‘game Changer’: Democratic Attorneys General Just Took Texas Off The Board

The Democratic Party’s historic midterm rout came with a special bonus for state attorneys general. Not only did Democrats capture five Republican-held state AG offices, strengthening the party’s hand in legal and policy battles to come over AI, voting rights, energy, health care and corporate power — they unexpectedly seized one of the most powerful AG offices in the country by winning in Texas.

“We took the head of the snake,” Sean Rankin, president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, said in an interview.

Soon-to-be-former Texas attorney general and culture warrior Ken Paxton had used the office to aggressively challenge everything from environmental regulations and gay and transgender rights to the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 win in battleground states. The Texas AG’s office has also long used the litigation pipeline to the conservative Fifth Circuit U.S. court of appeals to challenge Democratic presidents’ priorities.

“There will be a change in how the Republican attorneys general have to engage nationally if they do not have Texas at the front,” Rankin said. “Having Texas not on the other side, that's a game changer.”

Rankin, a longtime Democratic operative who’s run DAGA for a decade, was at the heart of a multi-year effort to recruit and support the AG candidates who ultimately defended hard-fought seats in Minnesota and Michigan and flipped them in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas and Georgia, where rising star Tanya Miller could turn the office into a major regional presence. After donors put nearly $58 million into DAGA’s push this year, Democrats will control at least 29 state AG offices, plus the District of Columbia; and if Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins wins the governorship in Alaska, one of a handful of states where AGs are appointed, expect one more.

Rankin spoke with POLITICO Magazine about what those wins mean for 2028, the sea change in Texas, the complexity of the data center issue and how he views “the one that slipped away,” when hotshot Florida Republican James Uthmeier won a tight state AG race in the rare GOP bright spot of the night.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Democrats picked up all the AG seats you wanted to pick up — except Florida — and you held some of the tighter seats, like Michigan, that that you needed to hold. What do you think worked for you beyond the broader “wave” dynamic?

Well, Democratic AGs won big across the board. What worked really well for us in our target states is that we controlled the things that we had the power to manage. We had very well-run campaigns. We had strong fundraising. That's both at the campaign level and here on the committee. This was our biggest fundraising haul ever. It's still continuing. We still have funds rolling in and will for the next 60 days.

So we were able to deploy resources and make sure that we were investing in our protection states first, and then our expansion states. Every time we saw something new, we really evaluated if we were ready to move in, and I think we were judicious in it. I think that's really the takeaway from this cycle for us, is that we were very careful and thoughtful about getting things together, working with candidates quite early to get them moving. And then because we had done our jobs, it gave us the room to be opportunistic when the landscape told us that we had additional states.

We started out with seven states, and we were truly committed to those seven. Expanded to eight before we knew it. Expanded to 12, and we were competitive in those 12. The one that slipped away just by less than two points was Florida, but it was a very competitive race, and José Javier Rodríguez overperformed the rest of the ticket.

OK, two follow-up questions on those pieces, starting with the early work you did with the candidates. What does the candidate recruitment process look like for AGs?

Let me help you to look ahead: We've been speaking with potential candidates running for election in Pennsylvania for six months to a year, so we are already making sure that we're going to be competitive in ‘27 and ‘28. While we may have had an election last night, we have elections every year, so we have to be looking to what's next very quickly.

I think I met Nate Willems [of Iowa] nearly two years ago. I think when it came to Chris Mann [of Kansas], obviously he had run four years ago. It was a very different map in 2022, and Kansas was just beyond our reach, but we sat down 18 months ago and talked. And I said, “I really want you to run. I'm completely behind you in Kansas. I want this for you, for the state of Kansas. I think we can get there because the underlying fundamentals of running against [current Kansas AG] Kris Kobach were so attractive, especially with the wind at our back.” We said quite early, this is what we need to build, and he was a great partner in building that with us.

Were there any states that you thought were long-shot pickups that you considered, and then, in the spirit of judiciousness, you decided against?

I think part of it was timing. At the end, the most finite resource is time, not money. We had money that was coming in. We didn't have time to turn everything around. In Florida, for example, Florida got built almost overnight. I wish I would have had a little bit longer with Florida. I wish I would have actually had a little bit longer with Texas and Ohio, quite frankly, just seeing how things were changing and the dynamics were improving. We have to make decisions based upon incomplete information, not all the resources we'd like, and certainly not all the time.

It also helps we have great candidates. Tanya Miller [from Georgia] is a star, right? She is every bit as dynamic in person as she seems when she's on video, she's incredible. She's going to do a fantastic job of resetting that office and making a difference for constituents.

