An obscure nonprofit credited with helping liberal candidates win low-profile but crucial races for state legislative and school board seats is expanding to three new states, potentially providing a boost for Democrats seeking to capitalize on President Donald Trump’s unpopularity in this year’s midterm elections.

The Pipeline Fund, which trains and supports state and local candidates, is launching chapters in Tennessee, Nebraska and Minnesota. A spinoff of the massive liberal nonprofit 1630 Fund, the group launched in 2020, aiming to help organize a mishmash of groups focused on training liberal-leaning people to run for office.

Already active in 14 other states, the fund’s growth is a testament to Democrats’ renewed focus on building state and local power to combat Trump — something that’s been on display in a host of special elections this cycle where Democrats have either wildly outperformed the 2024 elections or flipped GOP-held seats. It also hopefully has longer-term benefits, setting up candidates to run for higher office in the future.

“For the first time, for as long as I’ve been in politics, folks are really understanding that we can’t just think about these federal races,” Denise Feriozzi, the group’s co-founder and executive director, said in an interview with HuffPost. “We have to think about this long-term infrastructure that’s going to get great leaders to run, help them learn what it takes to govern successfully and then move them up to higher office.”

The group’s highest-profile success so far came in Florida, where its state affiliate recruited and trained school board candidates to combat a Moms for Liberty-led conservative takeover of school boards there. But it’s also proven instrumental in efforts to win and hold state legislative chambers in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Its efforts in the Keystone State are seen as a model: A group it funds there, LEAD PA, has nearly quadrupled its budget and helped to recruit or train six state legislative candidates who have flipped GOP-held seats.

In Minnesota, it hopes to have a similar impact ahead of elections where Democrats hope to regain total control of state government in the aftermath of ICE’s violent immigration raids in the state earlier this year. ICE’s invasion of the state has led to a spike in candidates interested in running for office, the group said.

“When our communities are under threat, people don’t retreat. We organize,” said Wintana Melekin, the executive director of Groundwork Action, the newly formed group in Minnesota. “We’re ready to channel that energy into building the kind of durable political power that lasts well beyond any single election cycle.”

In Tennessee, the new chapter will focus on recruiting and training candidates to help break the Republican supermajority in the state legislature, while the Nebraska chapter will focus on races in the state’s fastest-growing rural counties.

Right now, though, the Pipeline Fund’s efforts face a new challenge: worries about candidate security. Convincing candidates to sign up, knowing they will almost certainly face death threats, has become more of a challenge than ever.

“It’s not easy to get candidates to run right now,” Feriozzi said. “The environment we’re seeing is not great — the safety and security threats are real, and so the work it actually takes to convince someone to run is hard.”

The Pipeline Fund worked with a host of existing Democratic and liberal groups, including Run for Something, EMILY’s List, Latino Victory Fund and the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund. All of them have helped convince a donor class often focused on cutting multimillion-dollar checks to super PACs to pay attention to smaller races.

“There’s hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on federal races. We’re using a lot less money,” Feriozzi said. “For state senate and school board, a small amount of money can have a really big impact when you find good candidates.”

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