMAP strategy enabled them to have a really striking takeover of state legislatures and to gerrymander themselves to power for the next decade. And unfortunately, we’re still feeling the effects of that,” Wu said.
What Democrats did right in 2022
This election cycle saw historic investment in state legislative contests by Democrats after years of being severely outspent and of losing by hundreds or even tens of votes in critical races.
Jessica Post, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee — the fundraising arm of the Democratic Party dedicated to state legislative races — said that the DLCC spent more than $53 million this cycle, $18 million more than it did in 2018. By comparison, the DLCC’s GOP counterpart, the Republican State Leadership Committee, spent about $42 million, less than half what it spent in 2020 as redistricting loomed, and about $7 million less than it spent in 2018. The DLCC also sent a team of finance directors to work with state legislative leaders and raise a total of $105 million, mostly from their safe incumbents, to bolster their bids for majorities.
Outside groups, including the Democratic-aligned Forward Majority PAC and the States Project, a group focused on advancing Democratic power at the state level, were also big players.
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Trisha Ahmed/Report for America via AP
Forward Majority has a 10-year plan to spend about $70 million in these contests, including $20 million that it already dropped this election cycle. Its strategy is to develop a large-scale operation to compete aggressively in the most important tipping point state legislative races. And the goal this year was to help Democrats try to win dozens of seats across Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Arizona that would deliver chamber flips. Forward Majority also went after seats in Georgia and Texas aimed at strengthening the Democratic caucus in those states. The group ended up helping clinch wins in at least 48 of the 61 total seats it targeted. The States Project spent $60 million across Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maine, and Nevada in 2022, investing in many of the same seats as Forward Majority.
A little can go a long way in state legislative contests. Contributions of $500 to $1,000 can be a “consequential investment,” especially in a state like New Hampshire, where there are 400 legislators in the state House presiding over small districts and Democrats are just three seats away from retaking the majority, Post said. But some races are more expensive than others; Post said that the DLCC spent $23 million, almost half of its resources this cycle, to flip the Michigan Senate alone.
Adam Pritzker, one of the States Project’s founding partners, said that national Democrats still need to devote more resources to state legislatures: The Democratic National Committee did not contribute a single dollar to the DLCC this cycle.
“The national party really failed to appropriately invest. I hope we can rectify that going forward,” he said.
Post said that the DLCC has been “ringing the alarm on that resource gap” since she first joined in 2016, and that additional investment from national Democrats will be necessary both to defend new majorities and make states like Texas more competitive.
Beyond the dollar amount spent, Democratic groups employed their other resources strategically this cycle as well.
Post said that she had a “no surprises” policy going into 2022. That meant hiring regional political directors who could engage deeply in the states under their purview, and do so early in the cycle while keeping eyes on the entire map. In addition to vying for new majorities, the DLCC wanted to ward off potential losses in longstanding Democratic chambers, including those that were not considered to be competitive, but turned out to be, such as the Nevada Assembly and the Oregon House.
“I think we did a really good job of watching our flank,” Post said.
Pritzker said that the States Project also saw success in supporting these kinds of organizational efforts. His group invested in professionalizing campaigns by helping them hire staff, running tested TV ads that were unique to each race, helping candidates get local press, and incentivizing candidates to knock on doors rather than dialing for dollars.
“Most of this stuff is best practices in every major House and Senate campaign in America. We just brought that same toolkit to these races,” he said.
Forward Majority’s co-founder Vicky Hausman said that the organization searched for “every single unexploited opportunity at the district and race level that allows us to fight for the votes that no one else is targeting at this stage.” For example, it collected 20,000 voter registration applications in neglected districts where Republicans made up half the electorate in an attempt to boost Democrats’ edge.
Factors in the national political environment also broke Democrats’ way. New electoral maps drawn by independent commissions made some battles for control of state legislatures more competitive, including in Michigan. And the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade appeared to significantly boost Democratic enthusiasm up and down the ballot.
