Just before election day, I spoke with Jessica Post, the executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, a party organization tasked with winning back state legislatures. Post was door-knocking in Iowa for Democratic candidates—she was clear about the challenge, but she was energized.

“In 2010, I was at the DLCC,” she said. “I had a firsthand look. We were prepared for an old fight: lawyers, guns and money—but not a lot of investments were made in the electoral campaigns for state legislators.”

That 2010 wakeup call shook (some) Democrats into action.

“We have to invest in campaign infrastructure,” she told me.

Groups like the DLCC saw the 2016 presidential election as a critical point to turn statehouses and governorships blue, and ride that momentum into the 2018 midterms—so that by 2020, the eventual redistricting process would take place under Democratic oversight. (No less important, Democratic chambers could put a stop to conservative, state-level legislation like transgender bathroom laws and rollbacks of reproductive-health services). Speaking to my colleague Russell Berman this past August, Post was downright bullish about the prospects of doing this: At that point, the DLCC hoped to flip at least 10 state chambers, and as many as 13.

To do so, Post told me about her organization’s grassroots victory program, one that trained state legislative field organizers, “getting them to door knock, make sure the turf was cut, and to train the volunteers around the candidates.”

That infrastructure would prove critical in the long-term, according to Post. “This is longer-lasting than direct mail,” she said, and it would assist Democratic candidates in the following election cycle, and the one after that.

The DLCC was assisted in its efforts in certain states—like Ohio—by the Clinton campaign, which put hundreds of organizers in the field. President Obama, in a fairly unprecedented move, made 150 down-ballot endorsements. These included U.S. House races, but also candidates running for state Assembly seats and state Senate seats. David Simas, the White House political director, told me that, “Foundationally, the president—on his own—said to me and others on team that he wanted to engage forcefully and aggressively … on the state and local level.”

That desire, he said, was “Driven by what the president has seen in the last few years, in terms of legislation passed in statehouses—like SB-2 in North Carolina, voter disenfranchisement laws, attacks on reproductive health and attacks on climate.”

President Obama had already announced that gerrymandering will be a focus of his post-presidency, and he will work alongside former Attorney General Eric Holder on the newly-established National Democratic Redistricting Committee. The White House election-year effort to bring attention to down-ballot races, Simas said, “is absolutely consistent with the President’s drive to deal with redistricting.”