Login
— Our initial 2024 Electoral College ratings start with just four Toss-up states.
— Democrats start with a small advantage, although both sides begin south of what they need to win.
— We consider a rematch of the 2020 election — Joe Biden versus Donald Trump — as the likeliest matchup, but not one that is set in stone.
Democrats start closer to the magic number of 270 electoral votes in our initial Electoral College ratings than Republicans. But with few truly competitive states and a relatively high floor for both parties, our best guess is yet another close and competitive presidential election next year — which, if it happened, would be the sixth such instance in seven elections (with 2008 as the only real outlier).
Map 1 shows these initial ratings. We are starting 260 electoral votes worth of states as at least leaning Democratic, and 235 as at least leaning Republican. The four Toss-ups are Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — the three closest states in 2020 — along with Nevada, which has voted Democratic in each of the last four presidential elections but by closer margins each time (it is one of the few states where Joe Biden did worse than Hillary Clinton, albeit by less than a tenth of a percentage point). That is just 43 Toss-up electoral votes at the outset. Remember that because of a likely GOP advantage in the way an Electoral College tie would be broken in the U.S. House, a 269-269 tie or another scenario where no candidate won 270 electoral votes would very likely lead to a Republican president. So Democrats must get to 270 electoral votes while 269 would likely suffice for Republicans, and there are plausible tie scenarios in the Electoral College.
For the purposes of these ratings, we are considering a rematch of the 2020 election — Joe Biden versus Donald Trump — as the likeliest matchup, but not one that is set in stone.
Despite a multitude of weaknesses, such as an approval rating in just the low 40s and widespread concern about his age and ability to do the job, Biden does not have credible opposition within his own party, drawing only fringe challengers Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson. It may be that Biden could or should have drawn a stronger challenger, and maybe something happens that entices that kind of challenger into the race. But as of now, Biden appears to be on course to renomination.
Trump faces legitimate legal problems, specifically following his recent indictment over serious allegations that he improperly retained highly sensitive government documents. However, we would never presume an actual guilty verdict in this or another case until it actually happens — nor are we even sure a guilty verdict would prevent Trump’s renomination. It may be that the weight of Trump’s problems gradually reduces his level of support over the course of this calendar year leading into next year’s primaries, allowing a rival to consolidate the non-Trump portion of the party and really push him in the primaries. Or maybe Trump is compelled to take some sort of plea deal that involves him leaving the race. Those caveats aside, we see a party that is still broadly comfortable with Trump as its nominee. Until that changes, he’s the favorite.
It has now been more than a month since Trump’s leading GOP rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), entered the race. As best we can tell, he has gotten no real “bump” from becoming an official candidate — if anything, DeSantis’s polling position was stronger several months ago than it is today. Meanwhile, the field has gotten bigger, further splintering the non-Trump support while the former president remains as a clear plurality (or even majority) leader in national and state-level polling. This matters in a nominating contest in which even a plurality leader in a given state can end up getting the lion’s share or all of its delegates (as we saw with Trump in 2016).
For our general election outlook, we are not taking current polling much into account right now. Biden’s national polling right now is probably worse than what our ratings reflect: Different polls show either Biden ahead by a little or Trump ahead by a little nationally, and about a tie in aggregate per RealClearPolitics’s average. We believe Biden would do better than that, at least in the national popular vote, against Trump: Trump lost the popular vote twice, and we doubt he would be a stronger candidate in 2024 than he was in 2016 or 2020. The last time Trump was on the general election ballot was prior to the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol, an event that can now be used effectively against him in a general election setting. We just saw that in the 2022 election, several candidates who were tied to Trump running in key states — such as Kari Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, several election-denying candidates in other statewide races across the nation, etc. — underperformed the electoral environment. Midterms are not presidential elections, and this does not necessarily mean Trump can’t win — he certainly could, and our ratings reflect that possibility. But the actual results from recent elections, which suggested significant problems for Trump, seem to be a better guide than off-year polling.
We also are not really taking third-party voting into account as of now, although one could imagine the third party vote, whatever size it is, hurting the Democratic nominee more than the GOP nominee. The Green Party nominee, who might be left-wing intellectual Cornel West, could hurt Biden from the left, while a potential candidate backed by the group No Labels could provide an outlet for moderate/conservative voters. However, we do think it’s likely that any third-party candidate will poll better than they perform, and that the ultimate third party vote does not seem likely to be large (perhaps bigger than 2020’s 2% of the total, but likely not reaching 2016’s 6%). Still, that may matter in a close race, so it is a very important factor to watch.
We have previously noted that Biden’s chances in the next election are very contingent on who the GOP decides to nominate as his opponent. As of right now, that person appears likeliest to be Donald Trump. That certainly doesn’t make Biden a shoo-in next year, but it does make him better positioned to win, which is reflected in our ratings.
Let’s take a look at some state-level details of our initial Electoral College ratings:
— Democrats start with 191 Safe electoral votes, while Republicans start with just 122. However, if you combine the Safe and Likely columns, the effective “floor” for both parties is essentially identical: 221 for Democrats, and 218 for Republicans. Texas is one of a handful of important states (Arizona and Georgia are a couple of others) that very clearly have trended Democratic in the Trump era. But Texas is still a Republican-leaning state, as its big urban areas have not quite gotten blue enough to make up for how red its lesser-populated places are. Other Likely Republican states Florida, Iowa, and Ohio have all moved right in the Trump era. Alaska also appears here as Likely Republican as its GOP lean has eroded in recent years, but it’s also still clearly in the GOP column, and it’s included here more as a curiosity than anything else.
— We suspect the rating that might spur the most disagreement is starting Pennsylvania as Leans Democratic, as opposed to a Toss-up. It’s also the one that, internally, we are the most conflicted about. On one hand, Pennsylvania only voted for Biden by a little over a point in 2020 after backing Trump by less than a point in 2016. That basic fact argues for Toss-up. But we also think Biden may have a bit more room to grow in vote-rich southeast Pennsylvania against Trump, which could help protect his narrow edge as Republicans try to squeeze even more of a margin out of the state’s white rural and small-town areas. Certainly Democrats did great in Pennsylvania in 2022, although we don’t necessarily view that as predictive — Democrats also did well in the 2018 statewide races, but that didn’t prevent the state from being close in 2020. If you believe we’re giving an unreasonable benefit of the doubt to Democrats in Pennsylvania, consider that we may be doing the same to Republicans in North Carolina, a state that was Trump’s closest victory in 2020. We also may be giving the GOP a benefit of the doubt by listing Nevada as a Toss-up instead of as Leans Democratic, given the Democrats’ frequent ability to pull out close victories in the state. But Democrats should be concerned that this working-class state’s center of votes, Clark County (Las Vegas), is getting more competitive as opposed to getting more Democratic.
— Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin seem like fairly clear-cut Toss-ups, given how close they were in 2020 (each was decided by less than a point). But there’s a world in which the realigning patterns we’ve seen in the Trump years, in which big metro areas like Phoenix and Atlanta are getting bluer, push their states (Arizona and Georgia) from a reddish shade of purple to a bluish shade, and that Pennsylvania ends up being closer for president than those states are. Who the GOP nominates will play a role here — maybe a non-Trump nominee ends up being a better fit for the party in the Sun Belt, which would solidify Arizona and Georgia as Toss-ups or maybe even push them back to the Republicans. Wisconsin, meanwhile, may be the purest Toss-up on the whole map: Its presidential margin was below a point in four of the last six elections.
— In our 2020 ratings — when we ultimately missed just one state, North Carolina — we started Michigan out as Leans Democratic, a decision that paid off, as Biden won the state by nearly 3 points after it surprisingly backed Trump in 2016. It remains Leans Democratic here, along with New Hampshire, which has long been considered a swing state but seems to have settled left of center. The GOP position on abortion, in particular, seems like a considerable problem in these states (one could apply this argument to Pennsylvania too, among other places).
— Maine and Nebraska, the two states that award electoral votes at the congressional-district level, have unique ratings. Nebraska’s two statewide electoral votes and two of its three districts are Safe Republican, but the Omaha-based NE-2 voted for Biden by about a half-dozen points in 2020, and we are rating it as Leans Democratic to start. Meanwhile, Maine’s northern 2nd District backed Trump by about a half-dozen points in 2020 and it starts as Leans Republican. The two statewide electoral votes are rated as Likely Democratic — Minnesota, New Mexico, and Virginia are also in that category — and the very Democratic 1st District of Maine starts as Safe Democratic.
We have previously noted that only seven states were decided by less than three points in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This represents the real battlefield: Particularly if the race is a Biden vs. Trump redux, we would be surprised if any other state flipped from 2020 outside of this group.
Even then, we’re not even sure that all of these seven states are truly in doubt. After all, we’re starting three of the seven in the Leans category (Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania).
This all underscores the reality that despite the nation being locked in a highly competitive era of presidential elections, the lion’s share of the individual states are not competitive at all.
| Dear Readers: In the latest edition of our Politics is Everything podcast, the Crystal Ball’s J. Miles Coleman, Kyle Kondik, and Carah Ong Whaley discuss the results from Tuesday night’s Virginia state legislative primaries and look ahead to the closely-contested battle for control of both chambers coming up this fall. Listen and subscribe here or wherever you get your podcasts.
In today’s Crystal Ball, Senior Columnist Louis Jacobson previews another set of key state-level races for this year and next: attorneys general and secretaries of state. — The Editors |
— The once low-profile contests for attorney general and secretary of state have become increasingly important for driving policy outcomes in the states, particularly in setting the rules for how elections are run.
— The current campaign cycle doesn’t promise quite as much drama as there was in 2022, when several key presidential battleground states played host to tight contests between Republicans aligned with former President Donald Trump and more mainstream Democrats.
— For the current 2023-2024 cycle, we are starting our handicapping by assigning 18 of the 23 races to either the Safe Republican or the Safe Democratic category. Still, a number of these states will undergo wide-open primaries with different ideological flavors of candidates. And in the general election, we see three races as highly competitive: the attorney general and secretary of state races in North Carolina and the AG race in Pennsylvania.
The midterm election of 2022 was an unusually pivotal one for attorney general and secretary of state contests. There was a surplus of races between election-denying Republicans and more mainstream Democrats in such pivotal presidential battleground states as Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada. In our final pre-election handicapping of the 2022 cycle, we rated 12 of the 30 attorney general races and 16 of the 27 secretary of state races as competitive, meaning they were categorized either as Toss-ups or as leaning toward the Democrats or the Republicans.
The current campaign cycle isn’t promising quite as much drama: All told, 18 out of the 23 races on tap start out as either Safe Republican or Safe Democratic in our rankings.
Still, these contests will be important, because attorneys general can file lawsuits with far-reaching policy impact and because secretaries of state oversee the election process (in most states, anyway).
In the 2023-2024 election cycle, at least 6 of the 13 AG races and at least 4 of the 10 secretary of state races will be open seats, often because the incumbent is running for governor — a sign of how these lower-profile offices can serve as important political stepping stones.
Especially in states with heavily Republican leanings, these open-seat races are poised to involve a number of highly competitive primaries. In many cases, these primaries will pit more pragmatic Republicans against more aggressively populist ones. The type of nominee that emerges victorious could have a tangible impact on policy in these states, because those states’ partisanship makes it hard for Democrats to win a general election.
Meanwhile, the key matchups for the 2024 general election promise to be the AG and secretary of state races in North Carolina and the AG contest in Pennsylvania. (Pennsylvania’s secretary of state is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate rather than elected.) Both states will simultaneously be serving as presidential battlegrounds.
In the meantime, the races for both AG and secretary of state in Kentucky — which will be held later this year — bear watching, with Democrats nominating credible candidates. But because this is heavily red Kentucky, the GOP remains favored to hold both.
Here’s a rundown of each race for AG and secretary of state in the current two-year cycle, based on multiple interviews with political observers, both in the states and nationally. As in the past, we have rated contests in descending order, from most likely to be won by the Republicans to most likely to be won by the Democrats, including within each rating category (Safe Republican, Likely Republican, Leans Republican, Toss-up, Leans Democratic, Likely Democratic, and Safe Democratic). We’ll update these ratings periodically as the contests develop.
First, we’ll start with the three states that vote in 2023. Then we’ll move to the larger number of states that will be voting in 2024.
Louisiana: Open (Jeff Landry, R, is running for governor)
Louisiana’s office of attorney general is opening up this year as Landry runs for governor. That high-stakes race for governor, in which Landry is a leading contender, has significantly overshadowed the battle to fill the office he’s giving up.
Louisiana has an all-party primary on Oct. 14. If no one gets a majority, there will be a runoff on Nov. 18. In many such races in the past, a Democratic candidate has secured one of the two runoff slots. But in the AG contest, no Democrat has emerged yet, and the party’s bench in this solidly red state is thin. So the runoff, if there is one, might come down to what flavor of Republican voters want.
Landry’s top deputy, Solicitor General Liz Murrill, is the most conservative candidate in the race as well as the best funded. In addition to being closely aligned with the polarizing Landry, Murrill was previously a top legal advisor to then-Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who was unpopular when he left office. Murrill was also widely seen as bungling an abortion case before the U.S. Supreme Court, leading to a loss when Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the four liberals in the case (this was prior to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020).
Murrill’s leading opponent is GOP state Rep. John Stefanski, who is considered more moderate and is well-liked by state insiders for his even-handed stewardship of the House committee that oversees redistricting. Another Republican running is former prosecutor Marty Maley of Baton Rouge, who finished fifth in the 2015 primary.
