President Barack Obama will make a late splash into races for state senate and assembly over the next week, endorsing roughly 150 candidates across 20 states.

He’ll also back a candidate for the North Carolina Supreme Court.


The endorsements — which will come along with a variety of robocalls, social media posts, mailers, photos of Obama with the candidates taken as he’s been traveling to campaign in recent weeks, and even a few radio ads — are Obama’s biggest investment in state races ever by far, and come as he gears up to make redistricting reform at the state level the political priority of his post-presidency.

This is the beginning of that effort, an unprecedented engagement all the way down-ballot for any president.

The first group of endorsements went public Friday, with 13 in Florida, but the White House has a much larger list ready to go, including races in states far from competitive territory for the presidential election and Senate races, “focused mostly on swing districts for maximum impact,” said White House political director David Simas.

Democrats are hoping for an anti-Donald Trump wave to give them more of a defense against 2018 midterms that most expect will be tough for the party if Hillary Clinton wins. With Obama’s approval rating climbing — to 57 percent in the Gallup poll out Saturday — they’re hoping that hitching themselves to the president will make the difference. He’s also expected to hit close to 60 endorsements for House races this week, taping commercials and robocalls for many of them.

Six years ago, Democrats felt they couldn’t even get Obama interested in House races. But now, after years of the Democratic bench being depleted on his watch, Obama’s looking to build it back. On top of all that: a concern within the Oval Office and through the West Wing with how much policy is being crafted in state capitals, from laws on reproductive health to climate change to voting rights.

“While Congress has been obstructionist and there’s been no substantive legislation moving under Republican control, what you see in the states is very, very different,” Simas said. “This has not been a focus of presidents in the past. But given what’s happening in state legislatures throughout the country, it has to be.”

Though a former state senator himself, Obama had never endorsed in state legislature races as president before this year. He backed and cut a television ad for a state representative candidate looking to take out an incumbent whom local Democrats felt they’d been betrayed by, and whom the president had called out in his homecoming speech at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield in February. Obama also taped a robocall for the candidate who went on to win the April special election for the seat of the former New York state Senate majority leader who’d just been convicted of corruption.

Since then, White House aides put out word they were interested in doing more. There wasn’t a questionnaire or process set up ahead of time. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party’s arm for state legislature races in Washington, reached out to party caucuses in the states and provided recommendations. Candidates wrote letters.

Everyone went through the White House vetting process, with the West Wing guarding against anyone with a problematic personal or political record getting the president’s stamp of approval. Not everyone made it out.

“There is a high demand,” Simas said.

Although Election Day is just over two weeks away, the White House and allies argue that this is actually the prime moment to get involved.

“In a lot of these super-down-ballot races, focus often doesn’t shift down the ballot until very late in the cycle,” said Carolyn Fiddler, communications director for the DLCC, who pointed out that many of these races will be decided by fewer than 500 votes. “Given where this campaign has gone from the national level on down, this is going to be a really good way to push a lot of these folks over the line.”

Robert Asencio, a veteran of the Army Reserves and Miami-Dade Schools Police Department running for state representative in South Florida, said the path to the endorsement he received Friday started with a letter about his candidacy that he wrote to the White House long before anyone had told him Obama might want to get involved. He laid out his positions on the issues he cared about, and wanted the president to know. He said he never really expected to hear back.

“I hadn’t really thought about it, and then I received a call that I had received an endorsement from the president,” Asencio said.

Rep. José Javier Rodríguez, a Cuban-American running for a Democratic-leaning state Senate seat, said he’d also started out asking for Obama’s endorsement before he ever knew the president was interested in giving it, hoping to capitalize on what he felt months ago was already shaping up to be a good year for Democrats.

With a presidential race and a Senate race underway, Rodríguez said he never would have expected Obama to endorse. But he said with this election cycle in Florida, using for the first time a map that’s been fought over for years, there’s a long-term importance.

“The fact that we are in the first true electoral test of a decade-long effort here in Florida to tackle gerrymandering makes this an opportunity to bring more balance to Tallahassee," an opportunity "that has national significance,” Rodríguez said.

Obama’s backing reminds all those voters he’s stirring up in his campaign trips to Florida to stay in the voting booth until they’ve made their way all the way through the ballot.

“It’s turnout, but also voting down,” Rodríguez said.

Ascensio and his team were taken so much by surprise that the president wanted to get involved in a race at this level that they haven’t yet figured out how to use the endorsements. Their mailers and materials to hand out are all printed already. But he said voters have already been bringing it up to him, to his surprise.

“I hope it’ll convey the fact that the leader of this country has given me the trust of his endorsement,” he said. “I’m still absorbing what it means.”

Fiddler summed it up for him and the other candidates who are getting presidential endorsements in their races for the first time ever.

“This is huge,” Fiddler said. “We are thrilled.”