Defying history, Democrats won power in state capitals across the country, while Republicans deepened their control of red states.
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A get-out-the-vote rally for Michigan Democrats in Grand Rapids on Sunday.
Last year, as Democratic strategists geared up for a campaign season they believed carried existential stakes for American democracy, you could sum up their anxieties with one word: “trifectas.”
Borrowed from horse-racing jargon, the term means control of all three branches of government: the governorship, the legislature and the state supreme court. At the outset of 2022, Democrats were especially focused on breaking up or forestalling Republican trifectas. Their fear: Republican election deniers could win full control of key swing states this year, then use their power corruptly to deliver the presidency to Donald Trump on a silver platter in 2024.
They had two other related goals: stopping Republicans from winning supermajorities where the legislatures appeared impossible for Democrats to recapture, and defeating G.O.P. candidates for state attorney general and secretary of state who backed Donald Trump’s made-up narrative of a stolen 2020 election.
The big states for Democrats: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And in states where 2024 was not such a source of concern, such as Colorado, Maine and Minnesota, Democrats were mostly just trying to stave off defeats they feared were all too likely.
“We started the cycle knowing we had to defend our chambers,” said Jessica Post, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. There would be no ambitious, potentially doomed forays into exotic territory like Texas, or pushes to flip Georgia. In a year that could easily have gone south for Democrats, she told her staff she wanted “no surprises.”
So, who won?
The only surprise was just how well Democrats did.
Democratic candidates for governor won convincingly over election deniers in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Both halves of the legislature flipped from red to blue in Michigan, albeit narrowly, for the first time in decades. Democrats won a trifecta in Minnesota; held both chambers in Colorado, Maine, Nevada and Oregon; staved off Republican supermajorities in the North Carolina House and Wisconsin State Assembly; and clawed back seats in the New Hampshire State House. And every single “Stop the Steal”-style candidate for secretary of state lost or appears to be losing battleground races at this point.
Democrats are often outspent in state legislative races and have come to expect little or no help from the national party. In addition to the $50 million it raised directly — the going price of a modest Senate race — the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee essentially went scrounging for money in the couch cushions.
Post dispatched a three-person finance team to pore over the books of safe Democratic incumbents and cajole them into transferring money to their colleagues. That frugal strategy helped Democrats come up with more than $100 million from within the states they were targeting, Post said, including more than $20 million from Michigan Senate Democrats alone.
In July, Republicans added legislative chambers in four states to their list of top targets: Nevada, Maine, Oregon, and Washington, joining the Colorado and Minnesota statehouses. But they found themselves getting swamped in many battlegrounds amid record spending by outside liberal groups like Forward Majority and the States Project.
Republicans have made modest gains, however. They flipped the Virginia House of Delegates last year, though not the State Senate, while gaining seats in New Jersey. They may have broken the Democrats’ supermajorities in New York, while picking up seats in the Illinois Senate, New Mexico House and a host of red states. They took supermajorities in both chambers of the Florida Legislature, the Iowa Senate, the North Carolina Senate, the South Carolina House and the Wisconsin Senate. In races for governor, they notched commanding wins in Florida, Ohio and Texas, and gave Democrats a scare in Kansas and Oregon.
Who Will Control Congress? Here’s When We’ll Know.
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Much remains uncertain. For the second Election Day in a row, election night ended without a clear winner. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, takes a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate, and when we might know the outcome:
The House. Republicans are likelier than not to win the House, but it is no certainty. There are still several key races that remain uncalled, and in many of these contests, late mail ballots have the potential to help Democrats. It will take days to count them.
The Senate. The fight for the Senate will come down to three states: Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Outstanding ballots in Nevada and Arizona could take days to count, but control of the chamber may ultimately hinge on Georgia, which is headed for a Dec. 6 runoff.
How we got here. The political conditions seemed ripe for Republicans to make big midterm pickups, but voters had other ideas. Read our five takeaways and analysis of why the “red wave” didn’t materialize for the G.O.P.
But in 2022, not a single state legislative chamber flipped from blue to red. A party in power hasn’t achieved that result in a midterm election year since at least 1934, according to Post.
Democrats say abortion rights have a lot to do with their good year. The closely watched battle over a newly redrawn State Senate district in Paradise Valley, an upscale suburb of Phoenix, may be the cleanest example: Christine Marsh, a teacher who ran on abortion rights, looks to have defeated Nancy Barto, who was the sponsor of Arizona’s new law banning abortion after 15 weeks.
