Nick Rathod, pictured, is the executive director of the State Innovation Exchange, otherwise known as SiX. | AP Photo Top Democratic donors urged to invest more at state level

AVENTURA, Fla. — It’s all about the states.

That’s the message that will greet a wide swath of the Democratic Party’s leading donors and operatives here on Friday evening.


Nick Rathod, executive director of the State Innovation Exchange, is slated to pitch them on a new round of investment in the progressive group that aims to rebuild the party from the ground up by focusing on state legislatures — a strategy adopted by Republicans a decade ago.

Speaking before a panel featuring three prominent state attorneys general, Rathod — President Barack Obama’s former liaison to the states — will unveil a $10 million budget goal for the group, known as SiX, alongside the beginnings of a plan to expand the work of its 501(c)(4) side, allowing it to go beyond its policy work and dive further into elections and advocacy.

Addressing the group just hours after Donald Trump’s inauguration -- at a time when party leaders are considering more seriously how to replicate the GOP's downballot success — Rathod intends to sound the alarm about the approaching 2017 and 2018 elections and make the case that his party needs to work on developing a leadership pipeline from local offices, according to excerpts of the speech provided to POLITICO in advance.

“All of us need to recognize that this did not just happen overnight,” Rathod will say, detailing progressives’ decline below the presidential level, including a total lack of legislative chambers in the entire South while Republicans control as many legislative chambers as they have in nearly a century. “It’s been in the making for nearly a generation and progressives have basically been asleep at the wheel. While we have been spending billions on trying to hold control of federal power, right under our noses conservatives have been quietly investing and building an infrastructure at the state level that has been chipping away at progressive power for at least the past 40 years."

In insisting on the need for a more serious investment in building up local leaders for long-term gain, Rathod will point to Democrats’ weak Senate and presidential performances.

“How is it that we don’t have anyone else to run for Senate in some of these places?,” he will ask. “We have to dust off a bunch of old white guys who held office years ago. And don’t get me started on the presidential race. Conservatives had a clown car of candidates, but like it or not that clown car was relatively diverse, it was young, and most came out of state politics. Meanwhile we are organizing around two white 70-year-olds and our next best option was the vice president, who is amazing, but another 70-year-old."

The speech will greet donors and strategists who are gathering in south Florida as counter-programming for the inauguration, while they map out a path ahead for a party that suffered a shocking loss in November but even worse devastation at the state level over the last eight years.

Investment in the states has been a buzzy topic among Democrats in the months since Election Day, including among the candidates vying to take over the Democratic National Committee. Much of their emphasis is on making gains ahead of 2020’s round of Congressional map redistricting. SiX isn’t alone in making a local push: former Attorney General Eric Holder — who is also speaking at the conference — recently launched his own National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

Rathod intends to frame the coming campaign as a response to the GOP effort in the run-up to 2010 — led by veteran strategist, and later Republican National Committee chair, Ed Gillespie — that positioned that party for broader victories after that round of redistricting.

“That year, they spent about $30 million on races in those states and blew Democratic incumbents out of the water, and recaptured control of all of those state capitals,” he will say. “What they did there allowed them to control redistricting and redraw both state and federal lines in a way that built a conservative firewall in the House of Representatives at least through 2020. Let me put that $30 million in perspective for you: this year, the Indiana Senate race cost $30 million. So for the same amount of money that we put behind trying to elect Evan Bayh in Indiana, Republicans took control of statehouses and gained control of the House of Representatives for a decade."

The appeal is unlikely to be the only one donors hear at the weekend retreat, but it comes as many of the wealthiest liberal contributors are actively searching for their next big initiative after pumping more money into Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign than any before it.

Reorienting the left's leadership away from its entrenched leadership is among Rathod's aims.

“From my conversations with elected officials, operatives, and others in the states, they .have completely lost faith in the DNC and related party committees to do anything that would help support the organizing and other work happening in the states,” he’s set to say. “Donors and others need to ask themselves whether they want to follow the same crowd of people who now are talking a big game about the states but spent the last decade watching as the party lost nearly one thousand seats and otherwise decimated the party."

