Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.
Sometimes I compare this work to being a canary in a coal mine… if canaries were on the lookout for issues and local elections that would soon become nationally important instead of just fainting or dying from toxic fumes. I promise this will make more sense in a moment. With just over two weeks until Election Day, you can still make a big difference in important state and local races. More below.
Reminder: I’ve taken down the paywall, stopped normal billing, and made all Progress Report content — including new articles like the one below — free while I recover from open-heart surgery.
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Good news: The New York Times has discovered the importance of state legislative elections. Here’s what the paper of record published this week:
Congressional elections and governors’ races may get the attention, but voters in 46 states will also elect more than 6,100 state legislators in November, or 83 percent of all seats. The consequences are often profound.
State legislators — most of whom are part-time with minimal staff — typically allocate billions of dollars for schools, prisons, and health care, while shaping policies on hot-button topics such as taxes and A.I. But in an era of mid-decade redistricting, their ability to redraw congressional maps could be hugely consequential for the 2028 election.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time, you’ll be very well aware of the massive stakes of these lesser-covered elections, which are simply fundamental to the survival (or perhaps revival) of our democracy. It’d be cool if they garnered more attention in the nation’s most important newspaper than one short article built of glancing details, but it’s a start.
The Times highlights Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina as particularly crucial battlegrounds, where a strong Democratic performance could either create trifectas or break supermajorities in their respective statehouses. Because it’s more general overview than substantive guide, the story mentions neither the districts that might flip parties nor the candidates who might do the flipping. Again, it’s a start, and I’m glad these races are getting attention at all.
The good news is that all of the deeper information is freely available at my site FlipSeats.org, where I have catalogued every race anywhere in the vicinity of competitive in these states’ legislatures. Any last minute donations to candidates in these races will go a much longer way than any money tossed to federal elections.
You can donate to more than 50 of these candidates at this ActBlue page.
You can also read about and watch a few of my conversations with them in the pieces below:
Michigan
Wisconsin
Texas
Arizona
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This is huge if Democrats can utilize the blue wave in November to flip governor races and state legislatures we can redistrict all those seats back towards Democrats!