And I'll say this on Texas, we took the head of the snake. So fundamentally, there will be a change in how the Republican attorneys general have to engage nationally if they do not have Texas at the front. That is a fantastic and noteworthy change that people should understand, because Texas has played an outsized role in the actions taken, in my opinion, against many of the issues that I care about, that the AGs fight for, that we believe the American people support — having Texas not on the other side, that's a game changer.

Can you give an example of how that could play out?

Well, how about this? In 2020, when it came to election protection, it was Ken Paxton who was pushing this effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn the presidential election results in four of our states, in the battleground states.

But as we look ahead to 2028, the fact that Democratic attorneys general are in, I believe, all but one now of the battleground states, with Pennsylvania being the outlier, we can guarantee that there will be free, fair and secure elections in the presidential contest.

That matters, and the fact that we have the AG's spot in Texas means that the other side will not have the resources to wage a campaign, which we felt was outside of the rule of law and did not stand up, which is why Paxton's suit was thrown out. But that's a lot of resources in that office, and to have that office come to us means that it will be managed fairly. It will not be managed politically. It will do its job and it will take care of the constituents in Texas. And that's a change.

Are there ways this election changes sort of the coalition dynamics, whether it's the Democratic and Republican AG coalitions or the bipartisan coalitions that come together sometimes?

In 2018 we had 12 new AGs that came into the room from that election. This time we have 10, and then depending upon what happens with Alaska and this verification there — the AG in Alaska is appointed by the governor — we could have 11 new Democratic attorneys general.

We're going to miss some people who are moving on. I'm very excited about Aaron Ford winning the governorship in Nevada last night, and Phil Weiser in Colorado, as well as [former California AG] Xavier Becerra in California. Three recent Democratic attorneys general, that puts nine that we've seen go up to the governor's table in a very short period of time. So we're really seeing the bench of the party being built out and worked through the leadership that we've got. This is a proving ground for your ability to run for a different office and to become prominent nationally.

One issue you’ve been seeing AGs make a lot of noise on — to a certain extent in both parties — is AI, data centers and everything that surrounds them. Those were big issues obviously in Georgia and Texas. How do you see this new class tackling those issues, which were so resonant with a lot of voters?

I think data centers are tough issues. On the one hand, you see [economic] development. On the other hand, we’re all using tools that are requiring more computing power, but then the question is, how does that actually work in a particular state in a local environment? What's the water need coolant, what's the energy need for managing that, and who pays for it?

I think Dana Nessel has been at the forefront of pushing on this in Michigan. I think the transparency is very much needed, and I think as long as things are actually happening in sunlight with the light of day, I think it's a lot easier for AGs to work with corporate partners, because we do believe in the role that they play in the community in providing jobs. These are going to be complicated issues for the next few years. I think that there will be a fair look at solving these problems by attorneys general, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, in fact.

So as you headed into election night, what were your biggest fears? What were you worried could go wrong after such a carefully thought-out campaign?

Well, that we were wrong — that the assumptions we made were just simply wrong. People talk about blaming polling. My experience with polling is it's really just based upon the assumptions you make. It's not really based upon math.

What about Texas? I didn't think we were going to have an outcome in Texas that looked like that. In some ways, the biggest challenge was were the numbers really going to be that good? And if they did, should my math have changed? Should my map have changed even more dynamically than it did. I guess my biggest fear would have been if it's going to be as good as everybody thinks it is, am I leaving something on the table because I didn't stretch far enough?

Today, I look at Florida and I say, “I don't know, would an extra million dollars have made a difference in Florida?” It's hard to tell, a state that big. But did I really need to spend X in one state when I could have spent 2X in another state to help us get that much further? I think that's the biggest challenge.

Was there anything from the last 10 years or the last several cycles that informed the strategy that you just described? Were there mistakes, things that went wrong before, that informed the way you went about it this time?

Yeah. So in in 2022, when the wind was against us in the Biden midterm, it was damn hard, and we did not have the fundraising success. We were successful, but not having this level of fundraising success. And we had seven incumbents to protect, and it was a tough map for us. We lost Iowa by about 20,000 votes. We ended up picking up Arizona by 280 votes. We fought like hell to make sure that we could actually stay in place. That was not a happy moment.

At the end of that cycle, we looked at it and said, honestly, all of our candidates were not as prepared as they needed to be. We need to make sure that we actually have a plan. We did the work, so by the time we rolled into November of last year, we were fairly formidable. We knew what we were doing. And it was because of the challenges in 2022. I did not want to feel the same way I did four years ago after the election. You know, in that cycle, that sucked.