After a very busy 2008, everyone at the DLCC is taking a little time to spend with friends and families.

I want to take a moment to thank each of you for all that you do for this committee. Our success would be impossible without the support you provide.

Over the next two weeks, I'll try to update this site occasionally, but we'll be back in earnest in January.

Until then, here's to a happy and wonderful holiday season.

Last week, Josh Goodman, one of the writers for Governing Magazine, objected to a piece by NPR where host Scott Simon called Oklahoma "the most Republican state in the Union."

His point was that too often pundits only look at presidential performance when they talk about the nation's political divide.

Backing him up, the good folks at NCSL recently crunched the numbers to determine which legislatures have the most seats dominated by a single party.

There are three states in which Republicans hold more than two-thirds of the total seats: Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming.

Happily for us, there are seven states where Democrats control more than two-thirds of the legislative seats: Rhode Island, Hawaii, Connecticut, West Virginia, Maryland, and Arkansas.

For more triva, check out the whole post.

In state after state, lawmakers are grappling with the economic crisis.

Earlier in the month, in his regular radio address, President-Elect Obama announced his intention to develop a "two-year 'Economic Recovery Plan' that would create 2.5 million jobs patching crumbling infrastructure, modernizing schools and building wind farms, solar panels and fuel-efficient cars." State leaders are hoping that they will receive some portion of that stimulus package to boost local economies.

In Colorado, a committee of lawmakers focused on creating jobs and boosting the state economy is weighing options about what can be done in the face of a worsening national climate. A panel of economists briefing the group told the legislators much the state's job situation will be dictated by circumstances nationwide.

In Indiana, plans to boost education spending are being reevaluated as lawmakers come to terms with the state's economic situation. Revenue in the state is not meeting earlier projections, and the state's obligation to cover increases in Medicaid costs are adding to the concerns. Indiana has a cash reserve of $1.4 billion which could be used to prevent some of the worst cuts.

In Washington state, educators are worried about what the economic slump will mean for state's public colleges and universities. Lawmakers are being told to prepare for a deficit of $5.1 billion, and because funding for many services like K-12 education are mandated by law, many expect that higher education will be asked to absorb some of the harsher cuts.

On Election Day, the Montana House of Representatives finished the night split down the middle, and the Republicans lost control of the chamber. After Democrats selected Bob Bergren to be their leader, Gov. Brian Schweitzer appointed him to serve as Speaker of the House.

Bergren was first elected to the legislature six years ago. Before becoming speaker, he served on the Committees for Rules and Legislative Administration and was the Deputy Democratic Leader in the lower chamber.

Shortly after learning that he would lead the lower chamber in its next session, Bergren said that passing a new, two-year budget would be his top priority. He told reporters that making smart decisions in the face of the national economic crisis was, "vital" and pledged to work across the aisle as he governed.

Bergren is a retired firefighter who served as president and vice president of his local union before seeking elected office, and once he becomes speaker, Bergren will become the only firefighter to lead a state legislative chamber. He has served on the executive board of the Montana AFL-CIO since 2001. Before serving in the legislature, Bergren spent two years as a city councilman in his local community.

The 2008 election isn't over just yet.

On November 5th, Democrat Chris Bell finished first in a field of six candidates running for the state senate in the 17th District of Texas. Now he's in a runoff, facing Republican Joan Huffman.

Voters will head back to the polls tomorrow to decide the race.

Bell is a former congressman, who lost his seat due to the Tom Delay-led, mid-cycle redistricting effort in 2003. He ran for governor in 2004 and previously served on the Houston City Council.

If Bell wins tomorrow, Democrats will only need to pick up three seats in 2010 to hold a majority in the chamber.

The DLCC is focused on this race. Check out Burnt Orange Report for ways you can get involved.

Early this fall, months before the federal bank bailout, lawmakers in North Carolina passed legislation creating the Home Foreclosure Prevention Program:

Under the new law, lenders must provide homeowners and the state banking commissioner 45 days' notice before a foreclosure action is filed. The law also allows the banking commissioner to extend any foreclosure-filing notice period by 30 days.

The state uses that window to negotiate with the homeowner and mortgage holder on modifying a loan interest rate and payments.

Only a month into the program, the impact is already apparent:

According to RealtyTrac, which tracks foreclosures nationwide, monthly foreclosure filings in North Carolina dropped 27 percent in November compared with a year ago, while filings across the country rose 5 percent.

