The Democrats Whose 2020 Goal Is Grander Than the Presidency
BROOKLYN—The 10-person team plotting the next progressive era in American politics is crammed into a small, top-floor WeWork suite near the borough’s waterfront.
The group’s name, Future Now, is as generic as its glass-enclosed work space, surrounded by the start-ups, freelancers, free coffee, beer tap, and networking events that define the co-working experience. Exactly one block away is the building that housed the campaign headquarters of Hillary Clinton, whose defeat in 2016 inspired the launch of Future Now and so many like-minded organizations dedicated to harnessing the fear and anger of the activist left.
But you won’t hear much presidential talk from the crew at Future Now, even as the Democratic Party’s energy, operatives, and dollars flow into the free-for-all primary to oust Donald Trump. Future Now was inspired by Trump, but its goal isn’t—in and of itself—to defeat him. If anything, the organization’s entire raison d’être is to break the Democratic Party’s obsession with the presidency and redirect its focus back to the places where, Future Now’s founders argue, conservatives have amassed their most durable power: state legislatures.
“I don’t think this is a crisis that was created by Donald Trump, and I don’t think it’s solved by beating him. I think that he is a reflection of a really broken politics,” one of the co-founders, former State Senator Daniel Squadron of New York, told me. “State legislatures are the most important part of American civic life that’s been forgotten, except by the worst elements of politics and vested special interests. We have decided to focus all of our energy on the least glamorous, often most frustrating part of politics.”
Squadron is hardly the first Democrat to. Indeed, so many state-focused national organizations sprang up in the aftermath of 2016 that a leader of one of them told me the bumper crop is “confusing to the donor community.” In addition to , there’s , , and —all dedicated in one fashion or another to winning state legislative chambers for Democrats. Most of the groups are making an aggressive play for statehouses in 2020 because it’s the last chance for Democrats to win the ability to control the post-census redistricting process in many states.
