Daniel Squadron says Democrats ignored state governments at their peril

Daniel Squadron’s new book, released June 9, argues that Democrats have treated state governments as an afterthought while Republicans used state legislatures to shape abortion access, voting rules, climate policy and redistricting. Squadron, a former New York State senator, discussed that argument on CBS News’ The Takeout with Major Garrett.

The book, The Fourth Branch: How State Government Can Save Our Union, comes from Zando and runs 304 pages. Squadron represented parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan in the New York State Senate from 2009 to 2017, then resigned in August 2017 to focus on helping Democrats in state-level races. He later became a co-founder of The States Project, a Democratic-aligned group aimed at winning governing majorities in state legislatures.

The scale of that battleground is large. The National Conference of State Legislatures says there are 99 state legislative chambers and 7,386 seats nationwide. In 2024, voters in 44 states chose 5,808 state legislators, and Democrats lost trifectas in Michigan and Minnesota while Republicans kept their 23 trifectas. By 2026, Republicans controlled 28 state legislatures, Democrats held 18, and four were split.

That partisan map matters because statehouses decide more than local budgets. They are often where fights over abortion, gun control, minimum wage, paid family leave, criminal justice, climate policy and election rules are settled, sometimes long before Congress acts. The current redistricting fight has made that power even more visible, with state legislatures at the center of debates over congressional maps and control of the U.S. House.

Democrats have begun to respond with a more aggressive state-level strategy. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee has said the party has a chance to flip more than 650 state legislative seats, part of a multicycle push it has described as a $50 million effort to expand its power in the states. Squadron’s book lands in the middle of that campaign, framing state politics not as a sideshow to Washington, but as one of the main arenas where national policy is now made.