Selling people on the importance of state governments should not be particularly hard.

Congress isn’t passing laws to restrict access to abortion. States such as Mississippi, Georgia, and Kentucky are. Congress isn’t taking major action on guns—either to tighten limits on their use or to loosen them. State governments are. Nor is Congress likely to raise the minimum wage, enact paid family leave, legalize recreational marijuana, or spend heavily on an infrastructure plan anytime soon. All of those progressive goals have advanced in various state legislatures and are within reach in several more.

And even when Congress has passed far-reaching legislation, it’s often modeled on bills enacted in the states. The Affordable Care Act has similarities to the health law that former Governor Mitt Romney signed in Massachusetts, and the bipartisan First Step Act, which passed Congress last year, was inspired by a collection of states that had tackled criminal-justice reform.

Slowly but surely, Democrats say, the importance of state and local government is dawning on progressive activists and voters who have a well-earned reputation for putting all their hopes, dreams, and money into presidential campaigns. They’re “realizing maybe all the noise is coming from Washington, D.C., but the policy is coming from their backyard,” said Christine Greig, the minority leader of the Michigan House of Representatives.

Michigan is one of the states where Democrats began to claw back power in 2018. They won the governorship, and Greig credited Future Now Fund’s spending with helping Democrats pick up a net five seats in the state House of Representatives. The gains narrowed the GOP majority to 58–52, putting control of the chamber in reach for Democrats in 2020.

From 1992 to 2012, Michigan voted Democratic in the presidential race for six consecutive elections, giving it the appearance of a blue state before Clinton famously let its 16 electoral votes slip away to Trump in the closing days of the 2016 campaign. But the state government had fallen to Republicans six years earlier: The GOP had recaptured both the governor’s office and the state House from Democrats, and it had extended its majority in the state Senate to a supermajority. The victories allowed Republicans not only to enact conservative policies, but also to control the redistricting process after the 2010 census, which helped lock in their gains at the legislative level for the next decade.

“We were not paying attention to what was going on right underneath our noses,” Greig told me.

The Michigan story was replicated all over the country on Election Night 2010, which Democratic operatives now identify as every bit the historical inflection point that Trump’s victory was in 2016. The national focus had been on Congress, where a red wave swept Democrats out of power in the House, breaking their trifecta in Washington and ending President Barack Obama’s chances of signing major progressive legislation for the remainder of his tenure. Only in the aftermath did most Democrats fully appreciate how bad the bloodbath had been in the states—and what it would portend in the years to come.