WASHINGTON ― A week after Democrats’ sweep in the midterm elections, the scope of their victories beyond Congress is coming into focus ― and it’s astounding: Democrats will control a majority of the country’s state legislative chambers for the first time in a generation, marking the largest shifts in political power at the state level since the GOP wave of 2010.
As of late Monday, they’ve flipped 549 state legislative seats from Republican to Democratic, flipped control of 12 chambers and broken up 13 Republican supermajorities. They’ve also created at least six new Democratic trifectas, meaning in those states, Democrats will control the House, the Senate and the governorship. Democratic trifectas now outnumber GOP trifectas nationally, 22 to 19.
While dozens of elections are yet to be called, outstanding races are not expected to detract from Democrats’ takeover of chambers.
“It’s just an immense amount of governing power that we won,” said Will Rusche, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the official arm of the party focused on electing Democrats to state legislatures.
This sweep didn’t come together overnight, Rusche said, but is the result of years of the DLCC and other groups laying groundwork for this moment. It took decades of work in states like Wisconsin and Arizona to break the grip on power Republicans established in 2010 and win Democratic trifectas, he said. In Georgia, it took Democrats five election cycles of gaining seats to get within striking distance of taking the House this year.
The DLCC approached this election cycle as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” to make gains in states it’s been trying to break into for years, he said. Chalking up big wins in last year’s special elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the DLCC was investing in ― and banking on ― those races being early signs the midterm elections would be a boon for their party. They were right.
Democrats held just five Democratic trifectas in state legislatures when Trump was first elected in 2016. Helped by Trump repelling college-educated voters who reliably cast ballots in lower-turnout elections like midterms and special elections, where power at the state level is often decided, Democrats have more than quadrupled that number in the past decade.
“You think about what the Trump era has meant,” Rusche said. “We have chipped away at, and then this year was kind of the shattering of Republicans’ control of the states.”
Edith Jorge-Tuñón of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which is DLCC’s counterpart, said Democrats won big in part because they made state legislative races a top priority, suggesting the GOP needs to do better.
Democrats invested “unprecedented resources into these contests because they understand the power state legislatures hold in shaping policy and building the pipeline for the next generation of leaders,” Jorge-Tuñón said in a statement.
The DLCC was aided by a huge effort by outside groups, including $100 million spent by The States Project to flip state legislative chambers in 21 states, and in Texas, the coordinated campaign between the Texas Democratic Party and Texas Majority PAC.
“Our strategy this cycle was to be able to capitalize on the national environment in order to power every state legislative win that was possible,” said Mandara Meyers, executive director of The States Project. “We essentially had a clean sweep across our states.”
In Texas, the coordinated Democratic campaign recruited 104 candidates to run in every state legislative and judicial seat for the first time since at least 1972. Democrats not only won the governorship and the federal Senate race, but they won control of the state House for the first time since 2002 while sweeping every statewide race.
“This is a consequence of people on the ground, county chairs, precinct chairs, candidates that ran in every office for the first time since 1972,” said Kendall Scudder, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party.
Democrats trounced in federal races, too, taking back control of both chambers of Congress. For the rest of his time in the White House, President Donald Trump will now have to work with Democrats to pass any laws. But he’ll still have the ability to stymie their agenda by vetoing bills he doesn’t like, something he’s already vowed to do. And with Friday’s news that he’s tapping Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff, a far-right and proudly anti-immigrant extremist, Trump isn’t exactly signaling a desire to work across the aisle over the next two years.
In states with newly Democratic trifectas, though, legislators can plow forward with any number of priorities they’ve been itching to tackle, knowing their governor will sign them into law.
“What really is power for Democrats to do something is trifectas,” said Leslie Martes, CEO of Forward Majority, a political group focused on building Democratic majorities in state legislatures. “We can do some really cool stuff that we can’t do at the federal level.”
It’s a huge deal that Wisconsin is one of the states with a new Democratic trifecta, said Martes, as its congressional maps are “some of the most gerrymandered in the country.” The state’s GOP-controlled legislature and former Republican Gov. Scott Walker passed a controversial redistricting law in 2011, which helped to lock in durable Republican majorities.
Now, with Democrats poised to run all of Wisconsin’s state government in January, they can redraw congressional maps and roll back the gerrymandering that kept them out of power for the past two decades.
“We will be considering a congressional redistricting effort in Wisconsin,” said state Rep. Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the state assembly.
Redressing GOP political gamesmanship is just the beginning of the policy agenda Democrats can tackle now. In Wisconsin, Democrats finally revamp their restrictive election laws and try to advance Medicaid expansion. In Michigan and Arizona, which both have new Democratic trifectas, party leaders are signaling they’re ready to get moving on bills addressing affordability, voting rights, housing, abortion rights, gun safety and other priorities.
Medicaid expansion in Georgia and Texas, two of the largest states to never expand, will top the agenda there.
“With that majority, Gov. Keisha Lance Bottoms is going to be able to expand Medicaid,” Charlie Bailey, chairman of the Democratic Party of Georgia, said about Democrats winning the state House. “Like, this is the consequence. This is why we do what we do.”
Democrats will also be able to address the local issues that helped them win election in November. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s school voucher plan to take public school money to fund private Christian schools played a major role in Democratic wins and will now be on the chopping block.
Democratic Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, who just ousted Abbott, already named the leading GOP opponent of Abbott’s vouchers to her transition team, and Democratic lawmakers are planning legislation to repeal it.
“Voters have spoken that they don’t like the private school voucher,” said Texas state Rep. Salman Bhojani, a Democrat. “It’s a scam. It’s a solution looking for a problem.”
In states across the country, opposition to data centers was also a huge bipartisan issue that drove support to Democrats and will likely be addressed in the coming legislative sessions, according to Democratic state legislators.
“One of the things we saw in our polling, no matter where it was in the state of Florida, were data centers,” said Florida state Rep. Christine Hunschofsky, a Democrat. “Even if there wasn’t one planned in the area, it was very interesting to see that affordability was, like, No. 1, but in many places, data centers were No. 2.”
“The losses we had in 2010, it basically took us until this election to recover.”
- Will Rusche of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee
Democrats won in so many new places that the shock of winning has also led to an immediate concern about holding these new majorities. The scale of their wins combined with the attention they’ve created mean it will be hard for Republicans to come back for some time in many places.
“Some of these chambers we picked up so many seats that it is going to be hard even in a bad year to roll back some of those new majorities or those kinds of margins,” Meyers said.
In Texas, the site of Democrats’ most shocking and important wins, campaign strategists see their victories attracting permanent national investment to keep control and further bring the nation’s second-biggest state in the party’s column.
“We did this without much national support, and no one can argue that Texas is now on the map,” said Katherine Fischer, the executive director of Texas Majority PAC. “Our goal for the next cycle is to do what we did this cycle, but even bigger and better.”
Democratic Party operatives emphasized that their focus going forward has to be on the importance of durable power, and that 2030 redistricting will be key to deciding who holds it for the next decade.
“The losses we had in 2010, it basically took us until this election to recover,” Rusche said. “Let’s not do that again.”