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      The 10 swing state counties that tell the story of the 2020 election | Ben Davis

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      Looking at the results of the 2020 election at the more granular level of counties and precincts, it can mostly be defined by one thing: stasis. But beneath that stasis the results of this election and the changes from previous elections say an enormous amount about where the country is and is going. The counties that swung the most mostly fall into two categories: Latino areas swinging strongly towards Trump, and white-majority suburban areas swinging towards Biden. These 10 swing state counties were crucial to the final results, and help tell the story of what happened in 2020.Maricopa county, ArizonaHome of Phoenix and environs, Maricopa county is perhaps the most important individual county to the 2020 presidential election. The county makes up an absolute majority of the population of the swing state Arizona, and the winner of the state almost always wins the county. This year, Biden was able to flip Arizona by just over 10,000 votes, his margin coming entirely from winning Maricopa county by around 45,000. It was the first time the county had voted for the Democratic nominee for president since 1948. In many ways, Maricopa was a microcosm of the election: narrowly won by Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, containing urban and suburban areas, and having large communities of both college-educated white moderate voters and Latino voters. Maricopa was one of the linchpins of the Biden strategy of flipping white suburban voters – which he did just enough to win. Precinct results show Biden doing clearly better than Clinton in the white-majority suburban areas. They also show the result of Democrats’ failure to keep their margins among working-class Latino voters, especially in the seventh congressional district, which was carried by Bernie Sanders in the primary. Within Maricopa we can see the results of the trade-off Democrats made to win this election.Hidalgo county, TexasOn the border with Mexico, Hidalgo county, centered on McAllen, is over 90% Hispanic. Working-class and with very high rates of poverty, historically solidly Democratic Hidalgo represents the center of Biden’s failures with Latino voters and working-class voters more broadly. Hidalgo swung 23 points towards Trump, destroying any hopes Democrats had of winning Texas. Hidalgo saw a 27% increase in turnout, as Trump was able to break expectations by activating low-turnout voters to his side. Young, rapidly growing and working-class, Hidalgo is exactly the type of place Democrats need to win to enact any sort of progressive agenda in the future. For many years the conventional wisdom was that turnout in places like Hidalgo would benefit Democrats, but the consequence of Democrats’ focus on flipping white suburban voters was that these new voters were ignored by the party and Trump was able to capitalize. Like most working-class Latino areas, Hidalgo voted for socialist Bernie Sanders in the primary. Going forward, Democrats need a message of class-focused populism to build a base in communities like Hidalgo and build a progressive governing majority.Collin county, TexasThe flip side of Hidalgo county, Collin county in suburban Dallas is an example of the places that powered Biden to competitiveness in Texas and other suburb-heavy sun belt states. Collin county, like other suburbs in Texas, has long been a Republican bastion, giving enormous margins to GOP candidates up and down the ballot. George W Bush twice won Collin by over 40 points, and Mitt Romney won by over 30 in 2012. This year, however, Collin went for Trump by just four points, a 13-point swing to the Democrats from 2016. Collin and Hidalgo counties represent the twin patterns of this election: affluent white suburban areas swinging towards Democrats and working-class Latino areas swinging to Republicans.Miami-Dade county, FloridaMiami-Dade county is fairly unique politically, but you can’t tell the story of the 2020 election without talking about it. Miami and the surrounding area are heavily influenced by the politics of the Cuban diaspora, but the county is also home to many other communities. Miami-Dade saw one of the strongest swings in the country towards Trump, from going to Clinton by 30 points to Biden by just seven. While much of this was powered by Cuban-majority areas, Biden lost ground all over the county, including Black-majority areas. The immense losses in Miami-Dade are one of the biggest swings, and biggest shocks, of the election, costing two Democratic seats in the House of Representatives and putting Florida nearly out of play. The story in Miami-Dade is that the Republicans can mobilize massive numbers of working-class people who usually don’t vote. This has scrambled the entire American political landscape, and put Democrats in a precarious position going forward.Gwinnett county, GeorgiaGwinnett county, in suburban Atlanta, was key to Biden flipping Georgia. The suburbs were the first area of Georgia to support Republicans as the state moved from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican, and are now in the vanguard again as the state has moved back into the Democratic column. Gwinnett voted Republican every year between 1980 and 2012, voting for George W Bush by over 30 points twice. After going narrowly to Clinton in 2016, the county followed the pattern of suburban realignment more strongly than almost anywhere else in the country, voting for Biden by 18 points, a 75,000-vote margin. Winning big in places like Gwinnett was the key to Biden’s strategy for victory, and he was just able to do it.Lackawanna county, PennsylvaniaLackawanna county is the home of Scranton, Joe Biden’s home town, and is a longtime working-class Democratic stronghold. Lackawanna tells two stories in 2020: one of Biden doing just enough for victory and another of a permanent realignment of historic Democratic working-class areas away from the party. Lackawanna voted for Biden by eight points, a five-point swing towards native son Biden that helped push him just over the top in Pennsylvania. Biden was able to recapture enough support in north-east Pennsylvania and places like it in the midwest and north-east, combined with his increased support in the suburbs, meant that he was able to recapture the states Trump so surprisingly captured in 2016. But under the surface, the result in Lackawanna shows a long-term realignment brought about by decades of neoliberalism and declining union density and accelerated by Donald Trump. Obama was able to win Lackawanna twice by over 25 points. The 2020 result is a swing of nearly 20 points since the Obama era, despite Biden’s local connections. It is clear that many working-class regions have permanently moved away from solid Democratic status.Chester county, PennsylvaniaChester county, in suburban Philadelphia, is one of the GOP’s historical bastions, voting Republican every year but the landslide of 1964 until 2008. This year, Biden won Chester by 17 points and nearly 54,000 votes. Biden’s strength in the Collar counties around Philadelphia was crucial to his win in the state, and is the main thing keeping Democrats competitive since their collapse among voters in rural and post-industrial areas. Places like Chester form the heart of the new Democratic coalition, and Democrats will have to keep and improve Biden’s margins – and match his margins in down-ballot races – to put together governing coalitions in the future.Mahoning county, OhioMahoning county, home of Youngstown, is maybe the most powerful symbol of Democratic loss in the working-class midwest. After voting Democratic by enormous margins for decades, Mahoning went to Trump this year, the first time a Republican has won it since Nixon in 1972. Mahoning went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Obama by over 25 points twice, and even Michael Dukakis by over 25 points. Biden’s shocking loss this year shows a combination of further erosion among white working-class voters and among black voters. Mahoning represents perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the class-based New Deal coalition that has shaped American politics since 1932.Waukesha county, WisconsinCrucial Waukesha county, in suburban Milwaukee, has long been a bastion of Republicanism. This year, however, Biden’s strength with suburban voters closed the gap just enough for Biden to win the state. While Trump won by 21 points, the swing in Waukesha and the rest of the Milwaukee suburbs was just enough for Biden to win the state by around 20,000 votes. While the movement in suburban Milwaukee and the suburbs more broadly was enough to win the election for Biden, it was not as much as many Democrats expected.Northampton county, North CarolinaNorthampton county is a strong example of a serious problem for Democrats: erosion among black voters. These losses may indeed have cost Biden the state of North Carolina. Northampton county is 60% black, and this year went for Biden by 20 points. This was a five-point swing against the Democrats, and the smallest margin for Democrats in the county since the Republican landslide of 1972. Losses among black voters this cycle should be very worrying to Democrats.While the results of the election mostly show stasis, within these results, there was some confounding of expectations. First, the sheer scale of Latino defections to Trump was shocking to many. On the other hand, the swing toward Biden was enough to win the election, but below the expectations of many Democrats, and these voters often split their ticket for down-ballot Republicans, costing the Democrats a chance at a governing majority. Furthermore, the stasis in rural, white areas was a surprise itself. Many of these areas swung dramatically towards Trump in 2016, and it was expected that Biden would rebound at least a bit as there was no more room to fall for Democrats. Instead, these areas mostly stayed the same or even swung to Trump a bit. The results of 2020 confirm the huge swings and coalitional realignment of 2016 are here to stay. We head into the future with a Democratic party weaker than ever among working-class voters of all races and more reliant than ever on a wealthier, whiter and more affluent coalition. More

