'Once in a generation': Dems target swing states as Trump approval hits new low

10 December

Donald Trump and then Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey at a February 2020 rally at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Arizona, Gage Skidmore

National Democrats are looking to spend big next year to win legislative seats across the nation, and flipping control of the Arizona Legislature will once again be a top priority, even after record spending in 2024 resulted in Republicans expanding their majorities in both chambers.

A memo from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee outlines plans to flip more than 650 state legislative seats from red to blue, including in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

That is possible, the DLCC believes, because of the historic unpopularity of President Donald Trump in his second term and a resulting hostility among voters toward Republicans up and down the ballot.

“The favorable political environment taking shape for Democrats is on a scale that only comes once in a generation, similar to what Republicans took advantage of in 2010 with Project REDMAP, when they flipped hundreds of seats and fundamentally shifted the country’s political trajectory by cementing GOP control in the states,” the memo says.

The DLCC memo says that the group plans to target 42 legislative chambers, the most it has ever attempted, with an estimated $50 million budget, the largest single-year budget to date, according to the memo.

“2026 is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform state legislative power in Arizona and the data shows us the next election is our strongest opportunity yet to flip these chambers,” DLCC President Heather Williams said in a statement to the Mirror. “We aren’t wasting a moment to execute on our winning strategy to flip Arizona’s legislature and deliver a new trifecta.”

This isn’t the first time DLCC has spent big and made big plans to flip Arizona’s legislature.

In 2023, the DLCC announced record-high investments in races in the state in an effort to flip the legislature as at the time Republicans had a one-seat majority in both chambers. Pro-Democratic groups spent more than $10 million backing legislative candidates in the Grand Canyon State, though the efforts weren’t successful: Republicans increased their majority in both chambers.

“It is the bi-annual confident push by Democrats that they’re going to flip one house of the legislature,” Republican political consultant Barrett Marson told the Mirror. “Every two years, Democrats think it is the year.”

Marson pointed to gains made by Republicans in the legislature and how some Democrats have pivoted on immigration as a reaction to Trump. New polling by Gallup has shown that Americans have grown more accepting of immigration over the past year, shifting away from the tougher policies that gained Trump larger support.

Sen. Priya Sundareshan, D-Tucson, who co-chairs the Arizona DLCC, said that her caucus has a “diversity” of opinions on the issue of immigration, but at the end of the day, Arizonans want a “lawful deportation process,” not one with “extreme and excessive overreach.”

The Trump administration has come under fire for its handling of its mass deportation agenda, as ProPublica has uncovered more than 170 American citizens detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which does not track how often they hold them.

“I think the vast majority of Arizonans can agree this is not how we view a lawful immigration issue,” Sundareshan said.

But immigration is hardly to be the only issue at the forefront of the next legislative session, which begins in January.

Sundareshan said Democrats intend to leverage the affordability crisis in the upcoming session and next year’s elections.

“Specifically in Arizona, we can point to rising grocery prices that are a result of our agriculture industry being harmed by tariffs,” she said, noting that Arizona Republicans are working in “lockstep” with Trump to back policies that harm Arizonans.

Economists anticipate that the impact of the tariffs should hit consumers’ wallets by the start of next year, while Arizona farmers are saying that billions of dollars in aid meant to offset the impacts of the tariffs is too little, too late.

“This is the year where a lot of voters are going to realize that Trump and Republicans are lying to them,” Sundarashen said. “I think it is clear that a lot of the policies and priorities we have long championed as Democrats have been to ensure that corporations cannot continually raise prices and rates.”

She said that they intend to point to policy ideas Democrats are trying to put forward to lower those costs and increase affordability, though she conceded they’ll be fighting against a Republican majority that will almost certainly be unwilling to hear those bills or messages.

To Marson, Republicans already have wins on affordability in recent years, including repealing the rental tax and grocery tax, policy changes that were spearheaded by GOP lawmakers. Marson also pointed to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signing an executive order to align the state’s tax code with cuts included in Trump’s budget bill as another sign of things to come.

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