Murrill could run strong in an off-year election without a well-known and popular Democrat at the top of the ticket. If no Democrat enters the race and Stefanski makes the runoff, he would have a chance of winning, if he can nail down support from Democrats and establishment Republicans. But it’s unclear how much Stefanski would actively court Democratic votes in that scenario, at the risk of alienating Republicans. And there’s still time for a Democrat to get in the race, which would call into question that strategy.
Mississippi (Republican Lynn Fitch)
Fitch is seeking her second term as attorney general. The Mississippi attorney general’s office was the last statewide office that Democrats controlled in the state; Jim Hood gave it up to make an unsuccessful bid for governor in 2019, and Fitch flipped the open seat in the general election that year. But while Democrats are pleased with their challenger — Greta Kemp Martin, the litigation director of Disability Rights Mississippi — and while they see an opening with corruption allegations against former GOP Gov. Phil Bryant and former NFL quarterback Brett Favre, the Democrats’ chances of winning the AG’s office back this year against an incumbent Republican seem small.
Kentucky: Open (Daniel Cameron, R, is running for governor)
Like Republican gubernatorial candidate Cameron, GOP attorney general nominee Russell Coleman has one foot in the camp of Senate Minority Leader (and Kentucky Republican godfather) Mitch McConnell as well as one foot in the camp of former President Donald Trump. Coleman served as legal counsel to McConnell while also receiving Trump’s appointment to serve as U.S. attorney for Kentucky’s western district.
Coleman’s background in rural Kentucky and his tough-on-crime approach should serve him well in the general election. In a poll by the Republican firm Cygnal, Coleman led his Democratic opponent by double digits even though the same poll showed Cameron in a dead heat with incumbent Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.
However, many voters in the poll were undecided on the AG race, and Democrat Pamela Stevenson brings a unique personal background to the contest. In addition to serving in the state House, Stevenson spent 27 years in the Air Force, including extensive legal experience as a judge advocate general. Her campaign logo features her rank of colonel in a larger font size than her last name.
Stevenson, a Black Democrat, is running to succeed Cameron, a Black Republican. But geography could be a problem (she’s based in Louisville, a region that has often produced losing statewide Democratic candidates) and passionate speeches from the floor of the state House may provide Republicans with campaign fodder. If Stevenson catches fire, this race’s rating could shift, but for now, given the state’s red tint, we’re starting it at Likely Republican.
Mississippi (Republican Michael Watson)
Watson, elected in 2019, is seeking a second term and should easily win it. He faces Democrat Shuwaski Young, a political organizer and former federal Department of Homeland Security staffer. He ran for Congress against Rep. Michael Guest in 2022, winning only 29% of the vote in the solidly Republican district.
Louisiana: Open seat (Kyle Ardoin is retiring)
Incumbent Republican Kyle Ardoin bowed out of seeking reelection to a second full term, citing the “pervasive lies” of election deniers.
The GOP has a sizable field seeking to succeed him. One contender is Clay Schexnayder, a mechanic and race-car driver who is term-limited in the legislature after becoming the surprise compromise choice for House Speaker in 2020. He is well-known, is considered an effective legislator, and is sitting on a sizable war chest. But some conservative activists view him with suspicion, given his pragmatic approach to working with Democrats.
Other GOP candidates include grocery store owner Brandon Trosclair, an election denier; deep-pocketed Public Service Commissioner Mike Francis; and former state Rep. Nancy Landry, who has worked in Ardoin’s office for four years (and is not related to Jeff Landry).
The lone Democrat currently in the race is attorney, accountant, and small business owner Gwen Collins-Greenup. She has already run twice for secretary of state, losing to Ardoin both times with 41% of the vote. With that kind of track record, she has a good shot at getting past the primary but losing the runoff.
Kentucky (Republican Michael Adams)
Adams is a Republican who is tolerable to many Democrats. He fruitfully negotiated bipartisan electoral reforms with Beshear, a Democrat, receiving praise from across the ideological spectrum. Despite opposition from his right, Adams won a May primary with a little shy of two-thirds of the vote.
Democratic nominee Buddy Wheatley is from the region of northern Kentucky, which is in the Cincinnati orbit — this part of the state is reliably Republican at the presidential level but portions of it ended up contributing to Beshear’s winning gubernatorial coalition in 2019. Wheatley was a state representative but lost reelection after his district was redrawn to be unfavorable. Wheatley is considered a strong candidate, and he’s been attacking Adams fairly aggressively, but defeating a politician as well-liked as Adams will not be easy.
Utah (Republican Sean Reyes)
Reyes can seek a third full term as attorney general in 2024. No one has emerged as either a primary or general election challenger. Until someone does, Reyes should have smooth sailing. Reyes was mentioned many months ago as a potential primary challenger to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), but we have not heard anything about that recently.
Montana (Republican Austin Knudsen)
There’s no indication that Knudsen, who’s in his first term, won’t seek reelection. While Knudsen has irritated some Republicans in the state, he would be a heavy favorite in heavily Republican Montana unless he gets a primary challenge or seeks higher office. No names of potential Democratic challengers have surfaced.
West Virginia: Open seat (Patrick Morrisey, R, is running for governor)
West Virginia’s ascendant GOP has at least two credible candidates for this open-seat contest: state Sen. Ryan Weld, a member of the chamber’s leadership, and fellow state Sen. Mike Stuart, a former state Republican chairman and a former U.S. attorney appointed by then-President Donald Trump. Of the two, Weld is considered more of a pragmatist, while Stuart has positioned himself as more of a populist.
No Democrat has announced a run. Either way, the real action is expected to come in the GOP primary.
Missouri (Republican Andrew Bailey)
When Eric Schmitt left the AG office to become a U.S. senator, GOP Gov. Mike Parson appointed Bailey, his general counsel, to fill the vacancy. Now Bailey is running for a term of his own.
Bailey is continuing Schmitt’s conservative politics and is running with the aid of incumbency. But he won’t have a free ride in the GOP primary. One candidate already in the race is Will Scharf, a former federal prosecutor and onetime aide to then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican who resigned the office amid a personal scandal. Other potential Republican candidates include Tim Garrison, a former U.S. attorney and Marine Corps veteran; state Sen. Tony Luetkemeyer, a cousin once removed from GOP Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer; and John Wood, a former federal prosecutor and unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate in 2022. Wood dropped out of that race, in which he was running as an independent, after Greitens lost to Schmitt in the 2022 Senate primary.
On the Democratic side is state Rep. Sarah Unsicker and, with an exploratory committee established, Elad Gross, who lost the 2020 Democratic primary for AG. However, Missouri has become so solidly red that Democrats face huge hurdles in winning statewide office.
