This week’s election results are historic — and there is one massive victory that they’ve helped push into the headlines. The gains we fueled in state legislatures have ERASED Project REDMAP.
What is Project REDMAP? Ahead of the 2010 midterms, the Republican State Leadership Committee implemented a strategy that shifted the party’s focus to building power in state legislatures. The plan hinged on the fact that states control redistricting. The rightwing understood that winning power in state legislatures would allow them to draw Congressional maps that cemented their own power at the federal level — and they invested accordingly.
The result? Democrats lost around 700 state legislative seats across the country. The rightwing won trifectas — control of the State House, Senate, and Governor’s seat — in 21 states. And state lawmakers in those rightwing-controlled states drew new maps that gave Republicans a structural advantage worth an estimated 11 to 19 additional U.S. House seats.
People across the country have suffered because of the impacts of Project REDMAP for nearly two decades. That changed Tuesday night.
We powered truly historic gains in states across the country. With new trifectas in seven states, including Arizona, Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, Maine, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Democrats now hold 23 trifectas. Project REDMAP has been erased.
This is the kind of big, structural change that we could only imagine when The States Project was founded nearly ten years ago. Today, what once felt like a daydream, is reality.
As we often say, this isn’t where the glamour is, just where the power is. We have realized that power in a way that will tangibly improve millions of lives in this country.
Take that in. Celebrate. And then, let’s keep going.
