I mean, they get 35 state legislatures, they could change the Constitution.

Like, this is like ridiculous, you know?

And I don't want to freak people out, but like, it's true!

Hello, and welcome to the Politics Girl podcast.

I'm your host, Lee McGowan, let's get into it.

For two long Democrats have ignored the power of the states.

Over the past 40 years, while Republicans invested billions of dollars and focused energy

into building and holding state governing majorities, Democrats focus the majority of their

attention and money on national races.

And while we've spent a gross amount of time focusing on the federal government, which of course

we need to do, we are now seeing that the people who have arguably more power over our daily lives

are the people who run our states, and more specifically our state legislatures.

If you listened to last week's pod, you know that the 10th amendment,

the final amendment of the Bill of Rights, says that if it's not listed in the Constitution

as a federal power, or if it's not something the Constitution explicitly says the states can't do,

then whatever it is is up to the states, which gives state leadership an almost infinite

amount of things they have control over.

So the Republicans, knowing they were losing the majority will of the people around the country,

and that their policies and positions were no longer popular, made the strategic choice,

along with their donors and backers, to target their attention on the states and the courts,

where they had a better chance of dictating their will onto the people without necessarily having

the majority support of those same people. You only have to look around the country right now

...