Indiana (Republican Todd Rokita)
Rokita has been highly visible, and controversial, including for pursuing sanctions against a physician who spoke to the media about the case of a 10-year-old rape victim that attracted national attention.
Still, Rokita should be well-funded and benefit from grassroots support. If Democrats can recruit a credible candidate, they could make this a race, but no names have emerged yet, and there are few Democrats who would make credible statewide candidates in Indiana any more.
North Carolina: Open seat (Josh Stein, D, is running for governor)
Historically, North Carolina has been a competitive state in down-ballot races. Will that enable Democrats to keep their longstanding hold on the AG office as Stein runs for governor? It’s hard to say.
The leading Republican in the race is former state Rep. Tom Murry, though there is talk that GOP Congressman Dan Bishop, who is better known, might get into the contest. On the Democratic side is attorney and veteran Tim Dunn, though if new, GOP-leaning congressional lines are drawn, Democratic Rep. Jeff Jackson could enter the race rather than compete in an unfriendly district.
With the final candidate lineup in limbo, and given the state’s competitive nature down the ballot, we will start this contest as a Toss-up.
Pennsylvania: Open seat (Appointed AG Michelle Henry, D, is not running)
The Democrats have a trio of credible, declared candidates: former Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, former Bucks County Solicitor Joe Khan, and former top Philadelphia public defender Keir Bradford-Grey. Potentially in the wings are several other credible Democratic candidates: former Congressman and Senate candidate Conor Lamb, state Rep. Jared Solomon, and Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer.
No Republican is officially in the race yet, but several plausible candidates are considering bids, including former U.S. attorney and gubernatorial candidate Bill McSwain, state Reps. Natalie Mihalek and Craig Williams, former U.S. Attorney Scott Brady, York County District Attorney Dave Sunday, and Westmoreland County District Attorney Nicole Ziccarelli.
Democrats feel good about their chances of holding this seat, which was occupied by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro until he moved up in 2022. Democrats did well in the Keystone State in the 2022 midterms, and the presidential contest in 2024 should ensure high turnout. But Pennsylvania is a swingy state, with Republicans winning the state auditor general and treasurer races in 2020, and the GOP plans to take this race seriously, so we’ll start it in the Toss-up category. That could change depending on who the nominees are.
Washington state: Open seat (Bob Ferguson, D, is running for governor)
Ferguson leaves big shoes to fill as he runs for governor, but Washington state Democrats have a deep bench. Already in the race is state Sen. Manka Dhingra. Other Democrats who could join her include outgoing U.S. Attorney Nicholas Brown (who just resigned in advance of a run), state Sen. Drew Hansen, and Solicitor General Noah Purcell.
The GOP has a weak bench and, at least for now, shows no signs of competing aggressively for AG’s office.
Oregon (Democrat Ellen Rosenblum)
Rosenblum, who has held the office since 2012, would be a lock for reelection if she runs again, but she could retire. Any jockeying for the seat has taken a back seat to the legislative session in which Republican state senators have been denying the Democratic majority a quorum for months. (The walkout began May 3 and ended June 15.) But Democrats should have little to worry about, regardless of who their nominee is.
Vermont (Democrat Charity Clark)
Clark was elected AG in 2022 and should have no trouble winning a second two-year term in solidly blue Vermont.
Texas
Keep an eye on Texas, where GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton is facing possible removal from office after being impeached by the GOP-controlled state House.
If Paxton is ousted, which would require a 2/3rds majority vote of the state Senate, there would be a special election concurrent with the 2024 presidential election, with a March 2024 primary at the same time as that for other offices. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) would appoint an AG to serve between Paxton’s removal and the election of the new AG in 2024 (Abbott has already appointed an interim AG, John Scott, to take Paxton’s place temporarily while Paxton faces his impeachment trial). The winner would serve out the remainder of Paxton’s current term, which runs through January 2027.
West Virginia: Open seat (Mac Warner, R, is running for governor)
So far, the top GOP contenders for this open seat race include state Del. Chris Pritt, former state Del. Ken Reed, former state Sen. Kenny Mann, and longtime Putnam County Clerk Brian Wood. None of the candidates is considered widely known across the state, but whoever wins the nomination would be heavily favored against the eventual Democratic nominee.
Missouri: Open seat (Jay Ashcroft, R, is running for governor)
On the Republican side, Greene County Clerk and former state Rep. Shane Schoeller, who also was the 2012 GOP nominee for this office, has filed to run, but observers expect the GOP field for this open seat to grow. Whoever wins the nomination would be the heavy favorite against whichever Democrat wins the nomination.
Montana (Republican Christi Jacobsen)
Jacobsen is expected to run for reelection and would be heavily favored. No Democratic names have surfaced, and the bench for Montana Democrats is thin. But Democrats hold out hope of finding a candidate who can surf the expected turnout boost from Sen. Jon Tester’s (D-MT) reelection bid.
North Carolina (Democrat Elaine Marshall)
Despite North Carolina’s slight Republican lean, Marshall has become something of an institution in the state, having first been elected as secretary of state in 1996. But she won her most recent race by only about 2 percentage points in 2020, so the election should be competitive.
The GOP field includes Darren Eustance, a political consultant and the former chair of the Wake County Republican Party, and Gaston County Commissioner Chad Brown. Neither is well known, especially compared to Marshall. Incumbency gives Marshall a slight edge, but the contest should be competitive.
Oregon (Vacant)
Democratic Secretary of State Shemia Fagan resigned in May after a scandal regarding consulting work for a cannabis company. Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek has yet to appoint someone to fill the vacancy, though by law it must be a Democrat. Kotek’s appointed incumbent would be eligible to run in 2024, but it’s unclear whether the governor favors naming a caretaker or giving someone a head start on running for a full term.
Whichever option Kotek pursues, Democrats will be strongly favored to keep the office.
Washington (Democrat Steve Hobbs)
Hobbs, who was appointed to the office in 2021 and won the remainder of an unexpired term in 2022, should have no trouble winning again in 2024.
Vermont (Democrat Sarah Copeland Hanzas)
Copeland Hanzas, who won her first term as secretary of state in 2022, will be heavily favored to win again in 2024.
| Louis Jacobson is a Senior Columnist for Sabato’s Crystal Ball. He is also the senior correspondent at the fact-checking website PolitiFact and is senior author of the forthcoming Almanac of American Politics 2024. He was senior author of the Almanac’s 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 editions and a contributing writer for the 2000 and 2004 editions. |
— The Supreme Court’s Allen v. Milligan decision should give Democrats at least a little help in their quest to re-take the House majority, but much remains uncertain.
— As of now, the Democrats’ best bets to add a seat in 2024 are in Alabama, the subject of the ruling, and Louisiana.
— It also adds to the list of potential mid-decade redistricting changes, which have happened with regularity over the past half-century.