Gov. Easley has begun to tout the legislation's success, offering it as a model for action nationwide.

Steven Horsford first began to learn how the Nevada Senate worked in 1993 while he was a student intern.

Now, 15 years later, Democrats in the state are in control of the senate for the first time since 1991, and Horsford has been chosen by his Democratic colleagues to serve as the as the chamber’s majority leader.

He is the first African-American ever to be elected to the post, and at just 35, Horsford is also one of the youngest chamber leaders in the country. Majority Leader Horsford was also recently chosen to serve on Board of Directors for the DLCC.

Just after Election Day, Horsford told reporters that finding a way to balance the state budget without cutting essential services would be one of his top priorities. A state commission in charge of budget projections recently reported that Nevada would need to cut spending by as much as $250 million in 2009.

Outside of the legislature, Horsford is president of Nevada Partners -- a nonprofit dedicated to job training and education. He is also the chief operating officer for the Culinary Training Academy which helps workers prepare for jobs in the state’s hospitality industry.

A native of Las Vegas, Horsford is a graduate of University of Nevada, Reno.

Rep. Martin Frost is a guy who knows a thing or two about redistricting. He served in Congress from 1979 to 2005 and was chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

He has an op-ed in today's Politico which outlines the importance the 2010 election:

Whether Democrats can have a longtime majority in Congress will be determined by the outcome of some very intense hand-to-hand combat conducted on a state-by-state basis over the next two years.

In most cases, state legislatures and governors elected in 2010 will determine the outcome of this particular fight.

This fight is part of the reason that this committee exists. Over the next 23 months, those of us who work for DLCC will devote much of our professional lives to winning these races so that Democrats have a seat at the table where the new district lines are drawn.

If you want to understand the stakes, you need look no farther than Frost's home state of Texas:

In 2003, the Republican governor and the GOP Legislature caved in to pressure from then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and replaced a balanced congressional map, drawn by a federal court, with a harshly partisan plan that cost Democrats six seats in Congress and significantly reduced the influence of minority voters in Texas. The plan was approved by the partisan Bush administration Department of Justice.

Over the last four years, Democrats in the Texas have cut the Republican majority in the state house to a single vote, and if we win a runoff for a seat in the state senate later this month, Democrats will only be down three seats in the upper chamber.

The DLCC and our legislative candidates are making progress across the country, but the stakes will only be ratcheted higher in the next election. No one in politics will be spending more time on these races than us, and we'll have plenty more to say about this process as we head into next year.

Stay tuned...

Today, we're rolling out a big improvement of the Get Local Map. The new version is color coded to reflect chamber control, and it's now fully embeddable.

I'm guessing that those of you who read this blog are interested in state legislatures -- if so, write something for your personal webspace and include this map so that others can see the work we have left to turn this country blue.

http://www.dlcc.org/map

We'll be updating chamber margins individual states this week (we're still waiting a few finalized race results).

First off, I want to apologize for the lack of a post yesterday. I was on the road much of the day to make it down to Charleston for the State Legislative Leaders Foundation's meeting on the 2008 Election.

This morning, bright and early, I sat on a panel with Tim Storey from NCSL, Jennifer Duffy from the Cook Report, and Tim Garon -- one of the political directors from the Republican State Leadership Committee.

I've pasted my remarks below, but the stage was set up for audio recording, so I'm going to try to get a copy to share later because I think it went well.

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In 1994, two years into Bill Clinton’s presidency, Democrats suffered a major defeat, losing around 500 state legislative seats nationwide in the midterm election.

In 2002, two years into the presidency of George W. Bush, the GOP became the first party of presidential power to gain state legislative seats in a mid-term election cycle since FDR.

What was the difference?

Organization.

In the early 1990s, Republicans began to develop a concerted effort to win local races. They raised money, hired staff, conducted polls, and tested messages.

1994 was just the start.

In the 2000 Election, Republicans gained control of a majority of the nation’s legislative chambers.

They held complete control of all three branches of government in states that we all recognize as competitive: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

In doing so, they gained a significant advantage over the redistricting process which happens every decade—both for congressional seats and state legislative districts.

In the next election, Republicans won control of five state legislative chambers, left two additional chambers tied, and finished the year with more Republican state legislators than Democrats nationwide for the first time since the 1950s.

