This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday. It’s easy to reduce the stakes for any Election Day to the White House race. It feeds a billion-dollar campaign industry, draws the biggest headlines and turns even the most benign of venues, such as front lawns, into public squares for political signalling — and that’s during normal times without this year’s urgencies of pandemic, recession and racial reckoning. But the vast majority of contests underway right now are at the state and local level.