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      Latinos could swing Georgia. Don't repeat the mistakes of Florida and Texas | Chuck Rocha

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      In less than eight weeks, voters of the now-blue state of Georgia will head to the polls to vote in the Senate runoff election on 5 January 2021 to decide if the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will join their Democratic colleagues in Congress. These two seats are crucial to deliver the mandate needed by Joe Biden to enact his ambitious vision for America’s future.
      With the Democratic party’s hopes and dreams resting on Georgia’s shoulders, it would be a costly misstep to overlook a key demographic: Latinos. There are nearly a million Latinos living in Georgia, the majority of whom live in and around the Atlanta metro area. About 300,000 persuadable Latino voters who are registered to vote identify as neither Democrat nor Republican. These voters represent a small but decisive 5% of the electorate. In a world in which races are won on razor-thin margins, that 5% is a crucial swing vote.
      In the days leading up to the 2020 general election, I watched my colleagues’ hopes rise at the sight of a string of polls showing Biden with the lead in Florida and record-breaking early voter turnout in my home state of Texas. These hopes were quickly dashed. In the wake of defeat, my phone started to buzz with people asking, urgently: what went wrong with the Latino vote? It was the first time in my 30 years of political experience that the nation finally learned a truth that Latino organizers have been trying to convey for ages. We are not a monolith and you must ask us for our vote if you want to earn our vote.
      Let’s set the record straight: President-elect Joe Biden won Latino voters. He spent more money engaging with Latino voters in his 2020 campaign than either Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton. This investment paid off for Biden, with decisive Latino victories in the states he focused on competing in, including Florida.
      By now, we have all heard about the heroine of Georgia’s historic blue shift. Stacey Abrams’ unprecedented grassroots voter registration and mobilization efforts have unequivocally proven that the antidote to poisonous voter suppression tactics and lagging voter engagement involves two key ingredients: both statewide and community-led operations.
      Fair Fight Action was responsible for the registration of over 800,000 voters in Georgia – a force to be reckoned with in the once reliably red south. This level of mobilization, focused on Latinos, will be critical to swing the Georgia special election toward Democrats and clinch these two remaining Senate seats.
      Every 30 seconds in America, a Latino turns 18 and becomes eligible to vote. Over half of Georgia’s Latino population is under the age of 18. This means there are thousands of Latino youth in Georgia who will turn 18 on or before 5 January who qualify to register to vote in the Senate elections. This is in addition to hundreds of thousands of Latinos already over the age of 18 who are currently unregistered to vote.
      The registration deadline for all Georgians who wish to vote in the runoff elections is less than a month away, on 7 December. These next three weeks present a small window of opportunity for Democrats to expand their electorate. Emerging Latino populations can and will tip the balance in this election.
      Latino organizers and groups on the ground such as Galeo, a non-profit that helps register new Latino voters across Georgia, need funding and resources right now in order to mobilize Latinos in large enough numbers to swing the state. Over the past four months, Nuestro Pac – now the largest Latino-focused Super Pac, which I helped found – spent over $5m to galvanize Latino voters for Biden in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. These efforts helped deliver the margins of victory for Biden in many of the states he won.
      Georgia presents an enormous opportunity for Democrats, in part because the unique nuances of Latino voters in Texas and Florida, who are culturally distinct from elsewhere, are not present to the same extent in Georgia. The most pressing issue for Latinos in Georgia – and Latinos in general – is Covid relief funds, which are currently being held hostage by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Healthcare is a similarly critical issue for Latinos in Georgia – yet the Republican party has voted over 50 times to strip Americans of health protections provided by the Affordable Care Act, and are trying to defeat it through the supreme court.
      Through the appointment of a new and diverse Covid-19 taskforce, Biden has already taken a crucial first step to instill confidence in these voters. Now it is time for investment in grassroots organizing so that Latinos can deliver Biden a mandate.
      Chuck Rocha is the president of Solidarity Strategies and the founder of Nuestro Pac. He was a senior adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign More

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      ‘I need to make sure I’m heard’: the hurdles young Texans overcame to cast their votes

