Last week, following what happened in Tennessee, I spent several newsletters/whiteboards focused on the fact that Democrats didn’t even challenge half the GOP-held legislative seats in Tennessee. But it’s not just a Tennessee problem…it’s systemic. Dozens of districts, in state after state, are uncontested, leaving millions of Americans stuck in a world with no choice and no democracy.
I also explained just how much these uncontested races, together, damage democracy as well as broader public outcomes. The answer: it’s a catastrophe.
Many of you asked: Why do we let this happen? Why do we let so many extremists run without opposition, which means without any accountability, incurring all that damage?
And the answer takes me back to the basic “two battles” model I often talk about. The reason it’s such a systemic problem stems from how the two major sides in today’s politics view, plan for, and construct an infrastructure to wage the political battle as they conceive it.
The video above walks through it, but one side largely approaches politics through an anti-democracy lens. How can they lock an unpopular viewpoint into place, over time, when they know full well that the heart of their agenda would fail if left to a majority to decide through repeated elections? And the answer is that locking up state-level governance has become their central front, because doing so gives them enormous power over both 1) the key issues they care about, as well as over 2) democracy itself, since it’s the state legislatures that write most of the rules of America’s elections. And the combination of the two allows them to achieve their goal of passing law after law, while (due to gerrymandering, voter suppression, uncontested races, lawlessness, etc) facing no accountability even when those laws are deeply unpopular.
The other side—the side that supports democracy—fights a very different battle. For a variety of reasons, it anchors its battle in federal offices….which means it inevitably prioritizes swing states and districts in federal years. The robust infrastructure it builds every two years to wage this federal, swing-state battle may accomplish many of its federal goals in those years, but what does that infrastructure not do?
It doesn’t focus on the countless state-level offices that aren’t perceived to impact the outcome of the federal swing-state battle this side prioritizes. Which is almost all of them.
In short, its infrastructure is NOT conceived, designed or funded to do the things needed to compete everywhere…recruit, support, communicate, etc. That’s neither the mission, nor the goal. So when seats all around the country remain uncontested, it earns hardly a shrug.
But once you see that those attacking democracy are doing so from those very seats, and that the lack of accountability they face only invites more attacks (it literally incentivizes them), you see what a disaster it is that the pro-democracy infrastructure is designed to leave so many of those seats uncontested.
We can’t let it happen anymore.
The solution?
To fight for democracy, we must build an infrastructure that values running everywhere. And when I say value, I mean recruits, supports, celebrates, etc. those who run in these districts. And does so year after year.
If a race is tough, the candidate should be thanked more. At a time where democracy itself is under attack, that candidate is performing a critical act of public service by stepping up. Too often, today, they are treated like they don’t exist.
The good news is that this infrastructure is actually building as we speak, from the ground up. There are actually best practices to model after. Organizations working hard to fill the void
But we need to scale it all up. Fast.
More to come…
