From The Wall Street Journal:

In their quest for these prizes, Republicans are bringing significant resources to the table. Ed Gillespie, a former national party chairman, this year is running the Republican State Leadership Committee, an organization devoted to electing state officials. He says the committee has assembled 85,000 individual donors and will bring $18 million to state-level battles, including many in the upper Midwest.

If Republicans succeed in taking most of those targets, they will be re-establishing a beachhead that was crucial to the party and its national policy thinking in the 1990s. So, yes, there are sexy governor and Senate races under way in California, and Tuesday’s primaries in Colorado have big national significance. But ground zero in 2010 may well lie in the decidedly less sexy Rust Belt.

The significance of this battle is partly political. State leaders will redraw congressional districts after the 2010 elections, and, obviously, Republican leaders would make that process more favorable to their party. In addition, the states of the upper Midwest, though their populations have declined, remain crucial in presidential politics, and Republican governors might help deliver those states for a GOP nominee in 2012 (though, as Republicans found when President Bill Clinton won re-election easily in 1996, their ability to do so is limited).

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