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      Isaiah Rendon was certain that he had registered to vote by the deadline. But when he went to the polls in San Marcos, Texas, on election day last week, the 21-year-old was only offered a provisional ballot.
      It was Rendon’s first time voting. He hadn’t been interested in politics before. But this year, amid so much party infighting, he felt the urge to speak up.
      “I need to go ahead and make sure I am heard,” he said, “for what I believe in.”
      Confronted with a faltering economy, systemic racism, the accelerating climate crisis and a global pandemic, young Americans showed up to vote this fall, far exceeding turnout from four years ago. Youth, especially from communities of color, were one of the key constituencies that propelled Joe Biden to victory. And nowhere did they generate more buzz than in Texas, as Democrats aggressively pushed – but ultimately failed – to turn the red stronghold blue.
      During early voting, more than 1.3 million Texans under age 30 helped drive surprisingly high voter participation in a state infamous for chronically low turnout. However, consistent with a long history of voter suppression, young people still got caught in onerous laws and frustrating bureaucracy, even after doing everything by the book.
      “There’s just a lot of confusion on the ground, especially for first time voters, of what is their right, what is the law, and how can they vote,” said Catherine Wicker, a deputy field organizer for Texas Rising and graduate student at Texas State university.
      In Hays county, Wicker’s home base, Texas State dominates the city of San Marcos with a majority-minority student body nearly 38,000 strong. Hays flipped for Biden last week, but not everyone from the area was onboard: San Marcos recently made headlines after a caravan of Trump supporters literally drove a Biden campaign bus out of town. More

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      Why Democrats lost Latino voters along Texas border: 'They relied on loyalty'

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      While Democrats aggressively pushed to turn Texas blue this election cycle, they were banking on help from people like Barbara Ocañas, a highly educated, 37-year-old Latina voter from the Rio Grande valley.
      But, after Donald Trump faced backlash for using the word “coyote” to describe human smugglers, Ocañas was turned off by liberals focused more on semantics than the actual realities of the migrant crisis affecting her home. As the daughter of a Mexican émigré, she believes that undocumented immigrants are “just people, like you and me”.
      However, when it comes to earning US citizenship, “there is a right way and a wrong way to do it”, she said.
      She also fears what Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s administration could mean for people she knows who rely on jobs in refineries or hauling crude oil. So, faced with a ballot and a choice, Ocañas decided she preferred four more years with Donald Trump in the White House.
      “Not all of us take it to heart when we’re called rapists and bad hombres,” she said. “We have tough skin.”
      In Texas border towns with chronically low voter participation, residents did actually show up to the polls this election, exceeding county turnouts from 2016. But when results rolled in Tuesday night, Biden’s overall success was nowhere near Hillary Clinton’s slam dunk four years earlier, revealing Democratic vulnerabilities among a key bloc whose votes had largely been taken for granted.
      “Democrats have just assumed and relied on this historical loyalty by people in the valley to the Democratic party,” said Natasha Altema McNeely, an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. “And that assumption, I think, is very dangerous for the Democrats if they expect to continue to help the valley remain blue.”
      Biden still won Ocañas’s Hidalgo county, but with a fraction of the margin. In Starr county, which Clinton had dominated in a 60-point landslide, voters swung for Biden by just five points. And, after Democrats squandered a nearly 33-point advantage from four years ago, Zapata county flipped to deliver Trump a stunning victory.
      That erosion of Democratic support took place even after high-profile Biden surrogates descended on the US-Mexico border ahead of election day. Jill Biden, Joe’s wife, campaigned in El Paso on the first day of early voting, when – amid buzz that Texas might be in play – she told her audience that a win in the state would mean that “we are unstoppable”. More

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      Which party will hold the keys to states’ legislative and congressional maps?