— The closely-contested nature of the House raises the stakes of each state’s map, and redistricting changes do not necessarily have to be prompted by courts.
Landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions can sometimes be categorized as either beginnings or endings. Take, for instance, a couple of past important decisions that at least touch on the topic of redistricting.
In 1962, the court’s Baker v. Carr decision was a beginning: After decades of declining to enter what Justice Felix Frankfurter described as the “political thicket” of redistricting and reapportionment, the Supreme Court opened the door to hearing cases that argued against the malapportionment of voting districts. A couple of years later, the court’s twin decisions of Reynolds v. Sims and Wesberry v. Sanders mandated the principle of “one person, one vote” be used in drawing, respectively, state legislative and congressional districts, kicking off what is known as the “reapportionment revolution.”
More recently, the court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision represented an ending: The court threw out the preclearance coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act. Prior to that decision, certain states and jurisdictions (mostly but not entirely in the South) had to submit changes in voting procedures, such as redistricting plans, to the U.S. Department of Justice for preclearance. The court said that this method of determining which places needed preclearance was outdated, and Congress has never mandated a new preclearance formula. So prior to the Shelby County decision, a state like Alabama would have had to have cleared its new congressional district map with the Justice Department. In 2021, it did not have to.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Allen v. Milligan last week is neither a beginning nor an ending, although Republican authorities in Alabama and others surely hoped it would represent a form of the latter. Rather, the case is best thought of as a continuation of current law and how the Supreme Court interprets current law — namely, that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the so-called “Gingles test” that undergirds it still exists in the same way we understood them prior to the Milligan decision.
The Gingles test is a three-pronged assessment, laid out as followed in the 1986 Supreme Court decision Thornburg v. Gingles (we’re quoting directly from that decision). These are the conditions that need to be in place in order for a federal court to order the creation of a new majority-minority district:
— “First, the minority group must be able to demonstrate that it is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district.”
— “Second, the minority group must be able to show that it is politically cohesive.”
— “Third, the minority must be able to demonstrate that the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it… usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.”
Basically, the thing that was surprising about Milligan is that Democrats and their allies thought it was going to be bad for their side to at least a certain degree given the conservative makeup of the court. Instead, the Supreme Court didn’t really change anything.
We are not lawyers, and we will not pretend to be lawyers. Racial redistricting jurisprudence is, to us and likely to many others, confusing. Following discussions with some people who follow redistricting matters on both sides of the political aisle, we’re going to try to assess the fallout from the decision. Let’s start in Alabama and work our way to other states. This is not intended to touch on every single state with potential redistricting legal action that may or may not be impacted by Milligan; rather, we just wanted to hit the highlights of certain states and what the state of play in each is:
— In the Milligan case, a District Court found that Alabama’s congressional map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by creating a single district where Black voters made up a majority when it should have created two. Alabama is just over a quarter Black, but Black voters constitute a majority of just one of the state’s seven districts (14%). Those who sued over the map persuasively showed that it’s possible to draw a second Black district that satisfies the conditions of the Gingles test. What the actual map will eventually look like remains a mystery, but the likeliest outcome seems to be that instead of Alabama having a single, overwhelmingly Democratic district (the current 7th District, represented by Democrat Terri Sewell), the state seems likely to eventually have two districts that Democrats are favored to win. This is now reflected in our Crystal Ball House ratings — after the decision last Thursday, we tweeted that we were moving one unspecified Alabama district from Safe Republican to Likely Democratic. We say only Likely Democratic because it’s possible that this new district would not be an absolute slam dunk Democratic victory (or perhaps AL-7 would be reconfigured in such a way that it would be borderline competitive).
— A federal court in Louisiana made an analogous ruling in that state, which is politically similar to Alabama. Louisiana is about a third Black, but only one district (the 2nd, held by Democrat Troy Carter) is majority Black, so the state has five Safe Republican districts and one Safe Democratic district. Again, the endgame here very well could be that Democrats end up getting another seat, but we want to see how things play out. Louisiana uses a unique “jungle primary” system, in which all candidates compete together in the same primary, with a runoff required if no one clears 50%. Does that have an impact on the eventual jurisprudence here, or on how a newly-drawn district might perform politically? Or does Louisiana’s system help Democrats, given that because of the jungle primary — which in 2024 will occur concurrent with the November general election — filing deadlines are late in Louisiana, which gives this case extra time to wind through the legal system in advance of the 2024 election. It may be the case that despite Louisiana being similar to Alabama, the Gingles test may not force a second majority-Black district there in the same way as might happen in Alabama — or that is at least what state Republicans want the U.S. Supreme Court to ponder. (Democrats and their allies of course disagree and see Alabama and Louisiana as very similar — that makes sense to us, too, but we shall see.)
— This case also could force changes in Georgia, although it seems possible that a new map there wouldn’t actually change the partisan balance in the state, which is 9-5 Republican following a GOP gerrymander there in advance of the 2022 election. In other words, perhaps a currently Democratic seat in the Atlanta area could be altered to satisfy a court order to add an extra Black seat without actually giving the Democrats an extra seat. Court-ordered redraws do not always lead to changes to the political bottom line: North Carolina Republicans were ordered to redraw their congressional map because of racial gerrymandering concerns in advance of the 2016 election, but they did so in such a way that they were able to preserve their 10-3 statewide majority (we’ll get back to North Carolina later).
— A federal court also ruled against the South Carolina congressional map earlier this year, but it did so in a different way than in the Alabama case. Unlike in, say, Alabama and Louisiana, it might be difficult to satisfy the Gingles test in South Carolina to add a second Black district because of the compactness prong of Gingles: The Black population share in the state is very similar to Alabama, but Black South Carolinians are just more geographically spread out. So when thinking about Milligan’s ramifications, we aren’t including South Carolina in our calculations, based on our best understanding. The U.S. Supreme Court is slated to hear this case in its next term.
— The situation is also different in Florida, where there is ongoing litigation over the partisan gerrymander successfully pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last cycle. Among other things, that map undid a Safe Democratic, substantially Black (but not majority Black) district that ran from Jacksonville to Tallahassee. The state Supreme Court in Florida may order that district restored in some form — although the court is fairly aligned with DeSantis, so we wouldn’t necessarily bet on it — but, if it does, the court’s decision would be based on particulars in the state constitution, amended by voters in 2010 to prevent gerrymandering, as opposed to federal law (Democratic analyst Matt Isbell had a good rundown of the situation there if you’re curious).
— Texas also comes up in discussions of the ripple effects of the Milligan ruling, but the situation there is more complicated in part because the discussion is more about Latino voters than Black voters, and Latino voters are not as politically cohesive as Black voters are — which, again, may complicate a court using the Gingles test to force a redraw there.
