Exclusive: Why Sarah Jessica Parker Wants You To Vote In The Midterms

Sarah Jessica Parker grew up in a politically-minded family in Ohio, where she saw how community organizing could create real change in people’s lives. Now, ahead of the midterm elections in November, she wrote the foreword to former New York state senator Daniel Squadron’s new book, The Fourth Branch: How State Government Can Save Our Union (out June 9). In this exclusive excerpt, Parker shares her personal connection to local politics.

I didn’t come from very much. But one thing my family always had was a sense of obligation to the broader community. Before my siblings and I could understand the political complexity of things, we were involved in local organizing.

Sometimes it was awkward: wearing a sandwich board marching for affordable housing in front of the local fast-food franchise as my classmates’ families ate inside, or fashioning one of my father’s black socks into an armband to wear to school in solidarity with political prisoners.

Just like with reading, as I got older, I began to form my own opinions. I knew that the government could be my ally, but citizens had to rally to make change. Today I have a bigger platform and more resources. But I still have an obligation to stand up for what’s right, just as I would if I were a server or a nurse, a plumber or an architect.

I like to be informed. And if I can be of service, I’ll help in any way I can.

I think that’s why my dear friend J. Smith Cameron brought up The States Project to me. I had a vague sense of it as an effort focused on local politics. As J. described how she’d started a States Project Giving Circle, it started to become clearer.

When I heard Daniel Squadron explain the power of states, the tectonic plates of my world shifted. He described how power flows from statehouses to people’s lives, and how little attention most people pay to this level of politics—or the change they can make there. Just a small group of neighbors meeting in a living room could help state lawmakers win elections and improve people’s lives.

Once you connect what’s happening in the country’s fifty statehouses to what’s happening across our country, you realize where real change actually starts. As Daniel describes, states pass the laws that go before the Supreme Court, and many candidates who run for national office get their start in state legislatures. But even the laws that never get to the Supreme Court and the elected officials who will never run for national office have a profound impact on people’s lives in Iowa or Michigan, Nevada or Ohio, where I grew up. Every day they’re considering the issues I care most about—literacy and book bans, equal opportunity and reproductive health care, living wages and gun violence. These laws should matter to all of us, because people in every state are part of our country’s civic fabric.

And just like that, after hearing Daniel, I became as clear as I ever have been about the best action I could take to have a positive impact.

It’s the same goal that inspired my mother to slip a sandwich board over her young kids’ shoulders and help us turn a sock into an armband. She was doing what she could to win better schools and more affordable housing in our community, to raise our neighbors’ consciousness about the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa.

The Fourth Branch will help us all do what we can with more clarity and impact. By explaining how power works in our country and how we can be most effective, this book gives us a road map to improving America on every level, from our local community to our nation as a whole.

— Sarah Jessica Parker

Foreword by Sarah Jessica Parker to The Fourth Branch: How State Government Can Save Our Union, by Daniel Squadron. Copyright (c) 2026 by Daniel Squadron. Reprinted by permission of Zando, LLC.