On February 20th, 2018, six days after seventeen people were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Representative Kionne McGhee, a Democrat from Miami, stood on the floor of the Florida House of Representatives. Looking on from the gallery above were Parkland students who had traveled over 400 miles by bus to Tallahassee with the hope of persuading their state lawmakers to pass gun reforms.
McGhee asked the assembly to vote on a bill that would have banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Representative Carlos Guillermo Smith—of Orlando, where a gunman had killed 49 and wounded another 53 people in the Pulse nightclub in 2016—had sponsored the bill, whose chances would expire unless the House bent its usual protocol and acted right at that moment.
“The shooting at Parkland demands extraordinary action,” McGhee told the assembly.
He was trying a technical procedural maneuver, one that might have worked in an alternate reality without partisan politics. But everyone who understood what it meant that Republicans held a supermajority in the Florida assembly knew what would come next. Richard Corcoran, the Republican Speaker of the House, interrupted McGhee. A few minutes later, the House voted on party lines, 71 to 36, not to consider the assault weapons ban.
In the gallery, students began to cry. On Twitter, student leader Emma Gonzáles wrote, “The anger that I feel right now is indescribable.” Something unusual was happening. With their eloquence, temerity, and rage, the Parkland students had seized national attention. Major news networks and papers dispatched reporters to cover their calls for change. That week in February, even before knowing that hundreds of thousands of students nationwide would soon walk out of their schools and through the streets, the American public paid attention to what was happening in Tallahassee.
And yet from another vantage, the scene in the Florida capitol that day was not all that unusual. In statehouses, it is not uncommon to watch someone sit before a panel of elected officials, hold up a placard of a dead child—killed by opioids or lack of insurance or a gun—and plead for the passage of a bill that will inevitably not move out of committee because it does not fit within the political calculus of the assembly’s leadership. In those hearing rooms, ordinary people often share in breathtaking impotence.
Three weeks before the Parkland students arrived in Tallahassee, for example, the Florida Senate Judiciary Committee discussed the Rule of Law Adherence Act, which would have required all local government officials—explicitly including employees of the state university system—to turn over information about immigrants to federal immigration officials. The bill was similar to those shopped around the country by the American Legislative Exchange Committee (ALEC), an organization that since the 1970s has written experimental conservative state legislation. ALEC’s corporate members include Geo Group, the largest provider of detention services for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a major donor to Florida Republicans and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In 2016, the federal government decided to stop contracting with private prisons because a Department of Justice investigation had found they were unsafe, but after Trump’s inauguration, in early 2017, Geo Group received $774 million worth of contracts to run federal prisons.
It has been an open secret that Democrats have prioritized federal candidates and policy at the expense of the states.On January 30, 2018, the day that the Florida immigration bill was considered in Tallahassee, so many people showed up that the hearing room reached capacity. Muslim students and Latino farmworkers and their teenage children who had traveled hours to testify against the bill weren’t allowed in the packed room. Expressionless, they watched the proceedings on a television mounted in a hallway as Florida senator Aaron Bean stood at a podium and said his bill “means criminals will be kept off the streets.” The bill did not advance, in what counts as a victory, in part because in 2011 immigrant rights groups staged weeks-long protests in Tallahassee to oppose a bill modeled after Arizona’s 2010 law that allowed police officers to ask for immigration papers if they suspected someone was undocumented. The Florida legislature didn’t pass a new aggressive anti-immigrant law until 2019, when it gave the state the power to sue local law enforcement that refused to detain people according to orders from federal immigration agencies.
The next day, January 31, Floridians concerned about sea level rise arrived in Tallahassee by the busload to ask their legislators to pass a raft of proactive climate-related reforms. Many were college students or recent graduates who had grown up along the coast and understood that the window of opportunity for stalling climate change was closing; during their lifetimes, they told me, their hometowns would be radically altered, if not sunken. By the end of the legislative session that March, none of the bills they wanted were passed, even though just ten years ago it was all but mandatory for both Democrats and Republicans in Florida to at least make overtures about the need for proactive environmental laws.
Similar scenes play out in hearing rooms across the country, usually unrecognized by the American public. Beneath the tumult of the Trump presidency, state lawmakers have largely kept to their course. As ALEC’s own website explained in 2017, “State legislatures around the country have made significant progress passing bills on issues such as immigration, policing and healthcare, even as Republicans in Congress and President Trump have struggled to make similar progress at the federal level.” After decades of state-based campaigns coordinated by libertarian and Republican operatives and disinvestment in the states by Democrats and progressives, right-wing politicians have swept control of statehouses across the country. The consequences of those divergent strategies are glaring today. Democrats hit a rock bottom in November 2016, when Republicans won control of either the state legislature or the governorship, or both, in 44 states. In 25 of those states, like Florida, Republicans had hit the trifecta— governorship, House, and Senate. Democrats, meanwhile, had a trifecta in six coastal states. The significance of those numbers leaps out at you when you look at a map from 2009, when Democrats dominated or shared control of many states that ten years later would become blood red.
