For the last thirty-five years, state-level elections, governments, and struggles have been the building block for the right-wing, white-nationalist power grab that has become Trump and Trumpism. States in most cases dominate local governments through “preemption” laws that preempt or overturn attempts at home rule or in some states through the Dillon Rule, which reserves all power to the state. Most states control significant budgets while local budgets in all but the largest cities are too small for large-scale change.

Importantly, states draw the lines for congressional seats. In states from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, Republican control of redistricting has resulted in the flipping of dozens of seats over the last decade; particularly egregious examples of this are included in David Daley’s Ratf**cked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count. State power is critically important by itself, and it is reflected and magnified at the national or federal electoral level.

Power, particularly power within different scales of government, is fluid. Capital and its minions can and often do move swiftly to shift power when working people, people of color, and radical popular initiatives take control. For example, New York City power was subverted until recently by state-level government which limited rent control. At other times, national initiatives (such as Obamacare) are challenged and restricted by states’ rights. Further back, Progressive-era movements for municipal improvements — labeled “sewer socialism” — were stymied as they fought for more transformative change. Or look at Trump’s creative (and destructive) usurpation of federal executive power via tariffs, declared emergencies, and the arbitrary physical relocation of entire federal departments.

For these reasons, we agree strongly with the strategic orientation laid out by Eric Blanc and Puya Gerami in their Jacobin article, “The Left Needs a Statewide Strategy.” We need to hone in on state struggle while also acknowledging that the deck is stacked. At times, when we are most successful, it is even reshuffled.

Over the past ten years or so, a movement of grassroots state power building independent political organizations (IPOs) has grown. These efforts have been led by people of color, women, and leftists who cut their teeth in local community organizing and early on recognized the strategic imperative of building left-oriented state-based power as a counter to both corporate and far-right agendas. For the most part, these organizations grew in the vacuum created by the collapse of ACORN and the capture of the Democratic Party by neoliberals and campaign consultants, whose fixation on “triangulation” led to a focus on a narrow sliver of the electorate: suburban swing voters.

To leverage the experience of this wing of the movement, we built the State Power Caucus as a peer-to-peer space for almost three dozen self-identified state power organizations, from states as diverse as New York, California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and Texas.

Drawing lessons directly from this experience, we argue that there are three specific state-based strategies that organizers and activists should pursue.