In 2022, Bobbi Boudman ran for a New Hampshire state house seat in Carroll County. She lost by 12.5 points.
In 2024, she ran again. She lost by 13.7 points – an even larger margin than the first time.
Most people would have stopped.
But Bobbi didn’t stop. She kept organizing, kept showing up, kept building relationships in Wolfeboro and Ossipee and Tuftonboro – in a district that Donald Trump carried by 9 points, in a county where a seven-term Republican incumbent had never really had to break a sweat.
She didn’t even have a trendline to point to or a “we’re closing the gap” narrative to sustain her. Just had the conviction that the work mattered, even when the scoreboard didn’t show it.
And then, last fall, that incumbent packed up and moved to Texas.
The door opened.
And when it did, Bobbi Boudman was ready.
On a Tuesday in March, she won that seat – even though she was outspent five-to-one and running against a Republican backed by the former state Senate president. And just like that – seemingly out of the blue – Boudman secured the 28th Democratic state legislative flip since Trump returned to the White House.
But it was a result four years in the making.
We live in a world where three seconds is too long for a website to load. Where attention spans are measured in swipes and we’ve all been trained to expect immediate results or move on.
Democratic politics, by and large, has absorbed that lesson. Money chases flippable districts. Initiatives and organizations optimize for this cycle’s wins. Meanwhile, candidates like Boudman in deep-red areas struggle to get the resources to effectively organize their community.
That exposes a deeper problem – a sort of self-perpetuating cycle that we need to break free from.
When we don’t invest in a district, the candidate can’t run an effective campaign. When they can’t run an effective campaign, they lose – often badly. When they lose badly, the data reflects that. And when the data reflects that, nobody invests in the district.
Round and round and round we go, each cycle producing new evidence for the conclusion we’d already reached before it started.
When we wait for the data to change before we go in and push hard, we miss the fact that we can be part of the change. Districts change every cycle. Neighborhoods shift. New voters move in. Old assumptions lose their grip. The question isn’t whether change is happening – it’s whether Democrats are present to shape it, or absent while Republicans consolidate it.
Not every race needs the same level of investment. But too often Democrats look at a district’s partisan lean, see a number that doesn’t excite us, and decide to sit it out – as if the data is a fixed fact rather than a living thing that responds to what we do.
Because inactivity is activity. When we leave a district uncontested, we’re not being neutral. We’re actively deciding to cede the field. We’re telling voters there that nobody’s coming for them. We’re letting the Republican incumbent coast, unaccountable, unchallenged, year after year. And we’re making it that much harder for the data to trend in our direction – because you can’t build a trend you’re not participating in.
Bobbi Boudman wasn’t waiting for her district’s numbers to move before she decided it was worth fighting for. She was out there making her own conditions. And when circumstances finally shifted – when the incumbent moved away and the door cracked open – she was ready to push through it because she’d never stopped working.
That’s what it looks like when someone refuses to wait for permission, and just gets to work doing the thing and making a difference.
We appreciate that attitude at Every State Blue, because it’s who we are, too.
We fund Democratic nominees in the hardest places – the rural districts, the deeply red corners of the country where conventional wisdom says we shouldn’t bother. Most of them don’t win. That’s not the point.
The point is that they show up. They learn their districts. They knock on doors and introduce themselves to neighbors who’ve never had a Democrat campaign for their vote. They give people a choice and a voice. They make Republicans defend ground they assumed was free and spend money they thought they’d save.
And they build something that lasts – even when the results don’t show it yet.
And then sometimes, the incumbent moves away. Or a wave builds. Or the moment arrives. And the candidate who’s been quietly, stubbornly, consistently showing up is suddenly positioned to win a race that used to look unwinnable.
That’s not luck, or winning a race out of the blue. It’s the final payoff of years of steady, sweaty, very unglamorous work.
Bobbi Boudman knows it. Every State Blue believes it.
And we act on it.
Run everywhere. And keep coming back.
Every State Blue crowdfunds support for underfunded Democratic nominees running in some of the reddest places in America. With state projects in Ohio, Missouri, and Tennessee (and an upcoming special project we think you’ll love!), we’re redefining what it means for Democrats to run everywhere. Join Blue Ohio here. Join Blue Missouri here. Join Blue Tennessee here. Or support Every State Blue’s mission here.