For years, it has been an open secret in political circles that Democrats and progressive interest groups have prioritized federal candidates and policy at the expense of the states. The liberal political establishments—party officials, interest group and union leaders, donors and consultants—have for the most part underresourced state-based efforts since at least the 1970s, with repercussions that have only recently been obvious to the general public. “Conservatives have traditionally had this view that they want to build and invest and focus at the state level where progressives and Democrats have really centralized and tried to build their power in Washington, DC. And I think that that theory has had negative implications for and negative consequences for Democrats and progressives across the country,” said Nick Rathod, then director of the progressive organization State Innovation Exchange.
The moment I grasped the severity of the power imbalance in statehouses was on a Thursday afternoon in May 2016, when I was in Jefferson City, Missouri. I was there to report on how outmatched abortion rights advocates were, but I saw all around me that the problem extended far beyond reproductive rights. In the last days of the legislative session, capitol buildings become places of frenetic energy, with lawmakers, aides, and lobbyists stalking hallways and staying awake through the night to pass or reject final bills. That Thursday, I was weighing whether to go to the capitol basement for a meeting about the Senate holding a Planned Parenthood CEO in contempt or go upstairs to listen to the House debate a bill that would have made all abortion illegal without an exception for the life of a woman.
We are on a precipice. It remains unwritten whether the newfound activism on the left and reinvigoration within the Democratic Party will sustain itself.That week the assembly was also debating (and ultimately passed) what would be the first stand-your-ground gun law to take effect since Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012. I wondered whether I should watch that debate instead. As I hovered in the gray limestone hallway trying to decide which way to go, I ran into the lone ACLU lobbyist, who tracked 500 bills related to at least a dozen issues. She told me the assembly was on the verge of passing a voter ID law, and she couldn’t believe a controversial move to suppress voting rights in an election year wasn’t getting any attention outside the statehouse. Now in the situation that progressive advocates in redstate capitol buildings routinely find themselves, pulled between multiple urgent priorities, I eventually rushed upstairs to watch the House debate.
Some days later, when I was on my way home, several liberal blogs and news sites publicized a moment in that debate. Representative Tila Hubrecht, a trained nurse representing District 151, a southeastern parcel of the state, had said that conceiving a child during rape could be a “silver lining” from God. On the internet, Hubrecht was excoriated. I realized I had heard her comment in real time and had barely registered the line. Out of context, Hubrecht could be laughed off or criticized for being one particularly absurd lawmaker, but if you had watched just a sampling of the hearings, debates, or demonstrations in Jefferson City that year, you would know that her remarks matched the tenor of dozens of other comments and the overall ethos of the assembly, which passed, by a margin of 110 to 37, the baldly unconstitutional bill she was advocating for.
Dismissing Hubrecht as a lone wacko didn’t get at the heart of the issue. Each of the bills that made their way to assembly floors that spring were bellwethers of how much political sway the lawmakers who sponsored them held and which voting blocs the state’s political leadership feared. In assemblies across the country, legislators were debating bills that ten years earlier might have seemed too far out of bounds to ever make it to the floor. In statehouses and administrations, the conservative movement was deploying, and succeeding with, its death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy to whittle away at industry regulations, civil rights protections, and the social safety net.
Meanwhile, because they had less power in statehouses, Democrats and progressives were not enacting solutions to the problems they prioritized. After Republicans won hundreds more state legislative seats in 2010, groups like Americans for Prosperity, ALEC, and National Right to Life had more success with their bills. Between 2011 and 2018, while the national media tracked federal politics to the exclusion of so much else, state governments passed over 400 abortion restrictions. In 2016 alone, 77 bills that would have restricted voting rights were introduced or carried over in 28 states.
In 2015, Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker signed a “right to work” law, making his state the 25th in the nation to prohibit unions from requiring dues from their members, which in effect drains unions of their resources and power. That year in North Carolina, after four years of slashing public education budgets by hundreds of millions of dollars, the state legislature passed a law that restricted food assistance to unemployed adults and required all employers to verify employees’ immigration status, plus another law that prohibited the removal of Confederate monuments. Those bills are just a few of thousands, many almost identical, each a manifestation of the extremism that had become ordinary, with national implications.
