The long-term future of the United States will not be decided in the nation’s capital. It will be decided in the states – and that’s where the biggest story of the 2018 election is.

For years, Democratic Party leaders and funders focused on the federal level as the place to win major reform, and all but ignored state legislatures. Where the left was not paying attention, the extreme right stepped into the breach.

During President Obama’s time in office, his party lost over 900 state legislative seats. Over eight years, the Republican party won control over two-thirds of the nation’s state legislative chambers. From there, the political right attempted a slow-motion revolution to rig the rules of the political process so that a minority party, cowed by its largest donors, could hold on to power.

The components of that quiet yet epochal donor-driven power grab based in the states included gerrymandering with what one judge called “almost surgical precision”’; measures to destroy unions and suppress voting; organizing attorneys general to litigate against federal reforms from the Affordable Care Act to climate change protections; and more.

Republican party elected officials acted under pressure from the network of arch-right billionaires and multimillionaires built by the libertarian zealot Charles Koch over the last decade. Koch opposes nearly all of the policies won through collective action on the part of citizens over the past century, from graduated income taxes to workers’ rights, social security and Medicare, anti-discrimination laws, and environmental regulations.

By focusing on the states, Koch-allied strategists and the elected officials with whom they worked achieved a tightening chokehold on America’s political system. And they nearly got away with it – until some on the left proved they could learn from being outfoxed.

This election day, intense state-level organizing by Democrats secured stunning wins. Collectively, these wins constitute a promissory note toward long-term success. True, Democrats only won back about 40% of what they lost in the Tea Party waves of 2010 and 2012; there’s plenty more ground to make up. But last Tuesday staunched and reversed the bleeding.

Nationwide, Democrats won nearly 370 seats from Republicans, netting about 300. They gained seven governorships – not only in the midwest and on both coasts but even in three states in deep red territory: New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas. Seven legislative chambers in five states also flipped from red to blue. They also added seven new trifecta states (ie control of both houses and the governorship): Connecticut, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Washington. That narrowed the 3:1 Republican advantage in this arena to less than 2:1.

Against the odds, Democratic activists in even some of the reddest states – like Tennessee, ranked 50th in voter turnout and 43rd in voter registration – have invigorated once-moribund parties with new vision and organizing savvy. Their North Carolina and Texas counterparts broke Republican party supermajorities; in North Carolina, that means the Democratic governor’s veto can now prevail.

Critically, these state victories will put restraints on Republican party plans to use the congressional redistricting process after the 2020 census to extend the anti-democratic operation that party carried out in 2010 in a secretive project called “Redmap”. The most audacious and technically sophisticated gerrymander in US history, Redmap enabled state Republican officials to manipulate district lines using vast reams of detailed voter data. The upshot was that Democrats’ political representation for the past eight years was far less than their share of the electorate.

Recognizing such schemes for what they were, beleaguered Democratic majorities in key Republican-dominated states delivered sharp rebukes last week to Koch standard-bearers including Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, widely reviled for having “dropped the bomb” on public sector labor unions; Virginia’s Representative David Brat, the Tea Party candidate who had ousted the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, in 2014; and Kansas’s virulent advocate of voter suppression, a Muslim registry and extreme measures against undocumented immigrants, Kris Kobach.

Illustrating the unpopularity of the right’s economics, last Tuesday’s ballot initiative victories showed a hunger for progressive policies even in some states seen as indelibly red. Arkansas and Missouri raised their minimum wages. Utah, Nebraska and Idaho voted for Medicaid expansion. In Arizona, six mothers organized a massive grassroots fight against a Koch-backed ballot measure to privatize public education – and won a thundering 2:1 victory.

Perhaps most important, the citizen groups that did so much to secure these victories are now looking to fix our broken political system, so that the will of the majority of the citizenry can prevail. Many are working for new laws to provide independent redistricting, automatic voter registration, rights restoration for former felons (as was won in Florida this cycle), public financing of elections, and other kinds of measures to promote government of, by, and for the people, rather than those in the 1%.

With state power, progressives can prove their policies work to better voters’ lives. But there’s uphill work ahead for Democrats, to be sure.

What should be done between now and 2020 to enable Democrats to win that crucial election? Put money and effort into grassroots state-level organizing, starting now, to shift red to purple and purple to blue. With a geographically based Senate and electoral college, any approach that fails to invest in every state amounts to slow suicide.

The lesson from 2018 should be clear: keep investing in all the states and in ongoing intensive organizing programs, so the map of possibility at every level once again expands.



Nancy MacLean is author of the award-winning Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking/Penguin, 2017) and the William H Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University



