Shifted Downballot

The Vibe Has Shifted Downballot Too

Democrats in key state legislature races say they’re seeing a surge in money, volunteers—and hope.

Tim Murphy

It doesn’t take a lot of detective work to grasp that the mood within the Democratic party has improved dramatically since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the presidential ticket. Her campaign raised a staggering $310 million in July. Her poll numbers have shot up, moving key states like Arizona and North Carolina back into play. The turnaround has been so abrupt and so unavoidable that the nation’s largest political media outlets have begun chanting this new wisdom in an odd sort of harmony: It was “The Kamala Harris Vibe Shift,” according to New Yorker; “The Kamala Harris Vibe Shift,” according to Politico; “The Kamala Harris Vibe Shift,” according to the New York Times.

This “jarring vibe shift” (must credit: NPR) hits you over the head at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where a boisterous crowd packed even the nosebleed seats for the first night of programming, and a surprise appearance from the current vice president elicited a rapturous ovation. But the new enthusiasm isn’t just happening at the top of the ticket. It’s also percolating downballot, where state legislative candidates and party strategists say they’ve seen a surge in energy and fundraising since the ticket switch.

“The environment had sort of felt like a perpetual rematch,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me recently. The reaction to Harris’ ascension had shown that there was a “craving” in the electorate for something different that a lot of people in politics hadn’t fully reckoned with. Now there is “a new sort of level of engagement around what is possible and what could be.”

At a meet-and-greet with Democratic state legislative candidates on Monday, I heard some variation of that message over and over.

“There were quite a few voters who were a little skeptical before about Joe Biden and asking themselves how they were going to vote in November,” says Greta Neubauer, the Democratic minority leader in the Wisconsin assembly. “Having knocked on several hundred doors since this change, I will say that we are seeing amazing enthusiasm amongst Democrats for Harris, not only people who are saying, ‘I will be voting for Kamala Harris,’ but also, ‘How do I sign up? How do I get involved?’”

Wisconsin’s lower chamber is one of the party’s top pickup opportunities in 2024, thanks to a state supreme court ruling that threw out heavily gerrymandered Republican-drawn maps. With districts that finally reflect the state’s 50-50 partisan split, Neubauer says, the party is expecting to easily flip eight Republican-held districts that have changed to become more Democratic, and it’s hoping to win seven more seats in areas where Biden and Trump were separated by two percentage points or less in 2020. It’s an attempt to claw back control in a state where Republicans have gutted public employee unions and voting rights, and attempted to strip the Democratic governor of key executive powers.

“I have felt in conversations that we’re able to talk more about the future,” Neubauer says. “We’re not arguing for one of two former presidents. We are talking about someone who has incredible energy, incredible drive, and is really motivating a lot of new people to get involved who may not have felt that previously.”

The state legislative targets for Democrats closely mirrors that of the presidential race. In North Carolina, the party is hoping to end the Republican supermajorities in both chambers. In Michigan, it’s aiming to hold onto the Democratic trifecta it regained after a special election this spring. The party is looking to make inroads in Pennsylvania (where it narrowly controls the house but not the senate) and take back both chambers in New Hampshire—where it lost out on a majority in the state house by just 11 votes in 2022. Not 11 seats—11 votes.

Another top target: Arizona, where Republicans hold one-seat majorities in both chambers of the legislature. With an amendment officially on the ballot to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution, and new signs of life from the top of the ticket, Democrats there believe they have a chance for a governing trifecta in a state that was—until the Trump era—an emblem of conservative rule. They’re running on four core issues that “remain unsolved in Arizona or that have been created by decades of Republican leadership,” says state Sen. Priya Sundareshan, who co-chairs the Arizona Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. That would be reproductive rights, protecting public education, securing the state’s water supply, and gun control.

“We’re running more candidates so we have more pathways to flip than ever before, we’ve staffed up earlier, we’ve been providing our target district candidates with the field level staff that they will need, and we hired those much earlier in the cycle,” Sundareshan says. For months, the state had embodied Democrats’ diverging fates—Rep. Ruben Gallego led Republican Kari Lake consistently in US Senate polling, while Biden lagged far behind in a state he carried four years ago. Now, legislative candidates knocking doors were reporting “more enthusiasm and excitement,” according to Sundareshan.

To Democratic lawmakers who have spent years in the wilderness, Minnesota offers a tantalizing glimpse of what’s possible. Gov. Tim Walz’s shadow campaign to be Harris’ running mate was powered, in part, by the fruits of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party’s takeover of the state legislature in 2022—a slate of big policy wins on everything from union protections to free school lunches.

“When Minnesotans gave us the power with the trifecta, we knew we couldn’t sleep on that trifecta, and that we needed to get as much as we can done and don’t waste any of our capital,” said state Sen. Erin Murphy, the chamber’s majority leader. She told me that after the party had won full control in 2012, “we weren’t as prepared as we were this time.” They spent their subsequent time in the wilderness developing an ambitious governing agenda, under the auspices of a non-profit called the Minnesota Values Project. The result was “an agenda that we could move if we were given the power.

Minnesota Democrats are aiming to expand their six-vote majority in the house this fall, and they feel buoyed now not just by the elevation of Harris, but also the presence of a Mankato West High School defensive coordinator on the ticket.

“People are showing up in August in Minnesota—the month that we take off,” Murphy says. “They’re showing up and door knocking. We’re seeing it, of course, in the signups and contributions that people are making. But mostly it’s just that sense of possibility that we can do this, and people are putting the hard work necessary behind that feeling to actually accomplish it.”

The changes weren’t confined to swing districts and toss-up states. Elected officials in the party’s base were feeling it too. Washington state Rep. Kristine Reeves, who represents a diverse and reliably Democratic district near Seattle, said the mood on the ground took her back 16 years. “It was a very apocalyptic presidency under former President Trump,” she said. Now she was seeing “a level of hope and humanity”—particularly from young people—that she hadn’t seen since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

“I jokingly tell folks, Kamala Harris did in 18 days what it took Barack Obama 18 months to do.”