It’s a gorgeous June evening in 2018 in Washington DC. It’s easy to imagine senators Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand competing 12 months from now on debate stages across Iowa. But tonight they are tossing beanbags before a cheering young crowd fueled by a pale rosé and piles of guacamole.

It’s a celebratory fundraiser for Run for Something, the brainchild of the millennial activists Amanda Litman and Ross Morales Rocketto, which is teaching hundreds of first-time millennial candidates how to get elected to state legislatures, county commissions, school boards and judgeships. Most of them are women or candidates of color; many of them are running in places like Montana, Oklahoma and Arkansas, states in which Democrats have either surrendered or gone plain extinct.

“We’re here because people facing incredible odds and insurmountable obstacles kept fighting and kept resisting,” Booker tells me, “and figured out what they could do to make a difference.”

And we’re here because Litman turned anguish into action, channeling her devastation after working seven-day weeks to elect Hillary Clinton toward helping others determined to go from spectator to participant, but lacking any clue where to begin. But as Litman took stock while the pain of Clinton’s bitter defeat slowly dulled, she realized that what progressive politics needed most was a rebuilt pipeline of young candidates at the state and local level. Republican focus on down-ballot candidates had provided the GOP not just complete control of Washington, but a modern record number of governors and 70% of all state legislative chambers.

“When I talk to old white male donors, they say, ‘I’ve thought about running for Congress,’” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’m like, ‘Of course you have.’ You know who hasn’t? The young Latina who should.”

Litman quickly conquered the highest summits of electoral politics. She held a historic title: Hillary’s email director. No, not those emails. Litman directed all the campaign’s email fundraising efforts and communications. She raised $330m – that’s almost a third of a billion dollars – one small donation at a time. The campaign haunted her dreams, and destroyed her health: kidney infections, an ever-present migraine hum. She’d wake most nights in a cold sweat and reach for her phone to track fundraising numbers. Did I mention that she loved it? It was everything she’d dreamt about, ever since The West Wing turned her into such a politics-obsessed teenage nerd that she cut class to trail Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards across Virginia during the 2008 Democratic primary.

Election night was crushing. The next day, she sat in the third row for Clinton’s concession speech, eyes red, barely having slept at all, wearing a campaign sweatshirt she wouldn’t remove. Then a Facebook message arrived from a college classmate she hadn’t heard from for years, now a teacher in Chicago. “She was pissed,” Litman says. “She says, ‘If Trump can be president, why can’t I run for city council?’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton gives her concession speech in November 2016. Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

If her old friend wanted to march for change, then run for office, thousands of other people would have the same desire. They also wouldn’t know the first steps, and probably wouldn’t have a Facebook friend with Hillary’s number in her contacts. “There was no infrastructure for this kind of candidate recruitment. None. There was nobody doing it. If we’re able to do this right,” Litman says, eyes aglow, “it’s sort of a shadow national party with a very explicit focus. Could be cool!”

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Two years after the most devastating night of Litman’s life, election night 2018 looked completely different thanks to Run for Something and related efforts by dynamic young activists, almost all women, some completely new to politics, who upended their lives and left high-paying jobs to rebuild the progressive bench from the ground up. More than 200 Run for Something candidates won state legislative seats, some capturing red-state seats that had been in Republican hands for longer than the young candidates had been alive. That’s 10% of all 2018 Democratic state house gains, all for just $2.1m, and not much more than the average budget for one US House race.

While Run for Something helped funnel enthusiastic candidates into electoral politics, groups like Flippable, Sister District and Forward Majority provided another approach. They focused their efforts on reclaiming the state legislative chambers most crucial for the 2021 redistricting. They targeted blue and purple states which had been under complete GOP control since 2010, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina; red states with changing demographics, like Texas and Arizona; and competitive states including Washington and Colorado, where a small number of Democratic gains would be enough to create a blue trifecta.

Together, they channeled dollars and volunteers toward these small local races with massive national impact. Republican strategists and donors had long ago unlocked the importance of these elections and built the party’s national power one state legislative chamber at a time. Republicans captured more than 700 state legislative seats in the 2010 Tea Party wave, then locked in those gains with redistricting, tilting the playing field an even rubier red. In all, Republicans gained more than 1,000 state legislative seats during the Obama years, and used those majorities to enact measures making it more difficult to register to vote or cast a ballot in twenty-five states, further disadvantaging Democrats and consolidating GOP power.