During the summer of 2015, meanwhile, the Clinton presidential campaign joined together with the Democratic National Committee and 32 Democratic state parties with the expressed goal of rallying to “rebuild our party from the ground up.” The joint effort raised some $60 million. But a Hillary Victory Fund staffer was depositing money in the state party coffers, only to send most of it back to national campaigns working to elect Clinton. Only about one percent of the money raised went to the state parties, prompting one state party leader to call the arrangement “one-sided.” After that election, Democrats hit their rock bottom. This example is not an indictment only of Clinton and her staff; it is essentially 40 years of the liberal establishment’s priorities distilled.
There is a difference between winning an election cycle or two and executing a long-term, proactive political strategy.Those priorities made sense for a long time. On the national stage, Democrats held control of the House of Representatives for 42 years. Investing in national lobbying made sense for left-leaning groups. Besides, from before the Civil War, notions about the sovereignty of the states had been wound up with justifications for racial oppression. For contemporaries of the civil rights movement and those born in subsequent generations, grainy footage of southern governors refusing to allow integration and permitting white police officers to beat with batons and set dogs on black protesters reinforced the idea that state officials were hell-bent on impeding progress, whereas the federal government—albeit reluctantly and inadequately—intervened to ensure a measure of justice. Trying to pioneer civil rights reforms via Mississippi’s or Alabama’s statehouse would have been absurd. Besides, the whole point of the movement was securing civil rights for everyone in the country, not just a lucky few. That basic premise stuck. The baby boomers who have steered the Democratic Party and left-leaning interest groups for years came of age under the assumption that the federal government is the most meaningful venue for social and political reforms.
In recent years, we have seen those assumptions unravel. As Rich Templin, legislative and political director of the Florida AFLCIO, told me, “The state level is everything. Everything that has a negative impact on people’s lives happens on the state level.” While that reality, minus some exceptions, is evident to anyone who has spent time tracking just about any issue from labor to energy to guns, for decades that idea failed to gain much traction among Democratic Party operatives, the directors of left-leaning foundations and interest groups, and liberal donors.
At the same time, the interest groups affiliated with the left deemphasized local organizing, choosing instead to defend and expand their policy goals through advocacy and litigation. To a certain extent, that has begun to change. In the Trump era, new activists and organizers have lent might to local progressive efforts. During the highstakes 2018 midterm elections, Democrats gained trifectas in six states, flipped six legislative chambers, and broke Republican supermajorities in four more. Those gains, while meaningful, still did not reverse the effects of 2010, when 700 Republican state legislators were elected, or all of the previous years when libertarians and conservatives invested in their networks in capitals like Jefferson City and Tallahassee. Republicans continue to have outsize power on the state level across the country—and that little-understood power continues to build on itself, as we will see in coming pages.
We are on a precipice. It remains unwritten whether the newfound activism on the left and reinvigoration within the Democratic Party will sustain itself. There is a difference between winning an election cycle or two and executing a long-term, proactive political strategy. The Democratic gains in 2018, including on the state level, were largely considered a reaction against Trump. “This moment has radicalized liberals and electoralized the radicals,” Maurice Mitchell, Working Families Party’s National Director, summarized. That change was significant. But we can’t miss that the backlash against Trump, though often awe-inspiring, was nonetheless largely reactionary.
Attention is recursive; people pay attention because everyone is paying attention.For decades, the pattern has held that progressive groups have raised more money and attracted more members during eras when their missions have been threatened, as during George W. Bush’s presidency, than when they have secured wins. No matter how loud or organized they have been in the past couple of years, Democrats and progressives are still conforming to that historic pattern; they are more politically energized when they are obviously losing. Meanwhile, for decades, Republicans and their allies have been proactive, staking out longterm goals that have tilted the power dynamic to their advantage. Many crucial Republican victories that changed national politics were first won on the state level. Now, as the winner-take-all 2020 elections approach, progressive funders, strategists, and activists will have to decide whether they will get out of defensive mode and make that constant, yearlong, proactive and persistent work in the states a priority for the long term.
To advance a proactive agenda, Democrats have to win in the states. Defeating Trump in 2020 might be most Democrats’ ultimate goal. The 2020 presidential election is, of course, a profoundly high-stakes contest. However, Democrats and progressives cannot focus on that race, and other federal races, to the exclusion of down-ballot races and state-level policy work, or they will damn themselves to the same long-term power imbalances that led to their nationwide rock bottom in November 2016. The coming chapters of this book will illustrate why. One important reason is that statehouses are venues where lawmakers can propose ideas, set the terms of debate, and push the nation in a progressive direction.
Former Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory.” State-based campaigns for progressive reforms have worked, throughout history and within the last year. Some northern states abolished slavery 80 years before the Civil War. Wisconsin passed unemployment insurance as a model for the nation. In the 1960s, California set a higher emissions standard for vehicles. Overlooking what is happening in the states also means missing proof that victories like those are possible. In the 2018 midterms, voters in three red states—Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho—expanded Medicaid to cover more low-income workers. Washington passed a bill enshrining net neutrality in the state.
