The long-term future of the United States will not be decided in the nation’s capital. It will be decided in the states – and that’s where the biggest story of the 2018 election is.
For years, Democratic Party leaders and funders focused on the federal level as the place to win major reform, and all but ignored state legislatures. Where the left was not paying attention, the extreme right stepped into the breach.
During President Obama’s time in office, his party lost over 900 state legislative seats. Over eight years, the Republican party won control over two-thirds of the nation’s state legislative chambers. From there, the political right attempted a slow-motion revolution to rig the rules of the political process so that a minority party, cowed by its largest donors, could hold on to power.
The components of that quiet yet epochal donor-driven power grab based in the states included gerrymandering with what one judge called “almost surgical precision”’; measures to destroy unions and suppress voting; organizing attorneys general to litigate against federal reforms from the Affordable Care Act to climate change protections; and more.
Republican party elected officials acted under pressure from the network of arch-right billionaires and multimillionaires built by the libertarian zealot Charles Koch over the last decade. Koch opposes nearly all of the policies won through collective action on the part of citizens over the past century, from graduated income taxes to workers’ rights, social security and Medicare, anti-discrimination laws, and environmental regulations.