The Battle
To Draw the
Battle Lines
State races starting this fall will shape Congress for the next decade
By Philip Elliott
Nation
Jessica Post is stuck in traffic 63 miles south
of Washington, D.C., when she pulls an iPhone to her
ear. “How’s everything going with your family?” she
asks a contender for Virginia’s state legislature this
fall. “We are all in for your run. I was reading about
your opponent the other day. He sounds like a real
piece of.. .” Here, she remembers that TIME is tag-
ging along. “Work,” she finishes.
Calls like this consume a lot of Post’s time these
days. The 39-year-old president of the Democratic
Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) is leading
an unheralded but critically important campaign to
win back state offices for the party after eight years
of deep losses during Barack Obama’s presidency.
The consequences go far beyond which states may
be prevented from joining lawsuits trying to disman-
tle Obamacare or restrict abortion rights. The candi-
dates who win state legislative races later this year
and in 2020 will decide who wields power in Wash-
ington for a decade.
Every 10 years, politics rewrites itself, starting
with the decennial Census. Legislatures in 31 states
use the findings to draw the borders of federal con-
gressional districts. In some, nonpartisan commis-
sions draw the lines clinically. In others, it comes
down to who has the Sharpie and the least amount
of shame. The map is due to be reset before the 2022
midterm elections, which means lawmakers elected
as soon as this year may determine where the con-
gressional battlegrounds will be into the 2030s.
“State legislatures are the building blocks of our de-
mocracy,” Post tells TIME during a break from can-
didate calls in the DLCC office five blocks from the
White House. “It’s a level of the ballot that’s been
forgotten. But state legislators draw the lines, so con-
trol of Congress in many ways is decided by rules put
together in state legislatures.”
For decades, Democrats have largely overlooked
these local offices to their detriment. Terry McAu-
liffe, a former Virginia governor, remembers arriving
at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquar-
ters to start his job as party chairman in Febru-
ary 2001 and making a troubling discovery: lawmak-
ers in the states were starting to draw new district
maps, and no one at the DNC was paying attention.
“Not a thing had been done on redistricting,”
McAuliffe recalls. “In the past, I don’t think our party
understood the importance of legislative chambers.”
They soon learned. In 2010, the Tea Party wave
washed 681 Democrats out of legislative seats right
before new battle lines could be drawn, according
to data tracked by the National Conference of State
Legislatures, giving the GOP the opportunity to
cement its advantage in competitive congressionalILLUSTRATION BY JOHN TOMAC FOR TIME