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Carlos Osorio/AP
Both the DLCC and outside funders foresaw the opportunity presented by the national environment, and crafted a narrative about the imperative need to aggressively push back against Republican dominance at this particular political moment. Democrats worried that state Republicans in critical battlegrounds, including those who campaigned on the notion that they would have attempted to subvert the election in 2020, would be well-positioned to try to overturn the results in 2024. And they feared that state Republicans would try to enact further restrictions on abortion or enforce pre-Roe bans in some states. As Post wrote in a post-election memo, Democrats “drove the narrative of the existential threat the GOP posed to our democracy” and sought to “capitalize on [the abortion issue] at every turn.”
They were largely able to neutralize those threats, at least for now.
“Most folks we spoke with thought we were crazy to try to flip the legislatures in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, given the outlook this year,” Hausman said. “But we knew there were new maps, we knew there were many conflicting data points about the electoral environment we were in. And we knew the consequences and stakes were just too great not to try to compete.”
How Democrats can defend and build on their progress
Democrats’ historic gains in state legislatures are still fragile. To defend against Republican efforts to retake chambers and to advance their own agenda at a moment when they can’t pass their priorities at the federal level, they will have to invest more heavily in these races going forward. Voting rights legislation, redistricting reform, paid family leave, and other social and economic policies will hinge on it.
They don’t even have to wait until 2024 to get started. There are elections in Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana where Sister District and other organizations will be making plays in 2023. They’re trying to help Democrats take back the House in Virginia, and they see Mississippi and Louisiana as states that suffer from “deep underinvestment where a little bit can go a really long way,” Wu said.
Then, in 2024, Democrats face the challenge of fending off Republican supermajorities in Wisconsin and North Carolina, and at least holding the line elsewhere.
Wu said that Democrats have to be prepared for Republicans to “learn from their mistakes” in the 2022 midterms, namely running low-quality candidates with extreme views who were out of touch with voters. She predicted that they will instead run a playbook that draws on their success in Virginia, where they ran a diverse slate of candidates, focused on local issues such as public schools, and made strategic early investments.
To that end, some Republicans in states where Democrats made gains have already started to articulate strategic changes. In Michigan, where Republicans saw some of their most devastating losses this cycle, that includes recruiting “high quality, substantive candidates” — not just those with connections to Trump — and ensuring that they can attract robust fundraising, according to a post-election memo penned by Paul Cordes, the state GOP’s chief of staff, and obtained by the Detroit Free Press.
“As a Party, we found ourselves consistently navigating the power struggle between Trump and anti-Trump factions of the Party, mostly within the donor class,” he wrote. “That power struggle ended with too many people on the sidelines and hurt Republicans in key races.”
Cabel Roe said that without good candidates and money, Republicans in the state were indeed left “trying to figure out a way to stitch all the other elements of a winning campaign together with duct tape and spit.”
“We’re going to have to make a decision: if we’re going to adopt a more politically attractive image, or if we’re going to continue to just wrap ourselves around a MAGA agenda and lose,” he added.
As Republicans regroup, Democrats can’t afford to waste any time in making early investments to bolster their organizing infrastructure, local and state parties, and chamber caucuses.
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Matt Rourke/AP
Year-round and off-year voter contact is also important, and that’s where grassroots organizations can come in: “By the time campaigns are stood up and candidates and staffers are talking to voters in the election context, voters are already primed and ready and understand the importance,” Wu said.
But Democrats also need to play the long game in state capitols, Hausman said. They need to be building their operations in places where majorities will almost certainly be out of reach for years, including Texas and Georgia.
“We need to start investing now in places, geographies, districts, that may not come online for several more election cycles, which will be essential to actually control these chambers before the next redistricting cycle,” she said. “Democrats in no way can rest on their laurels, but very much will need to be, again, aggressively defending these hard-won majorities and continuing to fight.”