The Enduring Republican Grip on State Legislatures

Democrats lost more than a governorship in this month’s election, which cemented the party’s status as a persistent loser in state legislative elections.

The headline story in Virginia was the defeat of former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe by Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin, but Republicans also gained control of the House of Delegates, the lower house of the Virginia Legislature.

With the Virginia victory, Republicans control 62 of the nation’s 98 partisan legislative chambers compared to 36 for the Democrats. (Nebraska has a unicameral legislature that is nominally nonpartisan.)

The GOP victory in Virginia was notable because the Old Dominion had become reliably Democratic in national elections. President Joe Biden carried Virginia by 10 percentage points when he defeated Donald Trump in 2020, and Hillary Clinton also won the state in her unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign.

While winning the presidency last year, Democrats faltered in the undercard, losing 13 House seats and both houses of the New Hampshire legislature.

That trend is likely to continue, said political scientist Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

“There’s almost no chance Democrats will make progress in controlling legislative chambers while a Democrat is in the White House,” Sabato told State Net Capitol Journal. “And even when a controversial unpopular president such as Trump gives an opening to Democrats as in 2020, Democrats can’t seem to capitalize on it.”

As Democrats were losing in Virginia, incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy squeaked to victory in New Jersey in a race he had led by double digits in the polls.

New Jersey Republicans appear to have gained four seats in the Democratic-held Assembly. In the most stunning result of the election, New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney was defeated by obscure Republican challenger Edward Durr, an underfunded commercial truck driver whose campaign photo was a selfie.

Are VA and NJ First Signs of 2022 Red Wave?

Evaluating the New Jersey and Virginia elections and scattered down-ballot races in several states, analyst Nathaniel Rakich said on the 538 website that the 2021 results could presage a “red wave” in the 2022 midterm elections.

Such a wave would give the GOP control of Congress, now narrowly held by the Democrats, and provide Republicans an opportunity to win additional Democratic-held state legislative chambers such as the Colorado and Nevada senates and the Minnesota house.

David Wasserman, who analyzes House elections for the Cook Political Report, said this year’s elections viewed through a historical lens “portend a potential down-ballot calamity for Democrats in 2022.”

Discussing the context of the election, Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll, cited the “overall dour mood of the country.”

One key indicator is presidential job approval, which Newport said “serves as a broad indicator of overall party sentiment.”  Biden’s third quarter approval rating of 45 percent in Gallup polling was the lowest of any elected president since World War II except for Donald Trump, Newport noted.

Local issues also mattered. The teaching of racial history was an issue in Virginia; high property taxes may have hurt Murphy in New Jersey.

McAuliffe attempted unsuccessfully to make the Virginia governor’s race a referendum on Trump.

Whatever the combination of issues and attitudes motivating them, Republican voters went to the polls in greater numbers than their Democratic counterparts.

In Virginia, Democratic turnout surged in suburban Fairfax County in and in Black precincts and college towns across the state, but this was more than offset by record Republican turnout in rural and outer suburban counties.

The Virginia results shattered a long-standing myth that heavy turnout invariably favors Democrats.

“Higher turnout among Democrats increases our chances of winning,” Democratic fundraiser Guy Cecil told The Washington Post after the election. “Higher turnout overall does not do that.”

The Obama Effect Boosts GOP Statehouses

Republican dominance of state legislatures is a relatively recent phenomenon. As late as 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, Democrats controlled 17 state legislatures, Republicans nine and 23 were divided with each party controlling one chamber.

This changed dramatically in 2010, the first midterm election of the Obama years.

That year Republicans succeeded in demonizing the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, before its major provisions had taken effect. At the same time the Republican Party invested heavily in state legislative races at a time this was not a priority of the Obama administration.

The result was a GOP landslide that still reverberates in the corridors of the nation’s statehouses.

The 2010 election gave Republicans control of 53 percent of the nation’s legislative seats, the most they had won since 1928, and 54 legislative chambers, the most they had won since 1952.

As a result of these victories, which coincided with the 2010 Census, Republicans were able to shape state legislative redistricting in many states in 2011.

The Republican payoff was greatest in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, which except for a brief period of Reconstruction were governed by Democratic segregationists who suppressed Black voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

That law had a profound effect: for instance, it increased Black voting in Mississippi from 6.7 percent in 1965 to 59.8 percent in 1967.

As a majority of Blacks voted for Democrats, southern whites increasingly voted for Republicans in national elections.

Beginning in 1972, when President Richard Nixon carried every southern state, Republican presidential candidates won and usually swept the South except for 1976 when former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter was the Democratic nominee.

But Republican victories came slower in Southern congressional races and slower still in state legislative races.

In 1990, the GOP held no legislative chambers in the South -and only 26 percent of legislative seats in the region. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled 18 of the 22 southern legislative chambers. They control them all today.

It wasn’t just the South that went Republican in that transformative 2010 election.

Democrats lost state legislative majorities in the 11-state Midwest region in 2010 and have never regained them.

Today, Republicans control 19 of the 22 legislative chambers in the Midwest, with the Democrats holding only the Minnesota House and both Illinois chambers.

In the U.S. system of winner-take-all elections, incumbency tends to feed on itself, as incumbents tend to be better financed than their challengers.

Is Nationalizing Politics Killing the Middle Ground?

The most significant feature of current American politics is a hyper-partisanship that has produced what Louis Jacobson calls the “nationalization of politics.”

Once upon a time, significant numbers of American voters split their tickets, producing a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives throughout the administrations of Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Now, most Americans vote for all the candidates of one or the other party, observes Jacobson, the senior author of the Almanac of American Politics who has been handicapping state legislative control since 2002.

Extreme partisanship has hollowed out the center ground in American politics.

While Republicans have deepened their control elsewhere, Democrats have increased their majorities in coastal America. In California, for instance, Democrats have super-majorities in both legislative houses.

But it’s a changing world and a year until the midterm elections.

Since this month’s elections, Covid-19 cases have declined in many states, and Congress has passed a massive bipartisan infrastructure bill certain to produce thousands of new jobs.

Richard Harwood, the editor who hired me in 1972 at The Washington Post, liked to say that twenty-four hours is a long time in the life of a politician.

Eying Republican dominance in the nation’s statehouses, Democrats can only hope that is true.

-- By Lou Cannon

GOP Extends Lead in Partisan Control of State Legislatures

After picking up control of Virginia’s House of Delegates in the Nov. 2 elections, Republicans now control both chambers of 30 of the nation’s 49 partisan legislatures (Nebraska’s unicameral legislature is nominally nonpartisan), Democrats control both chambers in 17 states, and two legislatures are split between the parties.