Progressive groups to spend $10 million on state legislative races

THE BIG IDEA: A trio of progressive groups will spend $10 million between now and Election Day on digital ads to boost 75 largely obscure candidates running for state legislature.

The primary goal is to give Democrats control of chambers that will play an outsized role in the next round of reapportionment, so the money will be spread across just five states: Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan.

Acronym, a 501(c)(4) organization that was set up last year to help the left rebuild its atrophied digital capacity, will oversee the execution of what organizers are calling the largest-ever online program focused on these down-ballot races.

The targets have been carefully chosen and refined based on six months of polling by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, the group led by former attorney general Eric Holder.

“On the digital front, we’ve seen Republicans spend more aggressively and it’s a much higher percentage of their overall spend. This is catch-up without overcorrection,” said Rebecca Pearcey, the director of the DLCC’s independent expenditure arm. “Most state legislative candidates can’t afford TV, so it’s another way to reach more voters where they’re at.”

The GOP took over many state legislatures during the wave years of 2010 and 2014, and now Democrats are trying to capitalize if the pendulum swings their way in 2018 because of backlash to President Trump. Liberal major donors, who were often distracted by higher-profile federal races when Barack Obama was president, now see more value in controlling state-level institutions to check Republican power in Washington.

-- One striking feature of the project is that the money will go entirely toward running positive ads that promote Democratic candidates, rather than trying to tear down GOP nominees. The goal is to make sure lower-propensity voters know the names of down-ballot candidates so that they remember to also vote for them if they show up to vote in U.S. House and Senate races. “If you can pull two to three percent, or up to five percent, by increasing a candidate’s name ID in a cycle with a Democratic-leaning electorate, you can make some significant gains in some of these chambers,” said John Bisognano, the director of campaigns for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “That’s the goal.”



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