In many ways, the recent fusillade of Republican anti-abortion legislation—a complete ban in Alabama; “heartbeat bills” in Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri; and a similar measure in Michigan—represents a final domino falling into place. These bills are the direct result of decades of Republican investment to seize control of state politics. It’s a strategy that, as the director of Run for Something, an organization that recruits candidates for local office, I’ve watched unfold firsthand.

Part of the blame, of course, lies with Democrats, who too often focus their efforts nationally, neglecting state and local races. “I know that Democrats have to make decisions. We don’t have the same kind of deep pockets as Republicans,” an Alabama native and Democratic donor vented to me. “But I can assure you that $100,000 in Alabama in 2018 would’ve gone so far, instead of the donor class giving Beto [O’Rourke] more money than he knew what to do with.”

As a result of this failure to invest, candidate recruitment—a high-cost, low-yield effort that takes time, relationship building, and a whole lot of cajoling for no guaranteed win—has dwindled to a trickle. (That’s one of the reasons Run for Something is the first of its kind: a local candidate-recruitment organization working at a national scale is really hard to pull off.) For decades, it’s been an uphill battle to get national Democratic organizations and donors to invest time and money in places that have been written off as red states. In 2016, nearly half of all state legislative races went uncontested. In 2018, a wave year with record numbers of candidates, that number was a still-disappointing 33 percent.

“I think Democrats have trouble thinking longer term, so the idea of investing to capacity-build when you’re unlikely to win the immediate next cycle is at odds with the way they historically approach elections,” Elizabeth Spiers, an Alabama native and founder of political strategy firm the Insurrection, told me. “I was told over and over again that there was no path to victory, so there would be no funding. And when you don’t have funding, no path to victory is a certainty.”

While Democrats have largely stayed on the sidelines, the G.O.P. has made no secret of its strategy to win majorities in state legislatures in order to re-draw state and federal districts in their favor. In 2010, a re-districting year, the Republican State Leadership Committee launched project REDMAP to invest in specific local races in order to flip statehouse control to Republicans. In all, the G.O.P. raised $30 million to target 107 seats in 16 states in the 2009-2010 electoral cycle. For context, the average State House race in that same period cost anywhere from $677 in New Hampshire to more than $350,000 in California. In the grand scheme of political spending, that’s a pretty good deal.

Republicans spent quickly and carefully, dropping almost $1 million in Pennsylvania to target three State House seats, flipping the Pennsylvania State House. They dropped another $1 million or so in Ohio to flip five State House seats. They did the same in New York, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and, most relevantly, Alabama, where the state legislature flipped to Republican control for the first time in 136 years, and Republicans won every statewide office, including electing former lieutenant governor Kay Ivey. (You know, the Kay Ivey who just signed that horrific abortion bill into law.) After winning those chambers and some 700 state legislative seats nationwide, Republicans re-drew state legislative maps for 193of the 435 seats in Congress, using computer programs to place voters in districts block by block.