So what’s the upshot here? Again, and we have to stress this even though it’s an answer that won’t satisfy anyone, we are just going to have to wait to see how things shake out. But we do think some of the post-Milligan analysis that suggested that Democrats could enjoy a windfall of several seats in time for the 2024 election is, at the very least, premature. That may happen, eventually, but at the moment we’re most focused on the likelihood of a single extra Democratic seat in Alabama (which is now reflected in our ratings) and quite possibly Louisiana (which is not reflected in our ratings, at least for now).
One other thing to remember — just because Democrats got a ruling that they liked here does not mean that this very conservative court is going to start ruling for them on related cases in the future. As others noted, the key vote in this 5-4 decision was probably Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who left some breadcrumbs suggesting that Alabama just did not make the right arguments in this case. This is part of the reason why we are not making a ton of assumptions right now about what is next in states beyond Alabama.
Speaking of future Supreme Court decisions, Milligan was not the only important redistricting-related case in front of the court this term: We are still waiting to see what the Supreme Court says in Moore v. Harper.
That case is about the North Carolina state Supreme Court’s intervention against a Republican gerrymander in advance of the 2022 election. That intervention turned what would have been a 10-4 or even 11-3 Republican map in North Carolina into what became a 7-7 tie in November 2022, saving the Democrats several seats. Since then, Republicans have taken control of the North Carolina court, which already overruled its previous decision that defanged Republican gerrymandering efforts. So Moore v. Harper appears very unlikely to have any practical bearing now on North Carolina itself: Republicans are going to have the power to restore a gerrymander there.
The importance of the case from a redistricting perspective, then, is whether the U.S. Supreme Court will impose constraints on state judicial interventions against congressional maps. We have no idea what the court is going to do — it might just punt the decision given that North Carolina’s Supreme Court reversed itself after it changed from Democratic to Republican in 2022. However, the U.S. Supreme Court may issue a decision that impacts the ability of other state courts to intervene against gerrymandering. That could have ripple effects, like in Wisconsin, where the state’s new, Democratic-leaning state Supreme Court may be tempted to rule against Republican partisan gerrymanders later this year. Stay tuned.
Since the Supreme Court’s aforementioned Wesberry v. Sanders decision, which applied the concept of “one person, one vote” to congressional redistricting, there have been 30, two-year congressional election cycles (every even-numbered year from 1964 through 2022). Based on research I did for my history of recent House elections, 2021’s The Long Red Thread, at least one congressional district (and often more) changed from the previous cycle in 23 of those 30 election cycles. Most of these changes (though not all) were forced by courts. The 2024 cycle will make it 24 of 31 cycles, with potentially several states changing their maps in response to court orders. We bring this up to say that despite the now-familiar rhythm of all the states with at least two districts redrawing to reflect the census at the start of every decade, it’s common for at least some districts to change more often than that.
Beyond the states mentioned above, at least some of which will have new maps next year, Ohio is also likely to have a new map that quite possibly will be better for Republicans than the current one, which the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional but which was eventually used anyway in 2022 (just like in North Carolina, the Ohio Supreme Court has since changed in such a way to make it more amenable to GOP redistricting prerogatives going forward). Democrats in New York are trying to force a new map, in part because of changes to that state’s highest court that may make that court more amenable to Democratic redistricting arguments than the previous court, which undid a Democratic gerrymander. The particulars in both states require longer-winded explanations that we’ll save for another time.
And aside from the changes forced by courts, one also wonders if we will eventually see a redistricting technique that at one time was common but really has not been in recent decades: a state legislature enacting an elective, mid-decade remap without prompting by the courts.
The most famous modern example of this is when Texas Republicans redrew their state’s congressional map following the 2002 election. That gerrymander, which is most closely associated with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R), came after Republicans took full control of Texas state government in 2002. They replaced a court-drawn map that reflected a previous Democratic gerrymander and imposed their own partisan gerrymander, turning a 17-15 deficit in what had become a very Republican state into a 21-11 advantage. Georgia Republicans did something similar later in the decade, though to much less effect; Colorado Republicans tried to but were blocked by state courts — some states do not allow mid-decade redistricting, but others do (there is no federal prohibition on mid-decade redistricting). North Carolina’s looming redraw is somewhat similar to those in Texas and Georgia from the 2000s: The voters changed the political circumstances — Republicans taking control of Texas and Georgia state government in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and Republicans flipping the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022 — paving the way for the partisan gerrymanders that did (or will) follow.
The redistricting stakes are extremely high at a time when U.S. House majorities are so narrow. Democrats won just a 222-213 majority in 2020, and Republicans won the same 222-213 edge last year. It’s possible that the net impact of mid-decade redistricting — including some of the changes we’ve laid out above — could be decisive in who wins the majority next year. It may also prompt other states to try to go back to the redistricting well without prompting by courts — and if they determine they can based on state law — if they believe that new maps could make a difference in determining majorities.
| Dear Readers: We’re pleased to welcome polling expert Natalie Jackson back to the Crystal Ball this week. She explores Donald Trump’s continued strength in the GOP despite a recent indictment. We also urge you to listen to our recent Politics is Everything podcast episode with Natalie, where we discussed Trump, the GOP’s polling requirements for entry into primary debates, and much more. Listen and subscribe here or wherever you get your podcasts.
— The Editors |
— Despite a second indictment, Donald Trump remains in a strong position in the GOP presidential primary field.
— Trump continues to earn majorities or near-majorities in polls, far outpacing his rivals, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
— Republicans would rather have a nominee they agree with than an electable one.
As the Republican presidential primary field fills out and former President Donald Trump confronts a second indictment, an intriguing battle of numbers has emerged among GOP pollsters aligned with Trump and Florida Gov. (and now candidate) Ron DeSantis over whether Trump can win a general election against President Joe Biden.
In a column for National Journal a couple of weeks ago, I discussed the team DeSantis argument and why leaked numbers that are favorable for Trump’s archrival are nothing to hang one’s hat on. The pollsters affiliated with DeSantis (or pro-DeSantis PACs) continue to push back on polls that look strong for Trump. In many cases their critiques are valid, but it’s unclear that a non-Trump Republican would overcome the hurdles they cite as problems for Trump.
Shortly after, team Trump has started pushing back by pointing out that the general electorate knows little about DeSantis, and demonstrating how they can make the DeSantis polling numbers look worse by saying bad things about him. That’s a common campaign message testing strategy that campaign pollsters use to figure out their opponents’ weaknesses — it’s just usually not made public. Like the pro-DeSantis leaked polls, however, this pro-Trump memo was leaked to make a specific point.
