On The Importance of State & Local Elections

Added: 2026-06-10

[00:00:01]One of the great political myths in America is that everything important happens in Washington. It doesn't.

[00:00:06]Washington gets the headline, "State legislators get the power." And nowhere is that reality more obvious than in the South. For decades, Americans have been trained to think of politics as a presidential election every four years.

[00:00:18]We obsess over the White House, argue over Supreme Court nominations, and refresh election maps like gamblers staring at a roulette wheel. Meanwhile, state legislators quietly redraw district lines, rewrite voting laws, restructure public education, determine reproductive rights, and fund or defund public health care, shape criminal justice systems, and decide whether millions of people will have meaningful representation at all. The battle over democracy isn't happening primarily in Washington. It's happening in state capitals. It's happening in places like Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, and North Carolina.

[00:00:56]And it's happening right now. Most people hear the word redistricting and immediately their eyes glaze over. It sounds technical and boring and academic, but it's none of those things.

[00:01:06]Redistricting is the process by which political power is distributed. It determines whose voice matters and whose voice gets diluted. A line drawn on a map can be the difference between a community having representation or having its voting strength scattered across multiple districts until it effectively disappears. Across the South, we've seen repeated legal fights over maps that federal courts have found likely violate the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

[00:01:32]We've watched states spend years defending maps that dilute minority voting power while communities are forced into expensive, exhausting legal battles simply to preserve representation that they already possess. The fight isn't theoretical. It is an academic. It's about who gets a seat at the table and who gets locked outside the room. It is one of the central democra democratic struggles of our time. Here's the part that too often gets missed. Those maps aren't drawn by presidents. They're drawn by state lawmakers. The same state lawmakers who are elected in races that routinely see turnout collapse because people have been convinced that those elections don't matter. But they do matter. They matter because state governments oversee elections. State governments determine congressional districts. They matter because state governments fund schools.

[00:02:21]Because state governments regulate healthcare access. State governments decide whether public universities remain affordable. State governments oversee environmental protections and labor laws and housing policy and infrastructure. When people ask how we fight back against democratic erosion, voter suppression, unequal representation, attacks on public education, or the dismantling of public institution, the answer is often far less glamorous than they want. You start by winning schoolboard races, by winning city council races. You start by winning county commissions, by winning state house seats, by winning state senate seats. You build power where people actually live. That's why organizations and coalitions like y'all vote matter.

[00:03:04]Not because they are chasing celebrity or because they are building personal brands, but because they are helping close one of the most dangerous gaps in American politics, the gap between national attention and local action. In one month, they raised nearly $100,000 for candidates. They have recruited 500 content creators and influencers and in 4 days recruited 170 municipal candidates in Virginia alone. The reality is that many people under 40 receive a significant portion of their political information through creators, writers, podcasters, educators, and community organizers rather than traditional media outlets. groups that can translate complicated issues like redistricting, voting rights, state legislative races, public education funding, and local governance into language that people can actually understand. And that performs a valuable civic function. Awareness matters, fundraising matters, volunteer recruitment matters, candidate visibility matters. Most state legislative candidates are not sitting on millions of dollars. They are teachers, veterans, nonprofit leaders, small business owners, nurses, public defenders, and community advocates that are trying to compete against entrenched political machines.

[00:04:17]Sometimes a few thousand dollars or a few hundred volunteers or a few thousand new voters can fundamentally change the outcome of a race. And that's not anywhere close to an exaggeration. Many state legislative races are decided by margins smaller than the attendance of a high school football game. And every one of those races can affect the future of voting rights, reproductive rights, education policy, healthcare access and representation. The South is particularly important, not just because I live here, but because it remains one of the fastest growing and most politically dynamic regions in America.

[00:04:51]Demographic changes, urban growth, changing economic realities, and generational turnover are resh reshaping the political landscape. But none of that matters when people don't participate.

[00:05:03]Demographics are not destiny.

[00:05:05]Organization is, participation is.

[00:05:07]Showing up is. The lesson here is that if you're frustrated by gerrymandering, pay attention to state legislative races. If you're worried about attacks on voting rights, pay attention to state legislative races. If you're concerned about public education, pay attention to schoolboard and state legislative races.

[00:05:24]If you're worried about reproductive freedom, labor rights, healthc care access, environmental protection, or democratic representation, pay attention to state legislative races. Because while Washington dominates the conversation, state governments often determine the outcome.

[00:05:41]The truth is that democracy is rarely lost all at once. It erodess county by county, district by district, election by election. The good news is that it can be rebuilt exactly the same way. Not through a single presidential candidate, not through one viral moment, not through one election cycle, but through thousands of people deciding that the race for city council matters, that the school board meeting matters, that the state representative matters, that the state senator matters, that the district map matters. The South has always been a place where America's greatest democratic struggles were tested first.

[00:06:13]From reconstruction to the civil rights movement to today's battles over representation and voting rights, the region has often served as a proving ground for the nation's future. The question has never been whether those fights matter. The question is whether enough people are willing to show up and fight them. And if you want to stand in the gap for the South, if you don't believe that y'all voted for this rhetoric online, visit yallvote.org and donate. And as Amanda Nelson says, the further down your ballot, the closer to your door, because the road to Washington still runs through the courthouse, the school board, the county commission, and the state capital. It always has and it always will. The fine still death.