Democrats’ biggest problem isn’t in Congress. It’s in your state capitol.

Democrats’ biggest problem isn’t in Congress. It’s in your state capitol.

By Paul Waldman

Columnist

Yesterday at 1:50 p.m. EDT

If you pay a lot of attention to politics, just about every day you’ll see news of some outrageous thing that a Republican like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said or did. But David Pepper, the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, wants you to be aware of something more frightening.

“For every Marjorie Taylor Greene, there are hundreds of statehouse members” just like her, Pepper told me. “They’re on the inside, drawing the lines and setting the rules.”

Pepper has written a book titled “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines,” which persuasively argues that the site of the most pernicious corruption and assaults on democracy is not where congressional Republicans roam. It’s in the statehouses, which Pepper calls “the most corrosive danger America faces.”

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All the battles we observe at the national level — over abortion, tax policy, the environment, health care and the fate of American democracy itself — are playing out in state capitols. Some years ago — while Democrats were essentially sleeping — Republicans figured out that it would be relatively easy to take over at the state level, then use that power to make it almost impossible for Democrats to win, locking in their control and creating a playground for special interests.

What makes it possible is the fact that so little attention is paid to state government.

Do you know who your state representative is? How about your state senator? There’s a good chance you don’t, even if you’re a political junkie. That’s because politics has been so nationalized, and there are so many sources of information on Washington, even as local journalism has steadily withered away.

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The fewer reporters there are in state capitols, the easier it is for corruption to flourish. And that’s particularly true in places such as Pepper’s home state of Ohio, where through aggressive gerrymandering, voter purges and other voter suppression measures, Republicans have successfully engineered a system that completely insulates them from accountability.

The result is state legislatures populated by officeholders who are largely anonymous to the voting public, but who are surrounded by swarms of lobbyists. “No one knows who they are,” Pepper says, but “insiders in the capitols know exactly who they are.”

We have a kind of national myth that the federal government is where all the self-dealing and corruption happens, while states are the seat of wisdom and virtue. In fact, it’s often just the opposite.

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States Republicans control — both heavily conservative ones and more closely divided ones such as Ohio or Wisconsin — are where the GOP is most aggressively working to create what is essentially “competitive authoritarianism." Under it, formal systems of democracy continue to exist, but there’s no real electoral competition.

Democrats haven’t truly mobilized against this assault on their ability to participate in their own governance, and we see it every election. “Democrats tend to get more excited about that one dynamic candidate” rather than thinking systemically, Pepper told me.

In recent years, huge amounts of liberal money flowed into virtually unwinnable races, not because of strategic thinking by Democratic donors but because a compelling Democrat ran against a reviled Republican.

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So in South Carolina in 2020, Jaime Harrison raised a staggering $130 million to lose to Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) by 10 points. In Kentucky, Amy McGrath raised $94 million and lost to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) by almost 20 points. That money could have turned the tide on dozens of statehouse races, where far smaller amounts are spent.

Pepper saw it in 2010 when he ran for state auditor. As the election approached, he watched money pouring in to his opponent’s coffers from strange places, like employees from out-of-state corporate interests. Why would they care about an auditor’s race in Ohio?

Well, the auditor sits on the board that draws state legislative lines, which means a role in whether Republicans could gerrymander the state beyond democratic accountability. Which would be very good for corporate interests.

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Paying more attention to states also would highlight the problems of the corrupt, unaccountable system that exists in so many places — creating an opening to make a case for change to voters. “It’s inevitable that there’s a decline in public outcomes under the current system,” Pepper told me.

Schools do worse, services decay, problems don’t get solved — and that, Pepper argues, offers Democrats an opportunity. He points to Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, a Democrat who got elected in 2018 in a deeply Republican state by attacking GOP mismanagement.

Pepper has 30 pieces of advice for Democrats to address their problems at the state level — from passing federal voting legislation, to boosting local journalism, to directing more contributions to key local races. None is a silver bullet, and all will be made more difficult by Republicans’ success in purging accountability from the state political system.

But the most important message is that Democrats can’t make state politics an afterthought. “There’s almost a sense of resignation that statehouses are just going to be this way and we can’t do anything about it,” Pepper told me. “That resignation is when you lose.”