That was before Trump’s latest indictment, but the arraignment in Miami looks to change little in the GOP primary race. The particular Trump vs. DeSantis electability data war is likely to continue, as DeSantis has chosen to attack the Justice Department rather than Trump. Trump still maintains three significant advantages that DeSantis and the other candidates will have to climb a mountain to overcome:
It’s still early, but both FiveThirtyEight’s and RealClearPolitics’s polling averages show Trump currently above 50% in national primary polls, and solidly leading in early state polls. Only a few polls have emerged since the indictment, but there is not a clear sign of this changing. It’s still early (repetition intentional), but breaking the 50% threshold is substantial, particularly given that the remaining vote has to be divided among a lot of candidates and only DeSantis regularly gets into double digits. A CBS News-YouGov poll, partially conducted after the latest indictment news, shows 75% of likely Republican voters are considering voting for Trump, with the next contender (DeSantis) being considered by 52% — and from there it drops to a fifth or less. Even if Trump loses a few percentage points due to the indictment, the uphill climb for the challengers is steep with a lot of rock scrambling.
That same CBS News-YouGov poll shows that 62% of Republicans say Trump would definitely beat Biden in 2024. A recent Monmouth University Poll had a similar finding — that 63% of Republican voters think Trump is likely their best bet. These numbers could certainly change. That’s true of any numbers in this column — that’s why I keep saying it’s still early. But nearly two-thirds of the potential primary electorate thinks Trump is the one to beat Biden. That means most Republicans are not open to DeSantis’s argument that he’s more electable. If people aren’t open to an argument, it won’t be very effective.
A moderate Republican would have a smoother pathway to victory than Trump or DeSantis, particularly given Biden’s lackluster numbers, age, and relatively low-key persona. But moderate candidates face a very difficult primary environment where ideologues are more likely to vote for strong conservatives. A March CNN poll showed 59% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents would choose a candidate they agree with on the issues over a candidate who has a strong chance to beat Biden (41%). This undoubtedly favors Trump over other candidates. Michael Tesler pointed out in FiveThirtyEight that Republicans now equate Trump support with conservatism. The CBS News-YouGov poll showed that Republicans split 50-50 on whether they should focus on appealing to moderates and independents vs. motivating conservatives and Republicans.
There are still two significant complicating factors for Trump, though. The first is obviously his ongoing legal risk, with now two indictments and additional investigations ongoing. However, these investigations don’t seem to affect Republicans’ views of him, although an ABC News-Ipsos poll conducted after the second indictment does show that 38% of Republicans think the charges are serious, compared to only 21% in the first indictment. That said, the same poll shows that 80% of Republicans think the new charges are politically motivated, and nothing prevents Trump from running while under indictment — or even from prison.
The other complication is that the GOP primary field is large. It remains possible that one of these alternatives could catch on with voters and dislodge some of Trump’s supporters. A large field challenging an ex-president (an incumbent once-removed?) seems odd if Trump is really the party leader.
Contrast that with 2020, when Trump faced no significant challenges. That said, the GOP would have to align behind one alternative by January or so in order to give that candidate any chance of winning the nomination. And even then, we have no idea whether Trump or DeSantis, or any other candidate, would win. You can say it the other way, too: We have no idea whether Biden will win. It’s too early and the numbers all show a close race, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago.
Still, the evidence we have now indicates that if the field remains Trump vs. nearly a dozen (or more) others, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney is correct: Trump is “by far” the most likely Republican presidential nominee in 2024. Electable or not.
| Natalie Jackson is a research consultant working in political polling and a contributing editor with National Journal. More of her writing can be found on her substack. |
— The percentage of women in state legislatures has increased in recent years. However, there is still a significant gender gap in most states as women have not reached parity in representation.
— The majority of women in state legislatures are Democrats. While more Republican women ran for office in 2022 than in previous years, that didn’t amount to closing the gender gap in representation.
— The percentage of women in state legislatures has increased more in Western and Northeastern states than in Midwestern and Southern states. This is likely due to a number of factors, including the political climate, the level of motivation and activism among women, and the availability of resources for women’s campaigns.
In a special election on May 16, Democrats maintained a narrow majority in the Pennsylvania House of Delegates. As a result, the party will be able to continue to exert control over how the lower chamber of the state legislature will handle reproductive, gun, and voting rights legislation. With Republicans still holding the Pennsylvania Senate, the House could also provide an assist to Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro in budget negotiations. In House District 163, Democratic candidate Heather Boyd defeated Republican candidate Katie Ford for a vacancy created by Democratic Rep. Mike Zabel, who resigned from the legislature after multiple people, including a lobbyist and other lawmakers accused him of sexual harassment. That two women vied for the House seat is a sign of change for a state legislature that has been accused in the past by other women lawmakers of having a paternalistic culture and being an “Old Boys Club.”
But it’s not just Pennsylvania that’s changing. In early April, as the Tennessee House was about to vote on expulsion resolutions for Reps. Justin Pearson (D-Memphis), Justin Jones (D-Nashville), and Gloria Johnson (D-Knoxville) for leading a protest against gun violence on the House floor on March 30, Johnson told her colleagues in the state legislature that they should welcome a new generation of lawmakers who are going to look and do things differently because they “are fighting like hell” for their constituents. Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a bill that would ban abortion around the 6th week of pregnancy failed to get a crucial 33rd vote to break a filibuster in the technically nonpartisan and unicameral state legislature when Republican Sen. Merv Riepe abstained. When Riepe got pushback on an amendment he introduced to extend the proposed ban from 6 to 12 weeks, he told his Republican colleagues that reproductive rights will have women voting them out of office. He offered as evidence his own narrowing margins of victory against a Democratic woman challenger in a post-Dobbs election as a preview of what’s to come. In South Carolina, where women make up only 11% of the upper chamber, the opposition of all five women, including three Republicans, led to the failure of a near-total abortion ban by a 22-21 vote in April. While a comparatively less strict fetal heartbeat ban did eventually pass in May with the continued opposition of the five women, that they were able to prevent the passage of a stricter bill is another example of how women in decision-making positions can impact policy outcomes.
These vignettes got me thinking about how representation in state legislatures is (or is not) changing and prompted us to do a series examining trends. In this first installment, I examine how women’s representation has changed in American state legislatures since 1975. To analyze change in women’s representation in state legislatures from 1975 to 2023, I compiled data from several sources, including the National Conference of State Legislatures, Ballotpedia, and the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. Political science scholarship has shown that descriptive representation matters. Specifically, scholarship on gender and politics has shown that men and women have different policy preferences, and that female legislators are more likely to emphasize women’s issues and adopt women-friendly policies (see a good review of the literature here).
According to CAWP, the number of women serving in state legislatures has more than quintupled since 1971. Figure 1 shows the change in the percentage of women legislators in lower legislative chambers of all 50 states between 1975 and 2023. Readers can hover over each state to see pop-ups with additional information for each state, including a breakdown of women legislators by party each year. Note: Nebraska has a unicameral legislature, but I include it in both upper and lower chamber figures for comparison.