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      While the race for the White House is sorted out across tight midwestern battlegrounds, Republicans can already claim an important victory further down the ballot. The GOP held state House and Senate chambers across Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Kansas, and many other key states. This ensures a dramatic edge when it comes to redrawing new state legislative and congressional maps next year, following the completion of the census count.
      This year, Democrats had hoped to avenge the GOP’s 2010 Redmap strategy, which drove Republicans that year to control swing-state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida, and majorities they have not relinquished since. That also allowed Republicans to draw, on their own, nearly five times as many congressional districts nationwide as Democrats.
      Tuesday’s election offered both parties the last chance to gain influence over maps that will define the state of play for the next decade. States have different rules on this: almost three-quarters of all states, however, give their legislatures the prominent role. That heightens the stakes of state legislative races in years ending in zero. On Tuesday, in the two states with the most at stake – Texas and North Carolina – Democrats fell far short, despite millions of dollars invested by the national party and outside organizations.
      In Texas, Democrats needed to gain nine seats in the state House to affect redistricting. They may not net any. Republicans picked up several open seats, and GOP incumbents held on in almost all the battleground districts enveloping the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston. In House district 134, which includes part of Houston, Democrat Ann Johnson ousted GOP incumbent Sarah Davis. But otherwise, the party ran far behind expectations.
      The consequences could linger until 2031, if not longer. Texas Republicans may look to redraw state maps next year based on the “citizen voting-age population” or CVAP, and depart from the longtime standard of counting the total population. A 2015 study by Thomas Hofeller, the late GOP redistricting maestro, found that such a switch “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” and create a relative population decline in Democratic strongholds in south Texas and in otherwise fast-growing parts of Dallas and Houston.
      In North Carolina, meanwhile, even a new, fairer state legislative map – albeit one that still slightly favored Republicans – couldn’t help Democrats break the GOP’s 10-year hold on both the House and Senate. Democrats netted one Senate seat – they needed five – and lost ground in the state House. Republicans will not only have a free hand to draw maps next year, but they also appear to have gained seats on the state supreme court – which will adjudicate any dispute over these maps – and cut the Democratic majority there to 4-3. (Democrats did make gains on both the Ohio and Michigan state supreme courts, both of which could be asked to weigh in on the constitutionality of maps later this decade.)
      As a result, Republicans will have a free hand in drawing new districts across both states, providing the GOP with a renewed decade-long edge and also paving the way for conservative legislation on voting rights, health care, reproductive rights, education funding and much more. Any new voting restrictions, meanwhile, could assist Republicans in maintaining electoral college dominance in these states, as well.
      Democrats in Kansas had hoped to simply break GOP supermajorities and sustain a Democratic governor’s veto power over a GOP gerrymander that could devour the state’s one blue congressional seat. But they appear to have been unable to muster either a one-seat gain in the House or the three seats necessary in the Senate.
      Wisconsin Democrats, however, did successfully preserve the veto of Democratic governor Tony Evers, ensuring that the party will have some say over maps that have provided Republicans with decade-long majorities even when Democratic candidates won hundreds of thousands more statewide votes. Wisconsin was one of the most gerrymandered states in the country after the Republican takeover in 2010.
      Democrats flipped the Oregon secretary of state’s office as well, which plays a determinative role in redistricting should Republicans deny Democrats a quorum to pass a map. The party also denied Republicans in Nebraska’s ostensibly nonpartisan unicameral chamber a supermajority that would allow them to gerrymander the second congressional district in Omaha, which carries an electoral college vote.
      There was mixed news for gerrymandering reformers in two states where fair maps were on the ballot statewide. In Virginia, voters overwhelmingly approved a redistricting commission that will consist equally of lawmakers and citizens to draw lines next year. But in Missouri, by a narrow margin of 51% to 49%, voters repealed a 2018 initiative that would have placed maps under the control of a neutral state demographer. That will leave Republicans in full control of the process.
      After 2010, Pennsylvania has elected a Democratic governor, and Michigan has adopted an independent commission, suggesting less partisan maps next year. But by holding Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Ohio, Republicans appear likely to draw at least four times as many congressional seats by themselves.
      That advantage, in turn, will endure long after whoever won Tuesday’s presidential election has left the scene. More

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      Latinos offer lukewarm enthusiasm for Biden after Democrat fails to woo voters

