The Bulwark: “The Party’s Ability to Rebuild Its Gubernatorial Ranks is a Genuine Success Story”

The Bulwark: “The Party’s Ability to Rebuild Its Gubernatorial Ranks is a Genuine Success Story”

New reporting from The Bulwark highlights how Democratic governors have a battle-tested playbook for the Democratic Party — winning tough races by staying focused on the biggest issues facing American families and lowering costs for the people in their states.

After going from 15 governor’s seats in 2017 to 24 in 2026, Democratic governors and the DGA are going on offense on the economy and affordability across the 36 critical races for governor this year.

Read more from The Bulwark on how Democratic governors are the path forward for the Democratic Party:

• Eight years later, the Democratic party finds itself once more grappling with a shock Trump win and congressional minorities. But this time, the party controls far more gubernatorial seats.

• Following November’s off-year elections, Democrats are about to hold twenty-four governorships in states that make up 57 percent of the U.S. population. Far from being nondescript members of the party, this cohort includes figures like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, leaders who represent the face of the Democratic resistance to Trump 2.0.

• “[Republicans] had a long term strategy of building the bench, and they were a little ahead of the Democrats in decades past in that regard,” former Gov. Jay Inslee, who served as the chair of the Democratic Governors Association during the 2018 election cycle, told me. “We’ve caught up.”

• In what has otherwise been a bruising decade for Democrats, the party’s ability to rebuild its gubernatorial ranks is a genuine success story. And an unexpected one at that.

• “I would travel around the country with governors to try to raise money and we would frequently hear: ‘If you’re running for Senate, call us back,’” said DGA executive director Meghan Meehan-Draper, recalling what the organization was like when she first arrived in 2015 as a major donor director. “It was a real, real challenge the first few years at the DGA to, frankly, even get a meeting with some of these people.”

• For Meehan-Draper and her DGA colleagues, the importance of gubernatorial races was self-evident. Unlike Congress, which suffers from gridlock, governors were in a position to implement the party’s agenda. Their states were incubators for legislative initiatives and future leaders. Plus, they played a crucial role in redistricting.

• … the DGA launched the “Unrig the Map” campaign in the fall of 2015 to fund races in states where governors had authority over congressional redistricting. The hope was that by making explicit to donors and organizers how a state’s governor could impact the party’s ability to control the House in the leadup to the 2020 census, party leaders would start prioritizing these races. When John Bel Edwards won the governor’s seat just a few weeks later in deep red Louisiana, Meehan-Draper said that donors and voters started to get more curious about what the DGA was up to.

• Twenty-seven of the thirty-eight governorships that were up in Trump’s first two years in office had been held by Republicans, and many of those races would not have an incumbent running for the first time in eight years. If the Democratic party undervalued the importance of gubernatorial races before, Trump’s arrival in Washington gave them a reason to start caring about those races a lot. The DGA started to bring a new, compelling pitch to grassroots Democrats and deep-pocketed donors: “If you’re worried about Trump, the governor is the first and last line of defense against the Trump administration,” recalled Meehan-Draper.

• In the first year of his second term in office, Trump has picked increasingly aggressive fights with Democratic governors. He has withheld funds from their states and gone after local projects they support. He’s clamped down on immigration in their largest cities and threatened to send the military to others. He’s picked fights with universities in Democratic-run states (although universities in Republican-run states have not been spared) and attempted to withhold disaster-relief money, even in the wake of natural disasters. But by picking public flights with Democratic governors, he has also turned them into household names.

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