JULY / AUGUST 2019 | MOTHER JONES 65MAP QUEST
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Television broadcaster
and activist Rita Shelton
Deverell c overs the
history of American flight
to Canada in times
of crisis.TRUE
NORTH
STRONG
& FREE.
University of Regina Press
uofrpress.cawe work really closely with have been hes-
itant to reengage, either because they’re
tapped out from 2018 or they’re waiting for
the presidential race to shake out.”
Litman’s group is coordinating with
the ndrc to recruit state legislative candi-
dates to run in every district in the 12 states
Holder is targeting in 2020, but she said
reaching Run for Something’s $3 million
fundraising goal this year “is like pulling
teeth.” That’s small change for presiden-
tial candidates like Bernie Sanders and Joe
Biden, who each raised about twice that
sum on the first day of their campaigns, but
it could make the difference in flipping mul-
tiple state legislative chambers, Litman said.
More money might have changed the
outcome of the Wisconsin Supreme Court
race. Lisa Neubauer, the progressive judge
backed by Holder, was favored to win. But
in the final week of the race, the Republi-
can State Leadership Committee, the same
group that bankrolled the gop’s takeover
of the state legislature in 2010, launched
a $1.3 million ad campaign for Neubauer’s
opponent, Brian Hagedorn, an ultracon-
servative judge and former chief counsel
to Walker. Meanwhile, Republicans made
Holder a talking point—a Facebook ad from
Hagedorn admonished, “We can’t let Eric
Holder reshape Wisconsin’s Supreme
Court”—and Neubauer called on Holder
and other outside funders to stay out of the
race. Turnout surged in conservative, rural
parts of the state, and Hagedorn won by
about 6,000 votes, cementing a right-wing
majority on the court through at least 2023.
The day after the election, Holder spoke
at the annual convention of Al Sharpton’s
National Action Network. A dozen Dem-
ocratic presidential candidates were there,
and none had campaigned for Neubauer.
“It seems I’m the only one here who isn’t
running for president in 2020,” Holder
joked. He’d flirted with his own long-shot
presidential bid but decided against it, in
part to remain focused on redistricting. He
said “we should have won” the Supreme
Court race and worried that the presiden-
tial contenders weren’t talking enough
about the down-ballot contests that Dem-
ocrats need to win to reverse the gop’s re-
districting edge.
Holder was dismayed that he’d been
the only prominent Democrat to cam-
paign for Neubauer. “I’m still a little bit
wound up about this one,” he told me two
weeks after the election. “This should be
a wake-up call for us. I felt a little lonely
out there in Wisconsin.” ncontrols 62 of 99 state legislative cham-
bers nationwide and holds the governor’s
mansion and both legislative bodies in
22 states, compared to 14 for Democrats.
The bulk of the ndrc’s efforts will focus on
five Republican-controlled gerrymandered
states: Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and
North Carolina. Gaining seats there will
mean targeting districts in conservative
exurbs where Democrats came up short
in 2018. Mark Gersh, a Democratic re-
districting expert working with Holder’s
group, said the team is “trying to figure
out whether Trump’s plummeting pop-
ularity and behavior might enable us to
go beyond the parts we know we can win,
because there’s not enough of them. We
won all the low-hanging fruit last time.”
there’s momentum, though. The once-
wonky issue of voting rights has become a
rallying cry for Democrats. In 2018, voters
in five states approved ballot initiatives that
curbed gerrymandering. When Democrats
took control of the House, their first piece
of legislation was a sweeping reform bill that
called for independent redistricting com-
missions to draw all House districts. (The
proposal died in the Senate after Republican
leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a
vote on it.) Schumer said in March that the
fight for voting rights should be one of the
Democrats’ top three issues, alongside cli-
mate change and income inequality.
Voting rights are “part of a basket of
issues that are motivating to people who
feel like the character of our democracy is
being threatened and that democracy itself
is being manipulated,” said Axelrod. But
Democrats are still in jeopardy of ignoring
the state and local races that will determine
the country’s voting maps. “Our concern is
there’s wall-to-wall coverage of Trump scan-
dals, wall-to-wall coverage of crowd size and
presidential announcements, and our job is
to continue to make sure people know that
the next decade of democracy is on the line
in 2020,” said Post.
Democratic strategists working on
down-ballot races say the presidential
campaign is siphoning away resources. “It’s
harder to recruit people [to run], it’s harder
to get attention to these races, it’s harder
to raise money for them,” said Amanda
Litman, executive director of Run for Some-
thing, which recruits progressive candidates
for local offices. “Quite a few of the donors