Republicans control most state governments, and it's not a minor problem for Democrats. How did we get here? A conversation with author Meaghan Winter
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images You wouldn’t have guessed it from cable news, but Donald Trump was not the only major political event of 2016. Nor was the primary race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. To understand both the true import of 2016 and the scale of the defeat suffered by the Democratic Party, you must look to the states.
Meaghan Winter: The answer I give is not going to be complete because it is one of the central questions of our time, really, in terms of political dynamics. But one of the things that, for example, the anti-abortion movement has been wonderful at doing is connecting local activists to elite entities and institutions that have a lot of funding and political clout.
Institutions on the right have an incentive to give because they’re going to get a return on their investment. If you are the Koch brothers and you spend a million dollars on lobbying, you’re going to get tenfold the amount of money back by pushing a piece of legislation because you’re going to get a tax break or you’re gonna get to drill oil, whatever you want. Where liberal donors, compared to Democrats at large, tend to be more socially liberal and economically conservative.
I’m not saying that to minimize abortion rights or gay rights, obviously, but given the heightened emotions of those issues and given the fact that gun-rights supporters and anti-abortion supporters, as we were discussing, are extremely well-organized and are just there all of the time and, frankly, control so much of the culture of the statehouses. It’s really hard to see how the Democrats are going to win on those issues.
Your reporting makes it clear that the Democratic Party has a money problem. It doesn’t have enough, and what money it does have tends to come from big donors. You connect that problem to the party’s growing reliance on consultants. Do you think that the rise of small donors can help break the hold of the consultant class?
So do I have hope? Some. There are a lot of people on the ground who are trying to change the way things are done and the way money is spent in politics. And actually, I think that getting involved in your own neighborhood or city or state is really good for your mental health. It’s important to get off Twitter and talk to people to figure out what’s going on, because you actually can exert change in small ways on the local level, whereas we are pretty powerless when it comes to impeachment.
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