“Democrats had an entire cycle of losing,” says Vicky Hausman, the co-founder of Forward Majority.

Democrats contested more than 5,300 of the 6,066 state legislative seats up for election in 2018, the highest percentage in more than a decade. In one year, they won back almost 450 of the seats that had washed away over the previous decade. It came bottom-up, as Run for Something, Sister District and Forward Majority delivered energy, candidates and strategic smarts to races that the party ignored. They helped win majorities in the Colorado and New York senate, and eroded GOP majorities in Pennsylvania and Arizona. They cracked a Republican supermajority in North Carolina and significantly improved their party’s position in Florida, Michigan and Texas, gaining important yardage with one election to go before the next redistricting.

If our majority – our three-million-person majority – was engaged in state politics, everything is different Rita Bosworth

“We’re just citizens who have been activated. If our majority – our three-million-person majority – was engaged in state politics, everything is different,” says Rita Bosworth, the co-founder of Sister District, which started with a Facebook conversation and now has 30,000 nationwide volunteers organized through sixty-five active teams on the ground. They focused on thirty-two legislative elections – and won sixteen of them – in nine states where Democrats might flip a chamber or make inroads into gerrymandered GOP majorities.

Her three co-founders – political director Gabrielle Goldstein, partnerships and engagement director Lala Wu and programs and communication director Lyzz Schwegler – came together largely through a secret Facebook group of liberal lawyers established after the 2016 election. By spring, Bosworth, Goldstein and Wu had abandoned successful law careers to save democracy full-time.

On election night 2016, tearful in Columbus, Ohio, Flippable’s Catharine Vaughan found herself coming to a similar conclusion. She had taken a leave from McKinsey and Co and left San Francisco to work for the Hillary campaign and spend months on a host family’s sofa. When the campaign ended with whiskey and tears, Vaughan planned to head back to consulting and the Bay Area. Over farewell margaritas, the team tried to unpack what had gone wrong and what might come next. The conversation turned to gerrymandering. Ohio is enough of a competitive, bellwether state that they’d all put their lives on hold, thinking the state’s electoral votes could decide the presidential election. But Republicans still held a two-to-one edge in the state legislature.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hundreds of thousands march down Pennsylvania Avenue during the Women’s March in Washington in 2017. Photograph: Bryan Woolston/Reuters

Vaughan had spent several years working with the Gates Foundation and others on health problems in east Africa that were completely preventable if the right resources landed in the right places. People in politics are really good at understanding who has power and how to build a web of relationships, Vaughan says, but less skilled at building and judging effective organizations. “How do you help them see that maybe the way they’re giving their money could be optimized?”

Forward Majority’s Hausman had a similar background; as a partner at the global strategy firm Dalberg, where she led the Americas team and the global health practice, she worked on bringing business-school analysis and smart-data analytics to philanthropy. Rural governments in sub-Saharan Africa lacked the money they needed, for example, to buy and deliver bed nets to citizens before the rainy mosquito season. “There are these unsexy barriers that really impact people’s lives,” she tells me. “We can’t fix the whole thing, but we can use business strategy and analytics on specific problems that are fixable.” Turned out, one of those problems was democracy right here at home.

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Litman believes Democrats need to compete – and win – everywhere. She’s after candidates rooted in a community who are committed to getting out there and talking to people. She calls it her “fuck yeah” test.

Back on that Washington DC, rooftop, a third US senator and potential Democratic nominee, Elizabeth Warren, slides out of the Run for Something bash before the cornhole battle commences. “This is the future,” she tells me quietly, holding her arms open wide before the room. Indeed, if the forty-sixth president of the United States was pitching beanbags that night (or sneaking out early), it hardly seems a stretch to suggest that the forty-ninth or fiftieth might have been there as well, along with future senators and governors and state representatives, all inspired to run, and shown how to do it, by a new generation of activists who reinvented the party where it had been neglected by their elders – down ballot, where it matters most.

Excerpted from “UNRIGGED: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy“ by David Daley. Published by Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton. Copyright 2020 David Daley, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.