After 2002, Republicans began talking about building a permanent majority, and some observers took them at their word.

But then something unexpected happened over the course of the past six years -- Democrats won more legislative seats than they lost in 2003 and we have gone on to make net gains in every election since.

No matter how you parse it, that is a remarkable turnaround of our fortunes at the state level.

In 2004, when Democrats were losing seats in Congress, losing seats in the Senate, and losing races for governor, our state legislative candidates won control of seven new chambers and forced two more chambers into a tie.

In 2006, we made even stronger gains. In that year, we won control of 11 new chambers.

And this year, we continued the trend, picking up five new chambers and forcing two ties.

What does the shift look like in terms of total control?

In 2002, Republicans held majorities in 54 chambers, Democrats controlled 41 chambers, and three chambers were tied.

After this year’s election, Democrats control 60 chambers, Republicans control 36 chambers, and two different chambers are tied.

Let’s look at this year’s election.

In 2008, our political team targeted nine Republican-held chambers as possible pickup opportunities. On Election Day, we won new majorities in five of them: the Delaware House, Ohio House, Wisconsin Assembly, New York Senate, and the Nevada Senate.

The victories in Nevada, Delaware, New York, and Wisconsin are notable because they give Democrats complete control of the legislature in these states. The current political landscape represents the smallest number of divided chambers since 1982.

We also made serious gains in two other targeted chambers -- the Montana House and Texas House.

Democrats in Texas picked up four seats, to cut the GOP margin to 76/74. In fact, we came with in 20 votes of winning a fifth race that would have tied the chamber. The new margins present the opportunity for a leadership battle to displace hyperpartisan GOP Speaker Tom Craddick.

In Montana, Democrats picked up enough seats to tie the lower chamber, 50/50, and the Democratic governor appointed the new Speaker of the House.

Because of the ground we'd picked up in past elections, we knew that we had to focus on consolidating these past victories and improving Democratic margins in these states.

Prior to Election Day, our political team identified 13 chambers held by Democratic majorities that we needed to protect.

We successfully defended chambers in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Colorado, and we made serious gains in two chambers we originally thought we'd be hard pressed to hold -- the Michigan House and Oregon House.

Of our 13 targeted chambers, we only lost Democratic majorities in two places: the Tennessee House and Montana Senate. The Montana Senate is among the most competitive in the country and has changed hands in nine of the last 15 elections. Democrats in the state were hampered by a number of term-limit-forced retirements in low-Democratic performance districts.

Republicans also gained control of the upper chambers in Tennessee and the Oklahoma. Both chambers were tied before last week's election.

On Election Day, voters in these states came out strongly to support the national GOP ticket, suggesting some coattail effect.

Sen. John McCain's margin of victory over Sen. Barack Obama in the Sooner State was nearly two to one. Oklahoma is the only state in the country where the Democratic presidential candidate failed to win a single county.

Obama's support in Tennessee was stronger, due in large part to the Democratic turnout in urban areas -- he only lost the state by 15 points. But the Republican Party in the state made a point to target Democratic legislative candidates running in rural areas and was clearly able to make gains.

Across the country, Democrats now control more than 55 percent of the nation's partisan legislative seats. We once again made net gains, adding approximately 100 seats to our column. Democrats now control both the legislature and governor’s office in 17 states. Republicans hold equivalent control of governments in just eight states.

There are clearly many different factors at play which help to explain this new political alignment. As much as I would like for the DLCC to take credit for masterminding every seat won and every chamber flipped, the big picture is just too complicated for that.

But DLCC has been an integral part of the success that Democrats have had winning at the legislative level and there are a number of strategies that we have employed that I think offer a vision of success for the future. As the Republicans began to organize so did we.

Our political directors work with legislators, activists, and allies in each state to build successful, modern campaign organizations and develop state-specific strategies to reach voters.

We're unique in that we don't dictate any message. We recruit strong candidates who know their districts well, and we encourage them to run on local issues. We work with leaders and staff in each state to develop effective messaging operations.

We then help give these candidates access to tools like polling, communications, research, and online fundraising. Many of these basic political resources are too expensive for state legislative races, so providing an economy of scale and making them accessible is a huge strategic advantage for our side.

