Pearl River          I can’t be the only one who is sick and tired of the battleground, swing states political organizing practice, because I sure as heck am up to my eyelids with that mess.  Living in Louisiana, if I didn’t read the national papers daily, I might have forgotten there was a presidential election until signs popped up in my New Orleans neighborhood.  I hear that gazillions were spent on political advertising, but other than the last-minute social media notices and fundraising texts, God knows what the issues might have been.  Supposedly, Trump went hard against transgender issues in the last weeks before the election, but we would not have known about that down here.

Ok, so I’m way over it, but I also think now is a wakeup call for all Americans that we need a fifty-state campaign.  I think the Democrats have practically forgotten about that concept.  Having won the popular vote for the last twenty years, I get the feeling their strategists had concluded they can take all the rest of us for granted and put all their effort in the swing states and leave it to the yellow dogs and the underfunded, undermanned and almost invisible state parties.

Trump just shattered that illusion with an almost 5 million margin over Harris in the popular vote.  Maybe it will be a bit less when California and other slowpoke voter counters finish, but there’s no question the margin will be big and impossible to ignore.  Trump didn’t mind saying he had a mandate when he won a squeaker in 2016, but that was then, and this is now.  I can’t prove this, but partly his vote came out, because they claimed it would be a fix and stolen, if they didn’t.  Harris and the Democrats didn’t have a counter to that argument that would drive voters out across the country, rather than just in the battlegrounds.  Saying you want to save democracy, and then only walking that talk in swing states doesn’t work.

There are consequences.  A limited strategy allows more states to solidify red-base control of statehouses and legislative assemblies.  This narrow attention span over the last several decades has seen Ohio and Florida go from being swing states to being red bastions.  It has also meant that too many of the marbles, even if not all of them, have gone to controlling the White House and not enough to statehouses and Congress.

Open Secrets estimates that north of $15 billion was spent on political advertising with more than $5 billion coming in separately on dark money.  Both Republicans and Democrats can raise and spend billions.  Why not raise a couple of billion to build real parties in all fifty states?  In some red states in the South, Arkansas and Louisiana among them, huge numbers of offices are not even contested.  Look at the Senate race in Nebraska.  You run, then you have a chance.  You stay home and you have none.  If we want a real democracy, it means real contests and elections in all fifty states.  Long term for the future of the country, that’s a winner.  Everything in the swing states is a loser, both in those states and nationally.  Let’s look at the totals in 2024, and learn something.