As for the judicial branch, roughly two dozen states held elections for their high courts this year, but there were no major shifts in power despite record spending on both sides. Republicans swept three races in Ohio and added a seat on the State Supreme Court in North Carolina, cementing a 5-2 conservative majority. Those two outcomes could be consequential: Judges in both states threw out heavily gerrymandered maps this year. Republicans came up short in Illinois, where they were hoping to end the Democrats’ decades-old majority.
What’s left? Democrats could still flip the State House in Pennsylvania and might eke out a tie in the Arizona State Senate. The races for governor and state attorney general in Arizona and Nevada remain too close to call.
Forecast for 2023: a wild, wild West
When the dust settles, there could be a few swing states where divided government means nonstop brawling over the basic rules of democracy.
In Arizona, Kari Lake, a Republican former television anchor, might surge ahead of Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, by the time all the votes are counted. As of Friday afternoon, Hobbs was still leading by around 27,000 votes, but several hundred thousand votes have not yet been tallied. In the attorney general’s race there, Kris Mayes, a Democrat, was clinging to a slight lead over Abraham Hamadeh, a Republican.
Nevada is another state to watch. Joe Lombardo, a Trump-backed sheriff, is leading Gov. Steve Sisolak in the race for governor. And Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, is narrowly winning over Jim Marchant, the ringleader of election-denying secretary of state candidates.
For a preview of what could happen in those states over the next few years, look no further than the recent history of Wisconsin, where state politics is a blood sport.
The badger model
Arizonans and Nevadans can expect Wisconsin-style clashes over the relative powers of the various branches and statewide offices, along with vicious court battles.
Democrats are already bracing for Republicans in the Arizona Legislature to try to strip the authority of Adrian Fontes, should he indeed win the secretary of state’s office — just as they did to Hobbs. Last year, Republicans took away the secretary of state’s power to use taxpayer money to pay for election lawsuits, and the attorney general, a Republican, refused to approve Hobbs’s proposed overhaul of the state’s elections manual.
In Wisconsin, the Legislature has pushed to eliminate the secretary of state’s job altogether and settled on whittling it down to nothing over the last few decades. The office now has only one full-time employee and no longer even performs such uncontroversial duties as processing corporate filings.
Unlike many states, where secretaries of state oversee elections, Wisconsin has a six-member, bipartisan elections commission. That can lead to 3-3 deadlocks at times, as it did last month over the rules regarding poll watchers.
Republicans had been making noises this year about shutting down the commission and giving its powers to either the governor or the secretary of state instead. But since they didn’t oust Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, or win a supermajority, those ideas are going nowhere.
One thing is for sure: Republicans will be looking for opportunities to win back what they lost. In April, for instance, Wisconsin will hold nonpartisan elections for the State Supreme Court, where conservatives have a 4-3 majority.
The outcome could determine whether Democrats and liberal groups have another shot at challenging the state’s gerrymandered maps, which heavily favor Republicans, as well as its criminal ban on abortion.
“Wisconsin is now surrounded by three states that have Democratic trifectas,” said Sachin Chheda, a Democratic strategist in Wisconsin. “That gerrymander and abortion will be on the ballot in less than five months, and it’s going to determine what happens in Wisconsin for the next decade.”
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What to read tonight
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Control of the House and Senate is still up for grabs, along with key races in many states. Follow the results here.
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The Republican Party, after the worst midterm performance by a party out of power in two decades, is grappling with whether the ultimate cause was poor candidates, an overheated message or Donald Trump, Jonathan Weisman writes.
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For months before the midterms, election officials worried that right-wing activists convinced that the election system is corrupt and broken would cause significant problems. But overall, the vote went smoothly, Alexandra Berzon and Ken Bensinger report.
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Throw the bums — in? Midterm voters did not kick out very many incumbents this year, Jazmine Ulloa writes, despite a seemingly bleak pre-election landscape.
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ImageA woman showing her photos of former President Barack Obama during a campaign event for Senator Catherine Cortez Masto.Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
The Obama effect
By Haiyun Jiang
At a campaign event in Henderson, Nev., where Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was stumping with Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, three older women were sitting and chatting in front of me. One started showing photos to the others on her phone. I could see that they showed former President Barack Obama at rallies.
I took aim and waited. When the woman started touching her face, smitten over Obama’s photos, I had my shot.
For me, this picture conveys Obama’s long-lasting influence on his supporters and something about the values that he and they share. The splashes of blue and red in the photo are all you need to to see to understand that the campaign is the context.
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Source: nytimes.com
