Secretary of state—as in of the individual states, not the member of the president’s Cabinet—is one of those offices that doesn’t get a lot of attention until things go really wrong for voters. But since making things go really wrong for voters of color and young voters and low-income voters is a top Republican priority on Election Day, secretaries of state have been getting a little more attention lately. Democrats flipped three states in 2018, and now they’re focusing on winning five more in 2020.
The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State is targeting Republican-held seats in Missouri, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and West Virginia in 2020, and working to hold Kentucky in 2019 and North Carolina and Vermont in 2020. Mississippi and Louisiana are also up in 2019 and the organization will support Democrats there.
“The threat is real. Republican secretaries of state are helping Trump wage a Jim Crow-style assault on our voting rights,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla says in a launch video for the campaign. The video concludes “We’re launching a campaign to flip secretary of state offices and restore the right to vote. Let’s get Jim Crow back into the history books and out of our elections.”