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      [embedded content]
      In battleground states such as Florida and Texas, key communities with large Latino populations showed comparatively lukewarm enthusiasm for the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, after overwhelmingly supporting Hillary Clinton four years ago.
      Ahead of election day, activists, legislators and political operatives had warned the Biden campaign that it wasn’t doing enough to woo Latino voters, a diverse and fundamental constituency for the Democratic party.
      The apparent failure prompted some stern immediate criticism from some of the party’s leading figures.
      “I won’t comment much on tonight’s results as they are evolving and ongoing, but I will say we’ve been sounding the alarm about Dem vulnerabilities w/ Latinos for a long, long time,” tweeted the US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “There is a strategy and a path, but the necessary effort simply hasn’t been put in.”
      As Latinos went to the polls this year, they had three clear priorities: the coronavirus pandemic, healthcare costs, and jobs and the economy, according to the 2020 American election eve poll.
      On Tuesday night, the news wasn’t all bad for Democrats. Biden won Arizona, where Latinos represented a key voter demographic. Overall, around seven in 10 Latinos voted for the former vice-president, polling showed.
      “In some ways, about Latinos, the story of the night is that they made a difference for both candidates,” said Clarissa Martinez, the deputy vice-president of the Latino civil rights and advocacy organization UnidosUS.
      Both presidential nominees had been polling neck-and-neck in Florida. But when Clinton’s nearly 30-point margin of victory in Miami-Dade county slipped to just over seven points for Biden, the coveted swing state threw its 29 electoral college votes behind Donald Trump.
      Trump won a majority of the state’s sizable Cuban-American vote, according to NBC News exit polls, after targeted campaigns painting Biden as a socialist.
      Biden also lost Texas, a reliably red stronghold that Democrats had hoped to turn blue through high voter participation. South Texas’ Nueces county went to Trump by a wider margin than four years ago, after O’Rourke had flipped Corpus Christi and its surroundings in 2018. Whether Republicans regained the south Texas territory because of Latinos voting for Trump or higher turnout by other demographics is unclear at this point, said Juan Carlos Huerta, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi.
      In the nearby Rio Grande valley, where Clinton dominated in 2016, Biden also lost ground. He’s leading only by a five-point margin in Starr county, which is 96.4% Hispanic or Latino, and which Clinton claimed by a whopping 60 points.
      Meanwhile, he’s up 17 points in neighboring Hidalgo county, which is also majority Latino. That’s still a generous margin, but nothing like Clinton’s 40-point victory in 2016.
      Victoria M DeFrancesco Soto, an assistant dean at the University of Texas’ LBJ school of public affairs, hypothesized that Biden’s underperformance in the border region compared to 2016 could be attributed to two factors: the Clintons’ popularity among Texas Latinos and the fact that grassroots, old school campaigning couldn’t happen amid the pandemic.
      In the valley, it became clear that “the enthusiasm for Biden isn’t what the enthusiasm for Clinton was,” said Manuel Grajeda, the Texas strategist for UnidosUS.
      Both Republicans and Democrats haven’t focused on Latinos there as much as in other major counties, Grajeda said. That was “a missed opportunity” that showed up in the election results, he added.
      The relatively narrow margins for Democrats along the border came even as Latino voters flocked to the polls in Texas. During the incredible turnout in the state for early voting, an estimated 1.9 million Latinos voted, Grajeda said, including around 500,000 first-time voters.
      “The key to success with the Hispanic community in Texas is engagement, and very early on,” said congressman Joaquin Castro, who won re-election Tuesday night. “And making sure that we get to folks who have not participated in the political process before.
      “That continues to be a challenge that we’ve gotta make sure that we meet.” More

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      'Democracy is broken': state races aim to undo decade of Republican map-rigging

