LOOKING AHEAD. The battle for control of state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade begins one week from today.
How's that? Well, because incumbent governors are re-elected at high rates; and because any four-year-term governors elected this coming Tuesday who are not term-limited from running for re-election in 2010 will find themselves in the advantaged position four years hence; and because winners that year will be in position to have a major influence over the district mapmaking for both state legislatures and the House, the gubernatorial elections this year will have an indirect bearing on the fates of literally thousands of state and national legislative candidates running in 2012 and beyond. So, too, will battles for control of the state legislatures, in which the parties right now are basically at parity.
And the significance of these under-the-radar races is partly why, as I recently argued in The New York Times, long-term base development and mobilization are more critical than presidential-cycle, centrist party development: These efforts pay out more than every four years (i.e., in midterm and off-year elections as well), and they also pay off well into the future.
--Tom Schaller
