Democrats launch summer spending blitz highlighting state legislative races
The Democrats will spend $10 million on state House and Senate races.
In 2024, the presidential election will dominate political discourse. Democrats want voters to remember the importance of state legislature races, and they are spending a lot to ensure that they do not.
ABC News was the first to share plans of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), the Democrats’ arm for state-level legislative races. The $10 million spending spree is aimed at boosting state legislative campaigns and candidates across the nation. The “Summer of the States Campaign” marks the first investment of this magnitude by the DLCC at this stage of an election cycle.
Along with money, the campaign includes a microsite which will highlight key races and candidates who are running in them.
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“We’ve definitely noticed more interest. “We’re having more conversations with people about the importance of caring about both Washington, D.C., as well as what happens in our statehouses,” DLCC president Heather Williams told ABC News. “We know also that a dollar spent on a campaign at the ballot level is worth so much more, and this investment just means so much more,” said DLCC President Heather Williams to ABC News.
She said, “We cannot focus all our attention on the White House while leaving the states unattended.”
Democrats’ investment in state elections, which increased during the Trump Administration and has continued to rise since, is a historic shift from the Obama Administration and the years prior, when the Democratic Party’s state legislative election infrastructure atrophied and Republicans dominated contests for state capitols from coast-to-coast.
Donald Trump’s victory sparked Democrats to invest more in those contests. This trend was amplified after the Supreme Court revoked constitutional protections for abortions, giving state legislatures immense power to decide access.
Other Democratic groups also pour millions of dollars into state legislative elections, a sign that the races have become so important. The States Project (a group associated with liberal and Democratic causes) announced last week it plans to spend $70,000,000 in legislative elections this year. The DLCC’s summer spending spree of $10 million is part its own budget of $60 million for 2024.
Recent spending has already shown tangible results, with battleground states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania flipping their chambers by 2022 because Democrats outspent Republicans.
Williams said spending this year is particularly important given the risk that Republicans can flip the White House and Senate and hold onto the House, a scenario in which Democratic-controlled state legislatures could be a major buffer against a Republican federal trifecta.
She said that “we are entering the real campaign season, where voters will have to make choices.” “It’s critical that they understand the Republican agenda which includes rolling back many of our civil liberties, that it is going to appear in their statehouses, and that caring what is happening on the top of ticket isn’t going to be sufficient,” she added.
Money from the DLCC will be spent in several states. The party is working to protect Democratic trifectas in some places like Michigan and Minnesota. Other states, such as Arizona and New Hampshire have the potential to achieve a Democratic majority within at least one chamber of their state legislature. In other states, such as Kansas and North Carolina the Democrats are working to reduce Republican legislative margins to a level that would deny Republicans a supermajority with veto proof and restore the veto powers of Democratic governors.
Williams described the group’s “winning plan” as a strategy that funneled money into campaigns rather than focusing on specific tactics.
She said that “each state and program will receive the investment and may use it for different things, so it will be across the board. Everything from polling and data, to paid communication, to digital communication etc.”
Williams continued, “Because of our permanent presence, we work side-by-side with campaigns on the ground in order to develop campaign plans we can be proud of and that others will also support, right from the start.”
The Republican State Leadership Committee, the DLCC equivalent in the GOP, has yet to announce its fundraising target for 2024. Dee Duncan, its president, admitted that the group and other outside groups affiliated with it don’t invest in state legislative elections like their Democratic counterparts.
“While Democrat outside groups are expected to outspend us this year as per usual, Republicans can be trusted more to resolve the most pressing problems facing families such as the cost of living, and border crisis. We are confident that our advantage in policy, combined with our early strategic investments, such as our historic Pennsylvania mail-in vote program, will allow Republicans to withstand the onslaught from Democrats.
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