I, for one, hope Anymouse doesn’t flounce. I have family in Nebraska, albeit way at the other end of I-80 from him, and they’re good people who are fighting hard to make the state a better place for all of us.

We have 2020 bearing down on us faster than most of us realize. We have seen, beyond a doubt, what a lack of focus on state-level races in the 2006-2010 cycle meant when it came time to redistrict after the 2010 Census. If we’d worked harder to keep Dems in the governor’s mansions and legislatures of WI and NC, I have no doubt - ZERO - that those heinous voter suppression efforts would have been thwarted, those EVs would be Democratic and we’d be having a totally different set of conversations now.

This is also the biggest argument there is against third-party efforts. It’s a question Johnson and Stein supporters have trouble answering - if your candidate gets the White House, who will they have on their side to work with in Congress and the statehouses? I’d have so much more respect for Libertarians and Greens if they started with local races and worked up instead of trying to start from the top and work down.

So I’m with Anymouse, in principle at least, that there has to be some better national effort out there to make sure there’s some sort of Democratic presence in as many jurisdictions as possible. You never know when a random R candidate in some deep-red House district is going to implode during the campaign and present an unexpected pickup opportunity.

Yes, resources are limited (which, on the other side, is why the New York GOP was almost a non-presence in my blue upstate county in races that were hopeless for them, like Schumer’s). I’d sure as hell give more to a DNC that’s out there fighting harder to get more Dems in a big tent. Even - especially - if it means we end up with more Manchins and Heitkamps who are at least on our side when voting for majority leaders and running committees. And especially in the statehouses that Democrats seem to be rapidly surrendering. Imagine what the NC House districts will look like in 2022. Or FL. Or MI. Or…