But they'll also stick to bread-and-butter issues such as crime and education. Both of those perennial topics are drawing a lot of attention right now, due to concerns about public safety as well as the continuing fallout to schools from the pandemic, including poor test scores and chronic absenteeism.
In addition, state lawmakers have grown more attentive to housing — traditionally more of a local concern — as affordability and supply have become serious problems seemingly everywhere.
Here's a quick rundown of what to expect on these issues in 2025. (You can find our coverage of all the major issues to watch this year on this page.)
Crime
Crime is down, especially homicide, but the public remains apprehensive. Last November, voters in Arizona and California voted in favor of ballot measures imposing longer sentences. California voters appeared partly motivated by signs of social instability, such as rising homelessness, visible drug use and retail stores keeping basic goods under lock and key, which made voters feel unsafe in their neighborhoods.
This has already triggered a number of states to pass stricter laws, with more expected to follow this year. “The issue for most people isn’t whether something is up or down by 10 percent. It’s that they are seeing randomness and brazenness, and getting a sense of lawlessness,” says Adam Gelb, president of the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. “Some of what we’re seeing is more like … shaving off the edges of some of the policies that felt too lenient.”
Polling does show people tend to support stiff punishments for those who commit serious crimes, but when asked how to spend a finite criminal justice budget, respondents tend to forgo long sentences in favor of interventions that can help prevent crime, like mental health and substance abuse treatment, or reduce crime, like police presence as a deterrent, says Kevin Ring, vice president of criminal justice advocacy at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic organization that funds research into criminal justice policy. “People are waking up to the idea that just because we're mad at somebody doesn't mean that they have to die in prison,” Ring says. “That's not a great return on investment.”
With New Mexico suffering an exceptionally high violent crime rate, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has been pushing for a slew of bills addressing crime, homelessness, mental health issues and drug overdoses. The bills, among other things, would allow people with diagnosed mental health disorders to be more easily held in jail or involuntarily committed and would up penalties for gun ownership among people with prior felony convictions. The measures failed to pass last year, but 2025 will see the governor and legislative supporters try again, this time with an omnibus bill. "We must confront the hard truth: Mentally ill or drug-addicted people living on the streets cannot be allowed to live that way indefinitely," Lujan Grisham said recently.
The new year brings into effect some new state laws aimed at easing incarcerated people’s re-entry to society. Illinois is ensuring anyone who was charged as a juvenile sees their records expunged two years after completing their sentences, while Missouri has increased the number of expungements a person can seek. Advocates in New York are expected to keep pushing this year for sentencing reforms they believe could reduce incarceration, prison violence and recidivism. But some observers expect these bills will be challenging to pass, with state Democrats divided over their criminal justice goals. — Jule Pattison-Gordon
Education
The movement for private school choice has been riding strong tailwinds since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Voters in three states rejected school choice ballot measures last November, but voucher supporters are largely unfazed. In the last two years alone, 11 states have adopted some sort of universal school voucher program.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott hopes to make Texas the biggest voucher state this year. He backed 15 successful primary challenges in state House races last year to make it happen. In Tennessee, Republicans are planning another push for a voucher program. A GOP-controlled Congress could consider a federal voucher program. And the Supreme Court may rule on a case from Oklahoma involving the use of public funds for religious schools, with potential implications for how far the voucher movement could reach.
Support for private school choice has grown in recent years, with parents unhappy about pandemic-era closures and test scores and chronic absenteeism remaining major problems. Incoming President Trump pledges to shut down the Education Department. While that still seems unlikely to happen, Project 2025, a governing platform prepared by the Heritage Foundation, calls for eliminating funding for Head Start and Title I support of low-income schools.
State legislatures will also weigh funding decisions for public schools against the backdrop of expiring federal emergency funds and drops in student enrollment, attributable partly to state efforts to promote vouchers.
Public schools will remain a major battleground in the culture wars, with school boards battling over transgender students’ rights, parental input into curriculum and controversy surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. This atmosphere has not helped with an ongoing shortage of teachers and other school workers, with particularly sharp declines in the number of Black teachers in K-12 schools. “It’s hard to be a teacher when your job is so politicized,” says Kate Callahan, director of Research for Action, an education nonprofit. — Jared Brey
David Kidd/Governing
Housing
With housing costs and a shortage of units remaining pressing issues all over the country, Democrats and Republicans in many jurisdictions have united around the idea of easing permitting requirements and other regulations as a way to promote more construction. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently created a “director of housing solutions” in his administration, and the state legislature is gearing up to consider a range of housing policies, including new state tax credits for affordable-housing construction. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek is also proposing a record $1.8 billion in spending on housing and homelessness in her next budget. New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte, who will be sworn in as governor on Jan. 8, describes her approach to housing as “build, baby, build.”
Many experiments are also playing out at the local level. Regulatory changes have sparked a wave of new accessory dwelling units in Los Angeles but haven’t lowered housing costs much overall. By contrast, there’s some evidence to suggest that a building boom in Austin, Texas, has helped slow the increase in rent. Several cities and states are working to create revolving funds to build publicly owned, mixed-income housing. And conversions of office towers are reaching a post-pandemic peak, with dozens of office-to-apartments projects expected to be completed in the next two years, according to CBRE, a commercial real estate firm.
Even after years of concerted state and local attention to the affordability crisis, however, housing costs continue to grow across the country. The number of renters paying more than they can afford for housing hit a record 22.6 million in 2023, breaking the record set the year before, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.
Trump didn’t speak much about housing on the campaign trail. Housing experts don’t expect his administration to treat housing policy as an immediate priority. But other federal debates — including changes to interest rates, extending the tax cuts from Trump’s first term and potential changes to energy codes for buildings — could affect how much housing gets built and how much it costs to build. “Our take is that the biggest bite at the apple for changing any federal-level housing policy is the upcoming tax reform,” says Francis Torres, associate housing director at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. — Jared Brey
