Politico reports:
Barack Obama has spent well over $1 billion on his political campaigns, but it’s the $20 million to $30 million Democrats didn’t shell out three years ago that is costing the White House as he slogs through the first six months of his second term.
The GOP’s wildly successful, low-key and stunningly cheap campaign to seize state capitals in 2010 has come back to haunt Obama and his fellow Democrats. It’s now clear that the party’s loss of 20 state legislative chambers and critical Midwestern governorships represents an ongoing threat every bit as dangerous as the more publicized Republican takeback of the House that same year.
There was no stopping the GOP wave that year — but strategists in both parties say Obama’s team might have blunted it if they had somehow managed to cut into the GOP’s cash advantage — $30 million to the Democrats’ $10 million — in statehouse races by making campaigns at the very bottom of the ballot a priority.
There's more:
The effort, Pro Publica estimated, allowed Republican mapmakers to redraw the lines in “four times as manycongressional districts as Democrats,” consolidating the gains of the 2010 congressional elections and creating the firewall of safe GOP seats that has so bedeviled Obama.
An article well worth your time.
