#ThanksTrump !
"Last week, a Democratic Senate candidate in New Hampshire defeated a Republican by 11 percentage points ? 10 points more than Clinton?s margin in that district last year.
That came on top of a pair of victories earlier in July in deep-red Oklahoma, where Democratic candidates won GOP districts in the House and Senate. The party also flipped seats in the New Hampshire state House and New York State general assembly, each also in a district Trump won.
The party in control of the White House has lost seats in state legislatures in 27 of the last 29 midterm elections, he said."
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Dems are starting to win state races in Trump districts | McClatchy Washington Bureau
JULY 31, 2017 5:51 PM
Democrats are winning special elections this year. Just not the ones most people are paying attention to.
In a party desperate for victories, Democratic candidates are finding the most success in little-noticed state legislative races. They?ve already won four seats previously under Republican control, some of them in battleground districts that split evenly between President Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Party leaders say it?s a sign that they are benefitting from a broad backlash to the Republican president, one that failed to lift a quartet of special election U.S. House candidates ? including Jon Ossoff in Georgia or Rob Quits in Montana ? to victories of their own.
Especially for a party eager to win back state legislative seats next year, they hope the small races foreshadow big things in the midterm elections.
"Out in the states, we're seeing an incredible over-performance at the state legislative level," said Jessica Post, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
Last week, a Democratic Senate candidate in New Hampshire defeated a Republican by 11 percentage points ? 10 points more than Clinton?s margin in that district last year.
That came on top of a pair of victories earlier in July in deep-red Oklahoma, where Democratic candidates won GOP districts in the House and Senate. The party also flipped seats in the New Hampshire state House and New York State general assembly, each also in a district Trump won.
That success, party operatives say, is at least partially because the state legislative candidates are receiving the same boost of energy that has helped Democratic candidates for federal office. In a February race in Delaware for state Senate, for instance, the Democratic nominee had more than 1,000 volunteers.
The candidate went on to win by 17 percentage points.
?That?s unprecedented,? said Post, who said her own group?s online fundraising this year has already tripled what it collected in all of 2015. ?We?ve never seen anything like that before.?
It?s the kind of activism Democrats say they rarely see beneath the presidential or congressional level. But in a year when a previously unknown candidate such as Ossoff, running in a special U.S. House election in the Atlanta suburbs, raised tens of millions of dollars, the outpouring of support is reaching all types of races.
?These down-ballot races have given activists an outlet for the energy Trump has created,? said Carolyn Fiddler, a Daily Kos political editor and the liberal website?s senior communications adviser.
No state-level race is going to be a pure referendum on the national climate. Indeed, Democrats themselves are eager to argue that their victories are as much about dissatisfaction with local Republican governance, while GOP operatives involved in the races say Democrats are simply spending more money than they used to.
But even if state-level contests are small, they historically have been predictive of the national environment, said Tim Storey, elections analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures.