A barrage of state actions have challenged Obama’s core agenda. GOP's state victories haunt Obama

Barack Obama has spent well over $1 billion on his political campaigns, but it’s the $20 to $30 million Democrats didn’t shell out three years ago that is costing the White House as he slogs through the first six months of his second term.

The GOP’s wildly successful, low-key, and stunningly cheap campaign to seize state capitals in 2010 has come back to haunt Obama and his fellow Democrats. It’s now clear that the party’s loss of 20 state legislative chambers and critical Midwestern governor’s seats represents an ongoing threat every bit as dangerous as the more-publicized Republican take-back of the House that same year.


There was no stopping the GOP wave that year — but strategists in both parties say Obama’s team might have blunted it if they had somehow managed to cut into the GOP’s $30-to-$10 million cash advantage in state house races by making campaigns at the very bottom of the ballot a priority.

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For that seed money, Republicans secured an historic return, cementing a ten-year grip on the House of Representatives and a score of state houses, and erasing the remaining smudges of blue in red states.

“The Obama team has done some amazing things, those guys are really something, but the Democrats plain got skunked on the state houses,” says former Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), chairman of REDMAP, the group founded by Republican über-operative Ed Gillespie in late 2009 to influence state races ahead of the critical once-a-decade map-drawing process.

“They weren’t in the same league as us, and that’s having lasting consequences,” added Reynolds, who represented the Buffalo, N.Y. area for five terms.

It might be the greatest opportunity cost of the Obama Era in terms of sheer damage to Democrats, a gift that keeps giving to the Republicans in the form of GOP-dominated redistricting and a barrage of state actions that challenge Obama’s core agenda on health care, civil rights and abortion.

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“Huge pain in the ass, yeah, every day,” is how one senior Obama aide described the GOP’s creation of safe House seats — and the subsequent assaults on Obamacare, abortion rights, gun control, voting rights and municipal unions emanating from suddenly GOP-dominated states like North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio.

”Everyone is focusing on the House as hampering us, but no one has really focused on losing all those governerships and state legislatures,” the person added.

Those consequences are reshaping policy debates all over the country and forcing Democrats to play defense, wreaking particular havoc with White House implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

For starters, Republican mapmakers had GOP state legislatures in Florida and Ohio, their ranks fattened in 2008, buck their own Republican governors to reject Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid in their states. More importantly, the conservative revival has capped the number of states fully developing their own health care exchanges at 17, far fewer than Obama’s team had anticipated.

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The flipping of both houses in North Carolina has led to passage of new voter ID and registration laws Democrats claim are intended to restrict minority voting. The 2011 Alabama law that made it a crime to harbor or transport immigrants in the state was passed weeks after Republicans took over both houses in Montgomery.

And the new Republican supermajorities in Texas and elsewhere have resulted in a renewed push to limit abortions, with the GOP takeover of the Pennsylvania legislature and governor’s mansion leading to a crackdown on abortion clinics, spurred in part by the ghastly practices of convicted clinic owner Hermit Gosnell in Philadelphia.

Obama’s team has already begun prepping for the 2014 crop of races, when high-profile GOP governors, including Ohio’s John Kasich, Florida’s Rick Scott and Michigan’s Rick Snyder, are up for re-election. Earlier this month, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, former head of the Democratic Governors Association, quietly slipped into the West Wing to meet with Obama Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer to map out fundraising and campaign strategy.

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The meeting came after several Democratic governors, including O’Malley, implored Obama personally at a meeting of the nation’s governors this spring to help roll back the Republican tide in traditionally Democratic states, according to several aides familiar with the situation.

But when it comes to redistricting, the damage has already been done. The next chance Democrats have to fight back comes in 2020, seven long years away.

“It’s just one of those things Republicans have always done better than Democrats,” said Michael McDonald, a politics professor at George Mason who has served as a redistricting consultant in Virginia and New Jersey.

“Since back in the later1970s, Republicans, led by people like Lee Atwater, discovered that focusing on state legislatures was a really cost-effective strategy…” said McDonald.

“At the presidential level ,Democrats are able to match up with Republicans. At the state level, where spending has a more potent effect, they are less competitive… They’ve lost control of those elections and now they are at the whim of all these [conservative] superpacs.”

The unassumingEd Gillespie, an operational genius whose penchant for shadow work stands in marked contrast to the cable omnipresence of his ally Karl Rove, began laying the fundraising and logistical groundwork for the redistricting fight in mid-2009, seeing state elections as path back to relevance for a decimated national party.

“It was all conceived sitting in Ed’s office in Alexandria, Virginia… it was entirely his vision,” said Gillespie associate Chris Jankowski, head of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which served as an umbrella organization for the effort. “It seems like an obvious strategy now, but you have to turn back the clock to realize how demoralized we all were… He was saying, ‘Here’s something smart we can do…’”

Then came January 2010, when Republicans’ luck turned. The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United opened up the spigot for conservative donors, followed a couple of weeks later by Scott Brown’s Senate win in supposedly safe Democratic Massachusetts.

Gillespie & Co. pounced, pulling in millions from traditional GOP donors, including Wal-Mart, tobacco companies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative donors, according to a report by the online investigative web site Pro Publica. In addition, the RSLC activated a subsidiary to funnel cash to the party’s best map-drafter — the snowy-haired bane of liberals for decades, Tom Hofeller.

The effort, Pro Publica estimated, allowed Republican mapmakers to redraw the lines in “four times as many as many Congressional districts as Democrats,” consolidating the gains of the 2010 congressional elections, and creating the firewall of safe GOP seats that has so bedeviled Obama.

The Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, was only able to raise about a third as much — because panicked Democrats were pouring everything they had into Senate and House races, and because Obama’s team was focused on a handful of governor’s races, and the president’s own nascent re-election campaign.

“At first I was a little panicked, they weren’t out there really competing. I thought I was going to get hit by a sucker punch,” said Jankowski, speaking during a break in 2014 state strategy sessions being held this week in Sonoma, Calif.

“Then I realized what was happening and it was like, how much can we run up the score?” he added. “The vaunted machine that had just gotten Obama elected had this blind spot.”

At the time, Obama had bigger worries: The White House spent much of early 2010 obsessively focused on passing Obamacare, an effort that energized Republicans and enervated the West Wing.

“We did kill ourselves for [Alex] Sink and [Ted] Strickland,” said one Obama aide, referring, respectively, to the Florida and Ohio gubernatorial candidates swept away in the Republican wave.

Another Democrat, directly involved in the effort to raise cash for the state efforts, said “we could never get our big donors to give a damn about the states. The Republicans have always been more aware of the value of the states.”

Democrats did make up some lost ground last year, winning back a fraction of the 675 seats they lost in 2010.

“[A] funny thing happened on the way to all those Republican victory parties,” wrote DSLC director Michael Seargent in a recent op-ed. “Democrats netted over 170 new legislative seats across the country and flipped control of eight legislative chambers from Republican to Democratic majorities.”

Strickland, who campaigned hard for Obama last year, says Democrats need to learn their lesson in 2014 and beyond, citing Big Labor’s backlashagainst anti-union legislation in Wisconsin and Ohio as examples of Democrats mustering potent state operations.

“Given the circumstances, I don’t know what [the White House] would have done to reverse things… It was really grim out in the states,” he said. “Going forward, we just can’t let this happen again.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Martin O’Malley as the head of the Democratic Governors Association, rather than the former head of the group.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Jessica Huff @ 07/26/2013 10:16 AM CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Martin O’Malley as the head of the Democratic Governors Association, rather than the former head of the group.