8 MOTHER JONES |^ MAY JUNE 2018
OUTFRONTthe first Democrat to run for the seat since 2010. The in-
cumbent, Cecil Bell Jr., received 100 percent of the vote in
2012 and 2016. Seger’s Republican state senator also ran un-
opposed in her last election. “I couldn’t remember the last
time I was even able to vote for a Democrat in one of our
elections here,” Seger says.
Meanwhile, 500 miles away in West Texas, two millennial
friends, 26-year-old Armando Gamboa and 24-year-old Spencer
Bounds, are running for neighboring state House districts where
Democrats had gone awol. No one has contested Gamboa’s
district in Odessa since 2004; Bounds’ opponent in Midland is
a 50-year incumbent who last faced a Democrat in 2008.
Seger, Gamboa, and Bounds are part of a trend. Call it
the “Virginia Effect”: A little more than a year after Trump’s
inauguration, Democrats in deep-red districts are running
for oice at a historic clip, determined to find and turn out
progressive voters in places where no one has
competed in years. It’s a sign the enthusiasm
that swept progressive activists in the first
year of the Trump administration and led the
party to big gains in Virginia and elsewhere
is still burning as the midterm elections ap-
proach. These local races, mostly flying under
Democratic bigwigs’ radar, could also give a
party struggling for relevance in large swaths
of the country a quiet boost this fall.
In Texas, Democrats are running in 132 of
150 state House districts, a nearly 50 percent
increase since 2016 and the highest figure
since at least the early ’90s. Democrats also
have candidates in all 36 of the state’s con-
gressional districts, the first time they’ve put
up a full slate since 1984, back when Rick
Perry won his first oice—as a Democrat.
(That number is still tentative, pending the outcome of
a lawsuit in Dallas County, where Republicans are trying
to get about 80 Democrats running for state and local
races thrown off the ballot because the party chair didn’t
personally sign their ballot applications.)
The trend holds across the country. As of mid-March the
Democratic Party had enlisted candidates in all but eight
Republican- held congressional districts; in 2016, it failed to
run candidates in 28 districts. In March, Conor Lamb defeated
a Republican in a special election for a Pennsylvania seat that
hadn’t seen a Democratic challenger since 2012. Alabama
Democrats, buoyed by Sen. Doug Jones’ stunning special elec-
tion victory, have candidates in all seven congressional districts
for the first time since 1996. Kentucky Democrats haven’t con-
tested this many Statehouse races—93 out of 100—since the
middle of the Reagan administration. Democrats in Indiana
are contesting 84 of 100 state House seats.
That Trump has been good for Democratic candidate re-
cruitment is now canon among progressive organizers. Party
organs such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee and allied groups such as Emily’s List, the incubator
for pro-choice women candidates, have had little trouble lining
up elected oicials, veterans, and former Obama staffers to runin all but a handful of the 101 races the dccc views as pickup
opportunities. But another metric for Democratic enthusiasm
may be the number of Democrats contesting seats at the state
and local levels that aren’t on the party’s target list at all.
While national attention is focused on the congressional
midterms, statehouses present an increasingly enticing op-
portunity for Democrats, in part because after conservative
waves in 2010 and 2014, the party has nowhere to go but up.
Republicans may be susceptible to reversals in Pennsylvania,
Florida, and North Carolina—swing states with overwhelm-
ingly Republican legislatures where Democrats have left a lot
of seats on the table in recent years. Already, Democrats have
flipped 20 formerly Republican-held seats in special elections
since November 2016, some in districts that on the surface look
about as competitive as Seger’s (read: not very).
The candidate surge was a major storyline in last Novem-
ber’s elections in Virginia. Democrats fielded candidates in
88 of 100 House of Delegates districts—up from 56 the pre-
vious election cycle, and their biggest slate in 36 years. They
picked up 15 delegates’ seats and came within 2 seats of a ma-
jority, buoyed by an influx of first-time candidates. Schuyler
VanValkenburg, a high school civics teacher, was only the third
Democrat to contest his Henrico County district in at least
21 years—now he’s a delegate.
In Virginia, Democrats were quick to boast of a “reverse
coattails” effect, in which the glut of down-ballot candidates
actually boosted the party’s performance at the top of the
ticket. One data cruncher found that in deep-red precincts
where a Democratic delegate candidate was on the ballot,
Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam picked up 17 percent more
votes than his Democratic predecessor, Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
Northam saw a mere 4 percent improvement in similar pre-
cincts where the Republican delegate was unopposed.
Historically, big statewide races have always driven turnout
for small down-ballot races, not the other way around. Going
over the numbers in January, Geoffrey Skelley, a political ana-
lyst at the University of Virginia, found that this was likely the
case with Northam too. Nonetheless, he said the candidate
surge had made a landslide more likely. “The lesson from Vir-
ginia is that parties should try to run candidates everywhere—
ideally strong candidates—and especially if a wave favoring
their party is a possibility,” Skelley says. “That way, a party can
maximize the payoff of a wave. If turnout is disproportionately
favorable to one side, as can certainly happen in a midterm
environment, that rising tide can lift all of a party’s boats.”
Put simply: More candidates mean more opportunities,
especially when things are going awry for the other side. No
Alabama Democrat ran against Sen. Jeff Sessions in 2014;
the party wisely avoided that scenario against Roy Moore.
Grassroots movements and more established institutions
are both fueling the candidate boom. Consider Donielle
Lovell, a 39-year-old Western Kentucky University sociol-
ogist who’s the first Democrat to contest the state’s 18th
House District since 2004. A progressive who had never
been particularly politically active, Lovell got involved in
local Democratic groups after the presidential election.
She demonstrated outside an event held by Sen. Mitch"The lesson
from Virginia
is that parties
should try to
run candidates
everywhere."