Conservatives, midterms matter when it comes to state legislatures, too. Don't ignore their power

Many observers are comparing the 2022 elections to the last time an unpopular first-term Democratic president held office during a midterm, but the most important electoral results of that year and the warning sign they provide for what the true stakes are on November 8 often go unrecognized.

In 2010, Republicans not only took back the U.S House of Representatives, but we also launched an unprecedented effort to win state legislative races so we could better counteract the disastrous agenda coming out of Democrat-controlled Washington. 

Democrats were caught sleeping and the result was a net-gain of 20 state legislative chambers for Republicans and control of the majority of them throughout the country.

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The significance of these victories in the states for the Republican agenda in the years that followed cannot be overstated. It took us another three election cycles to win a Republican-trifecta in Washington, a dynamic that held for only two brief years. And while the House, Senate, and White House changed hands a total of five times in the last decade, Republican control of state legislatures has been the ballast of the conservative movement.

Republican-led legislatures this past decade helped the nation better weather the economic storms caused by two different Democrat presidents drunk on spending. They defended small business owners from lockdown liberals hellbent on using the pandemic as an excuse to permanently expand government control. They kept their states safe from a national crime surge by supporting law enforcement even when the left-wing mob sought to make it unacceptable to do so. And they spoke up for parents who simply wanted to have a say in their children’s education.

The appeal of flipping control of the Congress to neutralize Joe Biden is understandable, but we must not forget that control of Washington is often short-lived and hard to come by. 

After all, who would have thought in November 2010 that President Obama would win reelection in 2012 and hold on to his Democrat Senate until 2014. This means our first priority each year should be preserving the cornerstone of our party by defending our ground and fighting for more in the states.

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This task has gotten all the more difficult each year since 2010. In fact, Republicans have not net-gained state legislative chambers in a two-year cycle since 2013-14. 

Why? 

A constellation of national liberal special interest groups continues to up the ante when it comes to allocating resources to state legislative races and in 2020 they combined to shell out over $167 million in traceable spending in battleground states. 

These groups are raising even more this year, which has powered the Democrats’ significant television spending advantages in Michigan and Arizona, two states where Republican chambers are highly vulnerable. And in states like Colorado, where a favorable environment should give Republicans a shot to flip a chamber, Democrat spending has made it difficult to break through.

Republicans 12 years ago benefited from Democrats playing without a goalie in state legislative races. Now, it’s as if the GOP is the team playing a man down.

Thankfully, we have a secret weapon that Democrats don’t – the results of our policies. While Democrat-led states have mirrored President Biden’s tax-and-spend agenda, Republican-led states have prioritized tax relief to combat inflation and stabilize their economies, and 16 out of the 20 states with the lowest unemployment rates have Republican-led legislatures. 

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Republican-led states were also committed to getting kids back in the classroom as quickly as possible as Democrats took their cues from their teachers’ union donors during the pandemic. This led to students in red states performing remarkably better than those from blue ones on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress aka "the nation's report card."

And, GOP-controlled states remain crime safe-havens in comparison to liberal states like New York and Oregon that embraced radical bail reforms that allow repeat offenders to wreak havoc on communities.

If state legislative elections were referendums on policies alone, Republicans would again be poised for success this year. But Democrats know that they can distract from their failed record with an onslaught of spending, and if we don’t fight back, they might just be successful. 

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The best way we can counter the national liberal money machine is to remind every Republican voter just how important state legislative elections are to the conservative cause, even in a year that looks good for Republicans at the top of the ticket. 

As we always say at the RSLC, stopping socialism is a long-term fight, and it starts in the states.