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      [embedded content]
      The small farming communities of Wisconsin’s 32nd state senate district, with names like Romance and Avalanche, sit nestled along the Mississippi River. It’s within these rural towns that millions of political dollars are pouring into small counties to influence a local race for state senators who are paid a far more humble amount.
      That’s because in Wisconsin, like several other states this year, both Democrats and Republicans are trying to rack up seats in the state legislatures to hold influence over the political maps which are redrawn every 10 years after the decennial census count.
      “One race should not have this kind of significance,” says Ben Wikler, the Democratic state party chairman tasked with wrestling back majority rule in a state where Democrats won 54% of the overall assembly vote in 2018, but won just over 36% of the seats. “But democracy in Wisconsin is broken.”
      interactive
      Republicans asserted their dominance in 2010 by targeting 107 state legislative seats in 16 key states through a $30m national strategy appropriately called REDMAP. It worked: the hi-tech maps the GOP produced have kept every one of those swing-state chambers red throughout this decade, even in years when Democratic candidates won more votes.
      Legislatures in these states, contrary to popular opinion, then worked quickly to undermine collective bargaining, erode voting rights, enact draconian new limits on reproductive rights, refused to expand Medicaid and much more.
      But if Republicans flip the open seat in Wisconsin’s 32nd district – carried by a Democrat in 2018 by just 56 votes – they could block the Democratic governor’s agenda and claim complete control over drawing the next decade of legislative and congressional maps. They could cement their majority in the legislature, and continue implementing restrictions on voting like they are this year, potentially impacting which way Wisconsin goes in the presidential election.
      “It’s all on the line,” Wikler says. “Imagine that? It can be a lot to run for local office and feel like the future of your state and maybe even the electoral college rests on your race.”
      While races for the White House and control of the US Senate demand the largest headlines and the wildest fundraising sums, the stakes of America’s down-ballot races are huge. In three states in particular, Texas, Wisconsin and North Carolina, these local races will determine nothing less than the next decade of the states’ politics, and also influence the electoral college state of play into the 2030s.
      “Collin county, Texas, and outside Dallas, Houston, Waco, even,” says Jessica Post, who leads the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “Overland Park, Kansas. Livonia, Michigan. Those are the places that will change the country.”
      North Carolina: ‘They know what’s at stake’
      Just how important are these district lines? A 2016 report by the Electoral Integrity Project at Harvard measuring the health of American democracy gave North Carolina a seven on a scale of 100, the worst in the nation, and a rating in line with Iran and Venezuela. North Carolina Republicans locked themselves in power, then enacted a “monster” voter suppression bill that targeted black voters with “surgical” precision. They passed the infamous transgender bathroom bill. And when voters elected a Democratic governor in 2016, they curtailed his powers in a shocking lame-duck session.
      Those maps not only kept Republicans in power with fewer votes, it allowed them to command 10 of North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts, more than 70%, again, even when voters preferred Democratic candidates.
      Chart showing North Carolina voters voted for Democrats but Republicans had the majority in the state house.
      State Democrats broke the GOP’s gerrymandered monopoly in 2018, when they gained two seats in the state senate and nine in the house. Then, the following year, a North Carolina court tossed out the map, calling it an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that violated the state constitution. A new, fairer map was introduced – but it is now up for replacement.
      The state elections this year are the last chance for Democrats to win a seat at the table for next year’s redistricting. The new, fairer map will be gone. If the GOP wins both chambers, Democratic governor Roy Cooper can’t veto the Republican plan.
      “We’re going to have maybe 15 races where we’ve spent half a million dollars, just on the Democratic side, for a [state senate] job that pays $14,000 a year,” says state Representative Graig Meyer, who has led Democratic recruitment efforts to win back at least one chamber of the North Carolina legislature ahead of redistricting. “It’s all about the maps.”
      Meyer and state Democrats made a strategic shift as they recruited candidates. Instead of seeking out veteran Democratic officeholders – quite likely a “slightly older than middle-aged white guy who was pretty boring,” Meyer says – they looked for people with deep community connections and a high degree of emotional intelligence. As a result, the ensuing slate is younger and features more women and candidates of color.
      That’s the case here in state senate district 18, which includes Franklin county, in central North Carolina, and also some of the growing far outer suburbs of Raleigh. Rising home prices in the capital region pushed more families into these once quiet rural towns. Population shifts, newcomers from the north, and now a newly drawn state senate map that now reaches deeper into the outer Raleigh rings in Wake county could bring even more change.
      In 2018, Republican state senator John Alexander held this seat by just 2,639 votes. When the court mandated a new map, however, the new district that had been carefully crafted to tilt red no longer included Alexander’s home. This newly open seat is now far more blue-leaning, and one of the seats Democrats see as a must-flip. In almost any scenario, if Democrats are to take the senate, the road runs through these towns of Zebulon and Wake Forest.
