The incremental goosestep toward a uniquely American fascism proceeded apace yesterday, when Senate Republicans predictably refused to even allow debate on a federal voting rights bill that would save democracy itself. You know the drill by now. Senate Democrats represent 43 million more people than their authoritarian counterparts do, and 68 percent of Americans support the doomed For the People Act – but none of that matters, because the cultists have put the fix in for minority rule.
We could easily fume at length about the Senate (and especially the Democrats who continue to bring water pistols to a war zone), but in truth we need to focus on what happening in the states. That’s where democracy is dying by the day. That’s where Republicans – dominant in most legislative chambers – are working to rig the game. As Stacey Abrams said the other day, “We have been watching a slow-motion onslaught, where in state after state we are seeing anti-voter legislation, legislation that seeks to criminalize and intimidate election workers, and voting laws that will subvert democracy.”
We wouldn’t even need a federal voting rights law if Republicans were not systematically destroying at the state level. I apologize for being buzzkill, but the reason why they flex so much local muscle is because, for more than a decade, Democrats have been slaughtered in state legislative races. When Barack Obama was elected president, Democrats controlled most state chambers; since 2008, they have lost nearly 950 seats and most of the chambers have gone red. At last check, Republicans control 30 of the 50 legislatures. This is one of the most under-reported stories in American politics. Democrats are still paying a heavy price; so are people who vote blue – to the point where some new state laws could even empower red legislatures to overturn the final election tallies.
Yes, Joe Biden won the presidency with more votes than any candidate in history; yes, his agenda is broadly popular; yes, his current job approval rating is a solid 56 percent. But his party is weak from the bottom up. The grassroots Republican termites are gnawing away at the democratic woodwork, enacting laws that restrict the vote, and who’s going to stop them? Five years after Democrats were wiped out at the state level in the 2010 midterms, a former national Democratic spokesperson named Brad Woodhouse told the press that, wow, maybe the party needs to work harder at winning state chambers; as he put it in 2015, “There’s a growing realization we’ve got to get more serious at the state level.”
A “growing realization”? Too late, pal. That ship already sailed.
What’s happening now at the state level – the epidemic of anti-voter laws – can be traced back to those 2010 midterms. Democratic voters who two years earlier had propelled Obama to the presidency sat on their asses en masse; as a result, turnout was dominated by the GOP’s tea-party zealots. The doltish Democratic attitude was like, “OK, we elected Obama, our job is done.” So the rabid right filled the void. Republicans seized control of the majority of state legislative chambers, tallying their highest number since 1952, and their tally of state legislative seats was their highest since 1928.
Democrats in that pivotal year suffered what was diplomatically called “an enthusiasm gap.” Tim Storey, a prescient elections specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said it best: “2010 will go down as a defining political election that will shape the national political landscape for the next 10 years.”
I won’t mince words: Why are the Democrats so bad at grassroots politics? Given the importance of state legislative races, why did the national party allow itself to be outspent cycle after cycle by the GOP, usually by a 2-1 margin? Democrats finally wised up in 2020 and attained a measure of spending parity, but the 2010 dynamic still held and they failed to flip a single state legislative chamber.
Democrats have essentially surrendered crucial state turf for lots of reasons: The party’s core constituencies – especially minorities and young people – tend to skip midterm elections. The party is good at top-down messaging, whereas the Republicans are more bottom up with their “low taxes” mantra and cultural conservatism. When Hillary Clinton ran for president in ’16, she acknowledged that “we have just been decimated” at the state level, and suggested another reason: “Democrats are really personality-driven. There’s the old line that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. There’s truth to that.” She was suggesting – although she would surely have denied it – that the party responded to Obama’s “personality-driven” brand, but neglected the nuts and bolts of party building. Indeed, Obama paid little attention to that.
And a fundamental factor: Republicans have a more instinctive understanding of power; they are far more adept at playing the long game.
Way back in 2000, Tom Cole, the Republican National Committee’s chief of staff, told me that while everyone seemed focused with the Bush-Gore presidential race, he was obsessed with the GOP’s state legislative races. He said, “Next to the presidential race, this is more important to us than any other elections in the country” – because lawmakers in 44 states would have the power to draw the boundaries for House and state districts. (In other words, to gerrymander.) And I well recall that, while covering the 2004 presidential race, Republicans were already planning for the 2010 state legislative midterms.
Democrats, by contrast, are always reactive, always playing catch-up. The result, today, is MAGA Republican dominance at the grassroots level. The so-called state “laboratories of democracy” (a phrase coined a century ago by Louis Brandeis) have become pestilent Petri dishes. Trump’s cult is marching us toward authoritarianism, but the feckless Democrats warrant a fair share of the blame.