In Brief:
- Only a handful of legislative chambers are in play this year, most of them in presidential battlegrounds.
- Presidential voting always has a decisive pull on legislative results, with few districts seeing split outcomes. That matters more this year, with limited competition outside the swing states.
- Republicans continue their decade-plus dominance at the legislative level, but Democrats should gain a small number of seats nationwide thanks to recent redistricting changes.
Last year, Michigan Democrats took control of the state Legislature for the first time in 40 years. They acted accordingly, passing a hugely ambitious set of bills addressing abortion, labor and voting rights, among many other issues. But their margin was narrow. After a couple of representatives resigned to serve as mayors, the chamber was tied and legislation crawled to a halt for months.
Now Democrats have to worry about losing their House majority in November, stifling their legislative hopes. “The map was drawn in 2021 to be a competitive map,” says Zach Gorchow, president of Michigan operations for Gongwer, a legislative reporting service. “It’s really designed to give both parties a shot at winning control.”
Michigan is among only a half-dozen states where one or both legislative chambers are actively in play this fall. Almost all the rest are presidential battlegrounds as well. Legislative competition, like serious Electoral College competition, is now taking place only in a small minority of states. In the vast majority of the country, the current incumbent party is all but certain to retain control.
In past decades, a dozen or more chambers might change hands in any given election cycle. That’s slowed to a trickle — four chambers flipped in 2022 and just two in 2020. There are now way more chambers where parties have supermajorities than places where there is still real competition.
“There’s just not a whole lot of competition this year,” says Chaz Nuttycombe, president of State Navigate, an independent firm that forecasts legislative elections. “Where we’re expecting competition is where there’s presidential competition.”
Not only do polls show a tossup in presidential battleground states, but many of the chambers in those states are currently controlled by one-, two- or three-seat majorities, including the Pennsylvania House and both chambers in Arizona and New Hampshire. Republicans need to gain four seats to take over the Minnesota House, while control of the Minnesota Senate will come down to the result in a single special election. (The rest of the state Senate is not up this year.)
Democrats are hoping that Vice President Kamala Harris can propel their legislative candidates to victory, in part because she’s raised more money and opened more field offices than former President Donald Trump. “We’re trying to ensure that the energy and resources translate down ticket,” says Samantha Paisley, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
But Paisley notes that Democrats have a bigger problem with “ballot roll-off” — people voting for the presidential race but not legislative contests — than the GOP. And one of Trump’s political strengths has always been bringing out people who aren’t habitual voters but are Republican-leaning.
“More of them will be coming out this year because Trump is on the ballot,” Nuttycombe says. “That could result in Republicans flipping the Pennsylvania House and Michigan House and maybe also keeping the Arizona legislative chambers.”
Rebuilding Through Redistricting
Nuttycombe is currently predicting that Democrats will score a net gain of about 100 seats this year, out of nearly 6,000 that are at least theoretically in contention. More than 1,600 seats were left uncontested by one party or the other, with 35 percent of the incumbents running facing no competition, according to Ballotpedia.
Most of the projected gains for Democrats, Nuttycombe says, are due to redistricting, with more favorable maps drawn for the party since 2022 because of court orders. The most notable example is the Wisconsin Assembly. The GOP has maintained huge majorities since taking over the Assembly back in 2010 thanks to a strongly gerrymandered map, even in years when Democratic candidates gathered more votes statewide.
Republicans currently hold a 64-34 advantage in the chamber, despite the essentially tied nature of politics in that state. “The Wisconsin Assembly is now in play, because they have a new map,” says Gaby Goldstein, co-founder of Sister District, which supports Democratic legislative candidates. “Georgia is not in contention, or North Carolina, because of gerrymandering.”
Democrats Still Digging Out
The Wisconsin Assembly was among 20 chambers that Republicans won in 2010, part of a well-executed strategy to take control of legislatures ahead of that decade’s legislative cycle. Republicans scored a net gain of roughly 1,000 legislative seats during Barack Obama’s presidency.
“In state legislatures, quite frankly, we were just getting our clocks cleaned,” says Adam Pritzker, cofounder of the States Project, which is spending $50 million in support of Democratic legislative candidates this year. “Democrats were asleep at the wheel in the states. There was too much focus on what was happening in D.C., and not enough investment in state legislatures.”
As recently as 2016, Republicans controlled two-thirds of the nation’s legislative chambers. Although Democrats have only gained back about 150 of the seats they lost under Obama, according to Goldstein, they have gained back 11 chambers. That’s because they’ve taken back control in states where they consistently win at the presidential level, including Colorado, Maine and Virginia.
Despite a big money push in 2020, ahead of the current decade’s redistricting, Democrats failed to pick up a single chamber that year. They did better two years ago, winning four chambers. But they know there aren’t a lot of easy targets left on the board. “Initially, we were fighting in bluer states,” says Paisley, the DLCC spokesperson. “Now, we are running in true battleground states.”
Those states remain so close that control often comes down to one or two seats, sometimes decided by just a few dozen votes. This year, the competitive chambers clearly could break either way, with power turning on minute, unpredictable dynamics.
In Michigan, for example, voters have approved a change to the state’s term limit law that has resulted in less turnover, with incumbents able to stick around a bit longer. There are only eight open seats in the Michigan House this year. That's the lowest number going back more than 30 years.
“I don’t think there’s any question that if the old term limits law was in place, Republicans would be clear favorites to take control,” says Gorchow. “There are two Democrats seeking fourth terms this year who would otherwise not be able to run again in seats that Trump won and that would almost certainly have gone Republican.”