      “It’s a lot of pressure,” says Democratic senate nominee Sarah Crawford. “If I lose, I might have to consider moving out of state. I might not be able to show my face. It’s about the future of North Carolina. It’s about the next decade.”
      The mother of two and nonprofit executive said the skewed maps have taken a toll on the state.
      “In a 50/50 state, you shouldn’t have one party with an extreme majority over another,” Crawford says. “What it’s meant for North Carolina is that public education has suffered. We haven’t expanded Medicaid. Now we have a whole new layer of inaction with the Covid-19 pandemic. All of these bad things have come out of gerrymandering.”
      Just over an hour west sits the newly redrawn 31st senate district, encompassing the rural, tobacco environs surrounding Winston-Salem. This district has changed dramatically as well – from a Republican plus-18 seat to just a Republican plus-four on the new map. For the last decade, the only action has come in heated Republican primaries, followed by a November coronation.
      “We haven’t had a history of competitive elections,” says Terri LeGrand, the Democratic challenger. But this seat is winnable. The new district not only cuts deeper toward blue Winston-Salem, it includes 20 new precincts – almost all of them Democratic-leaning – that had been buried inside a neighboring Republican district.
      “My opponent is on record, very open about the fact that she supports gerrymandering. She has absolutely no problem with it. So, it’s not something that we want to leave to chance.”
      Republicans aren’t gambling, either. Millions in dark money from Republican donors have been funneled into North Carolina through something called the Good Government Coalition. It is registered to an address at a UPS store in suburban Virginia, according to Raleigh television station WRAL, and the custodian of records is listed as Matthew Walter – formerly the president of the Republican State Legislative Committee, which pioneered the party’s REDMAP efforts in 2010.
      The funds have gone toward negative ads being hurled against LeGrand, for example, incorrectly suggesting that she supports defunding the police. Similar ads have targeted other Democratic contenders in close districts, in a strategy mimicking REDMAP ads that identified a hot-button local issue, then buried mailboxes under a weeks-long avalanche of misleading negative ads.
      “It’s grinding and vitriolic,” LeGrand says. “They’ve thrown everything at me because they know what’s at stake.”
      Texas: ‘It’s not a red state. It’s a suppression state’
      Deep in the upper-middle-class suburbs north-east of Dallas are the well-manicured towns neighboring the ultra-wealthy enclaves that George W Bush and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban call home. Here, Brandy Chambers holds one of the nine keys to Democratic hopes of flipping the Texas house for the first time in nearly two decades.
      White people, for example, make up just over 40% of all Texans, according to 2019 census figures, yet still control nearly 70% of the state’s congressional and state legislative seats. In 2018, Texas Republicans won just over 50% of the statewide vote for Congress, but nevertheless won two-thirds of the seats.
      That could change in 2021, and the 112th district could make all the difference. Nine seats separate Democrats from winning an all-important ticket to the redistricting table next year. They are increasingly competitive in Texas and had been able to flip 12 seats in the 2018 midterms.
      If they succeed, Democrats would influence the drawing of as many as 39 congressional districts gerrymandered by the GOP dating back to the early 2000s redraw, which divided liberal Austin into four districts with four conservatives. There could also be a strong impact on national politics, because Texas could receive at least three new seats in Congress following census reapportionment next year.
      A Democratic state house would provide a brake on voter suppression efforts that sunk Texas to 50th in voter turnout in 2018 and limited massive counties the size of New England states to one dropbox each this fall.
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      “It’s not a red state. It’s a suppression state, and by God, my governor and my attorney general are doing their damndest to keep it that way,” Chambers says. “But when Texas goes blue, we take our 38 to 41 electoral votes with us, and then there’s no math in which a Republican can win the White House without Texas. If they draw the maps? We could be stuck like chuck for another decade.”
      According to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which rates state legislative races Moneyball-style, with an eye toward pushing donations toward the most meaningful races to impact redistricting, Texas’s 112th district is the most valuable in the state. “I was able to get so close in a historically very red district,” Chambers tells me. “If my race goes, a couple other races go, and we get a new House majority.”
      This year, determined Texans have withstood suppression efforts and set turnout records. More than seven million voted early, and numbers were highest in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and the surrounding environs that mirror the fast-growing, wealthy suburbs that have turned against the Republicans and Donald Trump.
      “The story this year is the Texas voter overcoming these obstacles inspired by the women by and large who are running for the Texas house,” says Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman who lost a Senate battle to Ted Cruz in 2018, but has organized nightly phone banks aimed at flipping the chamber. “I’ve never seen this level of organization and capitalization and strategic deployment of resources in my life.” More

