The race to Gerrymander: Democrats have a parallel campaign to win the House. It starts in the states.

• Author: Morris, Rachel

On a flesh Saturday morning in early September, about 15 people gather in an office in a rundown mall in Monroe, Mich., to campaign for Bob Schockman, a first-time Democratic candidate for the state Senate. Monroe is a small city of about 22,000 people 40 miles from Detroit. That day, the city's paper notes that the county's income growth is the third slowest in the nation; "for sale" and foreclosure signs are more evident in the yards of Monroe's modest houses than placards for either political party.

Schockman is tall and gangly with thinning iron grey hair and bright eyes. He has an irrepressible enthusiasm for solving local problems, which include vanishing auto jobs and trash shipped into the area from Canada for 21 cents a ton. He has arrived at his candidacy the old-fashioned way, by moving up through a series of local offices won with do-it-yourself campaigns. Schockman tells me that when he ran for his current job, which is clerk of the nearby settlement of Bedford, he knocked on every door in town. But the operation that revolves around his Senate run has a decidedly professional quality. On this day, Schockman is accompanied by his wife Joan, a field organizer called Patrick, and State Sen. Mark Schauer, Michigan's Democratic Senate floor leader. The lean, tanned Schauer has the brisk air of a practiced politician; he wears a crisp white shirt and an electronic organizer is clipped to his tan trousers.

We drive to a quiet residential street, and Patrick hands out Palm Pilots connected to an online voter database. The database has selected the addresses of people who don't support the same party every election, and Democratic-inclined people who don't always vote. Patrick calls these "persuasion doors." Schockman lets Joan take care of the Palm Pilot and sets off energetically. "I just love doing this," he tells me.

Meanwhile, on one side of the street, Schauer moves from house to house with impressive efficiency. He makes a genial introduction ("I'm walkin' for Bob Schockman"), and quickly establishes how the person intends to vote, if he or she has a spouse, and whether the spouse plans to vote the same way. He briefly pitches Schockman, plugs the Democrats higher up the ticket, and asks if he can put a sign for Schockman in the yard. Then he "codes" this information in the Palm Pilot and moves to the next door. Across the street, Schockman moves more slowly. He has a gentle, easy manner with the people he meets. At one house, he discovers that the woman who answers the door attended the same high school that he did; at another, he is enchanted by the Michigan Wolverines collar worn by the owner's dog, which becomes so excited at the attention that it urinates on the porch. Occasionally Schockman knocks on doors that aren't listed in the database. "I feel funny about leaving a house untouched," he admits. Sometimes, he becomes engrossed in conversations about the growing tendency of union members to vote Republican, or the University of Michigan football game that day that has been delayed by rain. At such moments, Schauer appears to gently nudge him along, after first inquiring whether the person has a spouse, and how they would feel about putting one of Schockman's signs in their yard.

It might seem unusual for a novice challenger like Schockman, whose opponent is very well-funded, to merit such professional backing. One explanation is that this November, Michigan Democrats hope to win six seats to control the state Senate for the first time in 20 years. More intriguingly, though, they also have an eye on redistricting. After the 2000 election, Michigan Republicans controlled all three branches of state government, and redrew congressional lines to give the GOP a 9-6 advantage in the delegation, although the state voted for the Democratic candidate in the last four presidential elections. Schauer aims to reverse that. He's thinking long-term, but if his party holds the governorship and wins the state house, he doesn't see any need to wait to revisit the electoral map. "If we have the kind of year that's possible," he said, "I don't have any qualms about making the case that Michigan's legislative and congressional seats are not in conformance with the balance of the state."

Michigan isn't the only place where state elections have become infused with national ambitions. Since June, when the U.S. Supreme Court largely upheld Tom DeLay's audacious mid-decade redistricting of Texas, many national Democrats have been turning their...