The "seismic" change that could upend the 2026 map

To hear Leslie Martes tell it, the Democratic Party “continues to get beaten over the head” with the significance of state legislatures.

Martes is the CEO of Forward Majority, a Democratic super PAC focused on state legislatures. Her group, which bills itself as the party’s primary outside group involved in legislative elections, is gearing up to spend $30 million on the 2026 cycle, and, in a notable shift in strategy, has a more narrow focus this year. I recently spoke with her about the group’s strategy this year, the growing parallels to the 2006 cycle, and the big stakes for one potential 2028 candidate.

The 2026 battle
This year, Forward Majority is relying on a model it says equips it to spend money in the most efficient way possible, specifically by flipping chambers and achieving unified Democratic control in key swing states: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In an era in which groups can now easily raise and spend millions of dollars on campaigns, Forward Majority’s approach is intriguing. Rather than an “everywhere, all-the-time” approach favored by some Democrats, the group is betting on success in the most competitive parts of the country.

Forward Majority readily points to the now-permanent battle over redistricting as a prime motivator, noting the outsized effect that state control now has on the national House map.  “People are starting to realize that the path to 270, the path to holding the House and a durable Democratic majority, it runs through the states,” Martes told me. She pointed to Arizona as an example of boundaries having long-term effects. “These maps really matter,” she said. “The demographics [in the state] are really shifting in our favor, but the maps are what are holding us back.”

But the success of Forward Majority, and other groups like it, this year has even bigger implications for the party’s narrative going into 2028. As I’ve written before: since Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016, Democrats have achieved unified control in only one state that voted for him — Michigan, from 2022-2024. The 2026 cycle offers a prime opportunity to reset the modern landscape. A successful reset could look awfully like 2006, the last midterm cycle under a second-term Republican president and the last midterm cycle in which Democrats won a majority of state legislative chambers and governorships nationwide. “I want it to be 2006, and I believe it is 2006. I believe there's 2006 energy out there,” Martes said.  

The “seismic” change
The backdrop for the group’s 2026 efforts is 2022, a cycle in which Democrats not only barely lost state legislative seats (a mere nine nationwide) but picked up a net number of legislative chambers. That outcome was unheard of for Democrats in a modern midterm cycle  — the party lost hundreds of seats in the Obama midterms of 2010 and 2014 — and surprised even most Democratic operatives. To Martes, it represented a “seismic” shift in the group’s assessment of what was possible in a midterm cycle.