How Trump's election has fueled a diverse new generation of politicians
It’s a gorgeous June evening in 2018 in Washington DC. It’s easy to imagine senators Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand competing 12 months from now on debate stages across Iowa. But tonight they are tossing beanbags before a cheering young crowd fueled by a pale rosé and piles of guacamole.
It’s a celebratory fundraiser for Run for Something, the brainchild of the millennial activists Amanda Litman and Ross Morales Rocketto, which is teaching hundreds of first-time millennial candidates how to get elected to state legislatures, county commissions, school boards and judgeships. Most of them are women or candidates of color; many of them are running in places like Montana, Oklahoma and Arkansas, states in which Democrats have either surrendered or gone plain extinct.
“We’re here because people facing incredible odds and insurmountable obstacles kept fighting and kept resisting,” Booker tells me, “and figured out what they could do to make a difference.”
And we’re here because Litman turned anguish into action, channeling her devastation after working sevenday weeks to elect Hillary Clinton toward helping others determined to go from spectator to participant, but lacking any clue where to begin. But as Litman took stock while the pain of Clinton’s bitter defeat slowly dulled, she realized that what progressive politics needed most was a rebuilt pipeline of young candidates at the state and local level. Republican focus on down-ballot candidates had provided the GOP not just complete control of Washington, but a modern record number of governors and 70% of all state legislative chambers.
“When I talk to old white male donors, they say, ‘I’ve thought about running for Congress,’” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’m like, ‘Of course you have.’You know who hasn’t? The young Latina who should.”
Litman quickly conquered the highest summits of electoral politics. She held a historic title: Hillary’s email director. No, not those emails. Litman directed all the campaign’s email fundraising efforts and communications. She raised $330m – that’s almost a third of a billion dollars – one small donation at a time. The campaign haunted her dreams, and destroyed her health: kidney infections, an ever-present migraine hum. She’d wake most nights in a cold sweat and reach for her phone to track fundraising numbers. Did I mention that she loved it? It was everything she’d dreamt about, ever since The West Wingturned her into such a politics-obsessed teenage nerd that she cut class to trail Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards across Virginia
during the 2008 Democratic primary.
Election night was crushing. The next day, she sat in the third row for Clinton’s concession speech, eyes red, barely having slept at all, wearing a campaign sweatshirt she wouldn’t remove. Then a Facebook message arrived from a college classmate she hadn’t heard from for years, now a teacher in Chicago. “She was pissed,” Litman says. “She says, ‘If Trump can be president, why can’t I run for city council?’”
If her old friend wanted to march for change, then run for office, thousands of other people would have the same desire. They also wouldn’t know the first steps, and probably wouldn’t have a Facebook friend with Hillary’s number in her contacts. “There was no infrastructure for this kind of candidate recruitment. None. There was nobody doing it. If we’re able to do this right,” Litman says, eyes aglow, “it’s sort of a shadow national party with a very explicit focus. Could be cool!”
Two years after the most devastating night of Litman’s life, election night 2018 looked completely different thanks to Run for Something and related efforts by dynamic young activists, almost all women, some completely new to politics, who upended their lives and left high-paying jobs to rebuild the progressive bench from the ground up. More than 200 Run for Something candidates won state legislative seats, some capturing redstate seats that had been in Republican hands for longer than the young candidates had been alive. That’s 10% of all 2018 Democratic state house gains, all for just $2.1m, and not much more than the average budget for one US House race.
While Run for Something helped funnel enthusiastic candidates into electoral politics, groups like Flippable, Sister District and Forward Majority provided another approach. They focused their efforts on reclaiming the state legislative chambers most crucial for the 2021 redistricting. They targeted blue and purple states which had been under complete GOP control since 2010, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina; red states with changing demographics, like Texas and Arizona; and competitive states including Washington and Colorado, where a small number of Democratic gains would be enough to create a blue trifecta.
Together, they channeled dollars and volunteers toward these small local races with massive national impact. Republican strategists and donors had long ago unlocked the importance of these elections and built the party’s national power one state legislative chamber at a time. Republicans captured more than 700 state legislative seats in the 2010 Tea Party wave, then locked in those gains with redistricting, tilting the playing field an even rubier red. In all, Republicans gained more than 1,000 state legislative seats during the Obama years, and used those majorities to enact measures making it more difficult to register to vote or cast a ballot in twenty-five states, further disadvantaging Democrats and consolidating GOP power.
“Democrats had an entire cycle of losing,” says Vicky Hausman, the cofounder of Forward Majority.
Democrats contested more than 5,300 of the 6,066 state legislative seats up for election in 2018, the highest percentage in more than a decade. In one year, they won back almost 450 of the seats that had washed away over the previous decade. It came bottomup, as Run for Something, Sister District and Forward Majority delivered energy, candidates and strategic smarts to races that the party ignored. They helped win majorities in the Colorado and New York senate, and eroded GOP majorities in Pennsylvania and Arizona. They cracked a Republican supermajority in North Carolina and significantly improved their party’s position in Florida, Michigan and Texas, gaining important yardage with one election to