Developing services like this, which we offer to every candidate whether she is running in one of our top targeted districts in one of our most competitive states or whether she is challenging Republican incumbent in a district that hasn’t voted for a Democrat in 30 years, will be a significant part of the future for our organization.

For instance, one year ago, the DLCC began working with Wired for Change, a progressive web vendor, to develop an Internet toolset for all of our candidates. We wanted to make online politics simple and affordable. The result of this effort is DLCCWeb.

This service provides candidates with a web site, online fundraising capabilities, unlimited blast e-mailing, and a range of additional advocacy tools. To make DLCCWeb affordable, we negotiated an economy of scale price and our candidates pay just $40 a month for access to everything.

In its first year, DLCCWeb was an unquestionable success.

We had more than 350 campaigns in more than 30 states sign up to the use the service. Of the active campaigns this cycle, most were challengers and more than half won their races. We had victors in states stretching from Alaska to Kansas to Texas.

The numbers in many ways speak for themselves:

Websites run by DLCCWeb candidates generated 13,903,917 total hits in 2008;

Candidates using the service sent 2,798,496 emails to their supporters;

DLCCWeb candidates raised $444,098.89 through online fundraising using the service.

In online business, retailers talk about reaching the Long Tail of consumers. The Internet now allows companies to make a profit by selling small volumes of hard-to-find items or services to large numbers of costumers instead of relying on the sales of a ubiquitous hit product.

For us, DLCCWeb represents an opportunity to achieve new victories by relying on the Long Tail of political campaigns. There are 7,382 partisan state legislative seats in this country. We cannot begin to identify the Democratic candidate running in each of these races, but we can offer this service and others like it to every single one of them.

We’ll continue to offer targeted support as well, of course. But with DLCCWeb, we’ll make gains that surprise even us. There will be more Democrats winning races by tapping into local energy in places like Kansas, Alaska, and Utah.

As we head into the final set of elections before the next round of redistricting, this is our strategy moving forward. We will empower campaigns from the ground up and give individual candidates the cutting edge tools so that they can develop innovative strategies to win.

Late last month, Rep. Mike Sheridan was elected speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, becoming the first Democrat to hold the position in 14 years.

He was unopposed in his bid for reelection to his third term. In the Assembly, Sheridan has served on a variety of committees, including jobs and the economy, labor and industry, transportation, insurance, small business and workforce development.

The new speaker says that the budget will be the top priority. Next year, the state must tackle a deficit that could grow to $5 billion.

Rep. Sheridan also said he'll continue to work with local, state and federal officials to secure a new product at the General Motors assembly plant in Janesville. The plant is scheduled to end production of full-size sport utility vehicles next month, and a coalition has approached GM about bringing a new product to Janesville.

As the former president of the United Auto Workers Union at the General Motors Janesville plant, Sheridan says the state needs to do more to protect jobs, like the ones being lost in his community because of the GM plant closure.

He also believes the state needs to do more to protect its major economic engines, such as Milwaukee.

Instead of writing something new today, I spent more time today doing research than I intended.

Luckily, you'll get to see some of the fruits of that labor tomorrow, when I'll post the next installment in our Meet the Leaders series.

Later this week, I'll also share the remarks I'm giving at conference on Friday.

I think both of them will be interesting.

We think we've got plenty of reason to be proud of DLCCWeb, and we're pretty happy that this service is starting to get some attention online.

Writing for TechPresident, Kevin Thurman says:

[It] doesn’t surprise me that many have missed one of the more fascinating online programs this cycle: The Democratic Legisative Campaign Committee’s DLCCWeb program.

Developed for the DLCC by Wired for Change the concept is simple: For $40 a month any Demcoratic State legislative candidate can have a website, online contribution system with ActBlue, and the web marketing tools they need to make their web program successful.

Compared to just one cycle ago and the dizzying array options at the time – ranging from too expensive to taking too much time – the DLCCWeb is a much simpler and cheaper option for your state legislative campaigns. With this price tag everyone from low-cost campaigns in New Hampshire to high-cost large campaigns in states like Texas and California found ways to use it to help their campaign.

We're already beginning to see campaigns sign up for this service for races they'll run in the next two years, and we think that DLCCWeb has a bright future. In fact, we'll soon begin discussing ways that we can improve the program.

If you've got any feedback about where DLCCWeb should go, let me know.