The Biggest Dem Success Story Has Nothing to Do With D.C.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY was in a sorry state in 2017. Donald Trump had shockingly won the White House, and Republicans controlled the House and Senate. And outside of Washington, D.C., Democrats held just fifteen governorships. All of this meant that the opposition party had few tools to meaningfully push back against Trump and few prominent leaders around to fight him.

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. Almost all of the most talked-about 2028 presidential contenders are governors, a far cry from the run-up to 2020, when none were among the top-tier candidates.

“[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.

For years, operatives working on gubernatorial races complained their work was neglected even as Republicans made deep inroads in state after state. How the party reversed these trends is one of the underappreciated stories in politics, and I have been curious to know exactly how Democratic leaders managed to pull it off. So before the holidays, I spent a few days getting the backstory from officials like Inslee who were deeply involved in the rebuilding process. Here’s what I discovered. ...