The scope and the importance of what is happening in state governments across the country are underreported, even though it is impossible to understand our political landscape without accounting for who is in power in places like Tallahassee and Little Rock and St. Paul—and who is organizing nearby. National political battles are now waged in the states. And they will be for the foreseeable future.
Right-wing strategists have explicitly chosen to pursue their goals on the state level. Until recently, everyone else has largely failed to respond, for reasons that this book will explore. In those same statehouses, lawmakers hammer out the details of state budgets that literally lay out what our culture values. In recent years, in the competition for airtime, though, those proposals, like dozens of others that rolled through obscure state committees, championed by unknown lawmakers, were no match for thousands of people protesting the “Muslim ban” at airports across the country, or the Today show’s Matt Lauer being accused of sexual harassment and assault, or Kim Jong-un boasting about his nuclear weapons, or Stormy Daniels saying she had been paid off for staying silent about an affair with President Trump, or any of the dozens of other urgent or salacious national stories that also needed to be reported. Social media algorithms and editors have been proven to privilege what is splashy, and opinions are easier to produce than detailed reports on pension funds or redistricting commissions. Attention is recursive; people pay attention because everyone is paying attention. When you have never heard of a public service commission, you don’t care who its members are, even if their decisions bear directly on climate change, and in turn your mortgage and insurance rates, and the fate of your city. Locked in trances of controversy, readers may not know how much they are missing as they scroll.
In the rare instance that local bills spark national discussion, those bills are usually described in isolation, as one-offs. Outrage momentarily ripples across television screens and social media, but the public doesn’t necessarily see how those bills fit into a far-reaching, long-term national agenda. In recent years there has been much discussion of how race, gender, class, and other identities “intersect.” Likewise, issues like guns or labor protections or clean energy that may seem separate are in fact entangled, not only in individuals’ lives but in policy and political calculations. That is true on the federal stage—as in Trump’s racial taunts facilitating a tax code that benefits billionaires—but also in less obvious maneuvers in the states. It is impossible to understand why, for instance, Wisconsin gave the Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn, which produces iPhones, $4 billion worth of tax breaks and permission to ignore environmental rules unless you also understand not only corporate lobbying but also how expertly Governor Scott Walker broke the local unions and how local gun rights and antiabortion organizations turn out conservative voters to every election.
There is almost no one with the necessary platform to describe how hundreds of seemingly disparate—and often ostensibly random or insignificant—bills are specifically designed, along with hundreds of others, to consolidate power for Republican lawmakers and their patrons. In recent years, giant hedge funds have acquired local newspapers struggling after the financial crisis and the explosion of online media. Investment funds have bought legacy papers like the Denver Post and shrunk their staffs, leaving fewer reporters to cover more terrain.
Between 2004 and 2014, just as the right’s coordinated campaigns in the states accelerated, local newspapers lost about a third of their full-time statehouse reporters. The remaining staff doesn’t have the bandwidth to capture everything that is happening, let alone present the bird’s-eye context about how one bill fits into a long-term movement. “No one has the luxury to spend all day in a hearing,” one former statehouse reporter in Florida told me. Meanwhile, the largest owner of local television stations in the United States is the pro-Trump giant Sinclair Media. After Sinclair buys a station, its coverage becomes more conservative and nationally focused. And, finally, after years of media consolidation, six conglomerates own and control much of the news media—everything from FiveThirty Eight.com to Fox News. As they have consolidated, those conglomerates have also focused more on national news.
As a result, even if you don’t go in for Fox News or conservative talk radio, you are unlikely to come across comprehensive reports on state laws unless one of those laws is challenged and makes its way to a federal court—or someone in that state is running in a close race for a federal position. Popular podcasts produced with political junkies in mind are no better on this front. On those shows, week after week, DCor New York–based journalists often engage in circular self-righteous glee or concerned analysis about the Trump administration’s various misdeeds, or they speculate about congressional races as if discussing a fantasy football league. And that is exactly the point.
Right-wing strategists have chosen to implement their policies on the state level because almost no one is paying attention. “Since we are greatly outnumbered,” Charles Koch told a roomful of his libertarian allies as they wrote their plans, they would have to exploit their “superior technology” “to create winning strategies” that they would deploy with stealth. On the other hand, a longtime progressive strategist told me that because his group’s policies tend to be more popular, “Our side almost always benefits from shining a light.”
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From All Politics Is Local from Meaghan Winter. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bold Type Books. Copyright © 2019 by Meaghan Winter.
