Why Democrats are pushing their donors to care more about state legislative races

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The News
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — John Boccieri’s tour through northeast Ohio politics is a microcosm of the Democratic Party’s decline, especially in state legislatures.
In 2008, Boccieri left his seat in the Ohio state Senate to flip a Republican-held House seat. He lost it in the 2010 GOP wave, which gave the party control over redistricting and put his old district out of reach. Democrats appointed him to a safe state House seat in 2015, though he left it to run for state Senate in 2018. But he lost that race, and went back to work as a pilot.
This year, Boccieri decided to try again for a seat in the state house. He bet that Republicans’ winning streak couldn’t survive a second Trump midterm, with Vivek Ramaswamy leading their Ohio ticket.
“The seat that I’m running in is still gerrymandered,” he told Semafor last week. “But we need someone who’s going to help Amy Acton, when she’s the governor, to push back on unregulated, unchecked data centers, and make sure that the state house corruption ends.”
Boccieri now exemplifies a new trend in Democratic politics: In the final weeks before the midterms, the party is trying to convince its donors that a “blue wave” could spread even farther — if their money isn’t all spent on a handful of House and Senate races.
“Democrats are always in this spot of this ‘coulda, woulda, shoulda’ with state legislatures,” said Leslie Martes, the CEO of Forward Majority, a nonprofit that spends on Democratic state legislative campaigns. The group has warned donors that Republicans are still ahead in both parties’ top target races at the state level.
“There’s this idea that these top-of-the-ticket candidates are going to lift the whole ticket, but that’s not the case,” Martes explained. “I worked in North Carolina in 2008, when Barack Obama was winning the state, and we didn’t pick up a single seat in Raleigh. There’s a lot of work to increase the name ID of our candidates at the state legislative level.”
The fight to control state legislatures intensified last year, after President Donald Trump urged Republicans to draw new congressional maps in the states they control that eliminate as many Democratic House seats as possible.
Strategists in both parties said that this redistricting scramble has changed how donors are being approached for state legislative races — rarely the first places where the largest political funders send their cash. Mason Di Palma, a spokesman for the Republican State Leadership Committee, said that his group began warning donors that Democrats could force their own gerrymanders if they swept state-level races in 2026.
In practice, that meant that if Democrats could expand their control in Minnesota, capture Wisconsin’s Assembly, and flip Pennsylvania’s state Senate, they would gain the power to delete GOP districts in each state.
“If Dems get trifectas, what will stop them from redrawing maps?” said Di Palma. “Your dollar goes further in state legislative races.”
Both parties have stepped up their recruiting for downballot races, with Democrats benefiting from an overall confidence that they’d make gains in the midterms. In Wisconsin they spotted a chance for their first trifecta since 2010 thanks to new maps; in Pennsylvania, the popularity of Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro was already helping them inch toward Senate control.
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Redistricting is reshaping the political outlook in many states, with the possibilities for partisan control divided into three categories.
First, there are states where neither party thinks that they can break the governing trifecta: Republicans are at no risk in Arkansas, Tennessee, or Indiana; Democrats are not worried about losing either the governor’s office or the state legislature in New York, Illinois, and California.
The dead zone includes places where state legislative elections are held in off-years: Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia.
The next crop of states with marquee legislative fights this cycle feature one party that’s trying to break a governing trifecta, or at least end a supermajority that makes it easier for the party in power to force new maps through.
This group includes Nebraska, where Republicans in the “unicam” have been a vote away from eliminating the presidential electoral vote for Omaha’s 2nd Congressional District. Ohio, where Democrats don’t think they can flip the state legislature, is also in this batch — it could still make Acton governor and elect enough legislators to sustain her vetoes.
“I’m very excited that we may break the supermajority in this election,” Acton told Semafor last week.
Finally, there are states where one party could win a trifecta, sometimes in places where they’d have the ability to draw new maps in 2027. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania top that list for Democrats. It also includes Arizona, where the party is a few seats away from control — and where Republicans have said they’d use a trifecta of their own to revisit the state’s redistricting commission.
The total money heading into state legislative campaigns pales in comparison to what Republicans have spent to hold Texas’ Senate seat. But the States Project — which, like Forward Majority, was created to help Democrats win more legislatures — announced a $100 million haul last month; the RSLC is looking at spending “north of $52 million” on its targets.
In key states, Democrats say that they remain outgunned; in Wisconsin, local GOP donors have helped swing-seat Republicans in the Assembly spend $11.3 million, compared with $7.6 million for Democrats.
“The right wing has been at this for more than 50 years,” said Mandara Meyers, the States Project’s executive director. “They have entrenched advantages and GOP megadonors are still pouring millions into individual races.”
David’s view
The story of modern state legislature battles is a Republican breakthrough in 2010, followed by 16 years of Democrats trying to claw back whatever they could. They started with lawsuits and ballot measures; in Michigan, Virginia, and Colorado, they created less partisan redistricting processes that kept both states competitive, not slanted toward one party.
Trump’s national redistricting push quickly changed their strategy, and the threat of new maps every two years helped both parties raise more money for 2026. Forward Majority’s ask for a final $2-5 million to avoid being outspent came after Republican donors to the party’s other PACs funded the key GOP state legislative campaigns.
There’s table talk about whether Trump’s low approval ratings can hurt his party as much as Obama hurt his party’s in 2010. The spending picture is completely different now: Democratic donors pledged never to neglect state-level races again, and Republican donors never stopped investing in them. Democrats are still not sure whether they can break through in the sorts of non-urban, non-suburban areas where Republicans have been drawing maps for 10 years, confident that these voters are permanently realigned.

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