Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo has a post that extends a theme I have often hit on here — geographic diversity in campaigning. And retaking legislatures is the ground on which to build those skills.
Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo: It’s not how many they are but where they are many
But we are where we are, in part, because Democrats chasing the “emerging Democratic majority” saw changing demographics as favoring them in presidential and statewide races. They abandoned the countryside, focusing instead on the concentrations of blue voters in the cities. That left the plains and mountain states and rural counties (and their elected seats) to the tender mercies of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Ask the South Vietnamese how holding the cities and leaving the countryside to their opponents worked out.
And where the Democratic Party is right now is the inability to hold the urban base and pursue persuadable rural (especially white rural voters) or hit enough issues of all working people to bring in persuadable white working class voters in cities and suburbs. Demographics (and psychographics for that matter, among the Trump campaign veterans) fail when they become the basis of stereotyping. There are a lot of cross-current voters who are persuadable, despite the mythology of the absolutely polarized electorate. That polarization, like Schrodinger’s cat, only determines its state of being when observed at election time.