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      in US Politics

      Lone Star turn: Kamala Harris campaigns in Texas in bid to flip state

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      Jesus Quintanilla, 20, from San Juan on the US-Mexico border, and his family had packed into their car and lined up outside the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley campus to hear vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
      They were turned away after being informed it was invitation-only at the voter-mobilization event.
      Undeterred, Quintanilla crawled under a fence and after getting scolded by the Secret Service found a spot where he could watch.
      Harris didn’t risk saying explicitly that she was there last Friday to flip Texas in the election, she left that to state Democratic luminaries and her former rivals for the presidential nomination, Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro, who came to stump for her and see this border community as key.
      She flew into nearby McAllen, which is most likely to ring a bell in the wider world for Trump-era scenes of trauma. It was in the city that border agents separated migrant children from their families and caged them under hardline immigration policies, some not to see their parents again to this day.
      The area has also been hit hard by coronavirus.
      At 4.43pm, a waving, beaming Harris sashayed on stage in jeans, blazer and her now-signature Converse sneakers with “2020” on the heel, to exuberant cheering and Mary J Blige’s Work That blasting from speakers.
      “They often criticize you for your skin tone, wanna hold your head high,” the R&B lyrics blared to about 200 vehicles gathered for the drive-in rally from various parts of the predominantly Hispanic region known as the Rio Grande Valley. More