I’ve written a piece for Boston Review about what seems like the millionth progressive effort to make headway in state and local politics:

[T]he Democracy Alliance, a “cadre of wealthy liberal donors” co-founded by George Soros, “aims to pour tens of millions of dollars into rebuilding the left’s political might in the states, racing to catch up with a decades-old conservative effort that has reshaped statehouses across the country.”

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because liberals make similar noises after every Democratic debacle—Bush’s “permanent Republican majority,” the “shellacking” of 2010, and now the disastrous 2014 midterms…So why weren’t calls for progressives to make a concerted effort in state and local politics heeded the first time, or the second?

In just a decade or so of political awareness, I can’t count how many times I’ve been in a progressive strategy session where somebody says “You know, the conservative movement took power by winning elections from the school board level on up, and we need to imitate them.” Everybody always nods sagely, but nothing seems to change. I’m sure there are groups out there doing great work in the states right now (including some of the Democracy Alliance’s grantees), but the priorities and incentives of the progressive movement as a whole are still basically the same.

Relatedly, Politico says that Hillary Clinton plans to “fix the party infrastructure that withered under President Obama” by doing…something. The story quotes local Democratic officials vouching for her commitment to “local organizing,” but as I wrote last month, Obama’s commitment to local organizing was quite sincere and effective, at least in the short run. What will Hillary do differently to sustain it after next November?