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.