Figure 2 shows the percentage of women legislators in upper legislative chambers of all 50 states between 1975 and 2023. Readers can hover over each state to see pop-ups with additional information for each state, including a breakdown of women legislators by party each year (again, unicameral Nebraska is included on both figures).
Although it didn’t receive much national news media attention, women scored big in the 2022 elections for state legislative seats. As of this year, almost one-third of state legislators are women, and there is a record number of women serving in state legislatures. Maps 1 and 2 below are shaded by the percentage of women’s representation in upper and lower chambers for each state as of 2023. As Map 1 shows, Nevada has the highest percentage of women serving (61.9%) in lower legislative chambers, while Mississippi has the lowest (11%). Map 2 shows that Nevada also has the highest percentage of women in upper chambers (61.9%), while South Carolina has the lowest (10.9%).
While the increase in representation is a positive sign, there is still a significant gender gap in most states. Women have reached parity in representation in just 3 lower state legislative chambers (Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada) and in just 3 upper chambers (Arizona, New Hampshire, and Nevada). Compare that to the fact that women make up about 50.7% of the population nationally, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Women also have higher reported voter registration and voting rates than men for every federal election since 1984, according to data from the Current Population Survey.
As of 2022, the most recent year for which race and ethnicity data is available, the majority of women legislators are white (73.2%). Women of color make up 24.6% of women legislators, with Black women comprising 16.1%, Latinas 6.7%, Middle Eastern .5%, and Native American/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian 1.3%.
Maps 1 and 2 contain pop-up information with additional details by state, including the percentage point change from 2010 to 2023 of women serving in upper and lower chambers. The change in the percentage of women in lower legislative chambers since 2010 ranges from a decrease of 9 percentage points in West Virginia to an increase of 31 percentage points in Nevada. The top 10 states with the greatest percentage point increase in women’s representation in lower legislative chambers are Nevada (+30.9 percentage points), Oregon (+21.6), New Mexico (+21.4), Rhode Island (+20), Colorado (+19.9), Delaware (+19.5), Virginia (+19), Washington (+18.4), Florida (+17.5), and Kentucky (+17). Lower legislative chambers in 6 states experienced no growth or decline: Wyoming (0 pp increase), Kansas (-2.4), North Carolina (-4.2), Mississippi (-4.9), Tennessee (-6.1) and West Virginia (-9), all of which are controlled by Republicans.
Not surprisingly, it has been more challenging for women to break barriers in upper legislative chambers than lower chambers. While women’s representation has increased in 40 of 50 states since 2010, there are still states with relatively low percentages of women serving in the upper chamber. Women have 20% or less of representation in 10 states, all controlled by Republicans: South Carolina (10.9%), Alabama (11.4%), West Virginia (11.8%), Louisiana (12.8%), Arkansas (14.2%), North Dakota (17%), Indiana (18%), Mississippi (19.2%), Utah (20.7%), and Oklahoma (20.8%). And our home base of Virginia, which will have legislative elections later this year, is just barely ahead, with 22.5% of women in the Democratic-controlled state Senate.
There are 10 states that experienced an increase of 15 percentage points or more in women’s representation in upper legislative chambers since 2010: Nevada (+28.6 percentage points), Rhode Island (+23.6), North Carolina (+20), Illinois (+18.7), Florida (+17.5), Wyoming (+16.6), Nebraska (unicameral, +16.3), Michigan (+15.8), New York (+15.7), and California (+15). Upper legislative chambers in 10 states experienced no growth or decline since 2010: Delaware (0 percentage point increase), Hawaii (0), Massachusetts (0), Tennessee (0), Arkansas (-2.9), Colorado (-3), Oregon (-3.3), New Hampshire (-4.1), Alabama (-5.6), Minnesota (-7.5), Indiana (-12), and Louisiana (-12.8).
The variation in the percentage of women in state legislatures and change can be attributed to a variety of factors, including the political climate, the level of motivation and activism among women, and the availability of resources for women to run and serve in office.
Since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election and as issues affecting women’s rights to self-determination have been at the forefront in the last couple election cycles, there has been a renewed interest for women to run for office and serve in politics. In general, there have been more efforts to recruit and train Democratic candidates to run for office. However, the Republican Party is doing a better job of recruiting women than in the past. In 2022, the Republican State Leadership Committee reported that 769 Republican women and minority candidates were elected to state legislative positions, an increase over 2020. The RSLC also said that it spent $5.3 million recruiting, training, and supporting diverse candidates. While more Republican women ran for office in 2022 than in previous years, that didn’t amount to closing the gender gap in representation, especially in Republican-controlled legislatures in the South. As of 2023, one-third of all women state legislators are Republican, and Republican women account for 10.9% of all state legislators.
Overall, the increase in women elected to state legislatures has particularly come from the Democratic Party, with 1,580 Democratic women lawmakers serving in upper and lower state legislative chambers. Two-thirds of all women legislators are Democrats, and Democratic women account for 21.4% of all state legislators. The biggest increase for Democratic women legislators occurred in the 2018 election cycle — we’ll call that the Trump effect.
In addition to the political parties, there are organizations and PACs at the national and state levels focused on recruiting and supporting women. I reviewed a database of organizations that CAWP maintains and found that the majority of the organizations are nonpartisan (65.7%), while 20.5% of them are Democratic-affiliated and 13.8% are Republican-affiliated. Organizations with a national focus make up 15.3% of the total, and the remaining are state-focused (including state-based chapters of national organizations). California (6.2% of all organizations) and Texas (4.2%) stand out with the greatest percentage of state-based organizations. Still, not all women who go through political leadership programs run for office. And the percentage of organizations in a state doesn’t translate to parity.
Good politics and policy depend on diverse perspectives and lived experiences, but women remain underrepresented at all levels of government. As this analysis shows, the number of women in state legislatures is increasing, and this is a positive trend. However, as this analysis also demonstrates, progress is not a given and there are clearly states where more attention to closing the gender gap in representation is needed.
For women to achieve parity in representation, there are structural challenges that states can address, including for example, by increasing salaries for legislators and providing stipends for childcare. There are also ways in which political parties and organizations can address the challenges women and other minoritized candidates face by expanding recruitment, encouragement, and training efforts, while increasing financial support for women to run for office. Openings and incumbency are also issues, and may require encouraging more women to challenge candidates from their own parties in primaries.
| Dear Readers: Join us on Tuesday, April 11 for a conversation with Nguyen Quoc Dzung, ambassador of Vietnam to the United States. The ambassador will speak on the relationship between Vietnam and the U.S. and issues impacting Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
The program begins at 6:30 p.m. eastern at Minor Hall, Room 125, on the Grounds of the University of Virginia. It is free and open to the public to attend with advanced registration through Eventbrite; it will also be livestreamed at https://livestream.com/tavco/ambassadorofvietnam. — The Editors |
— After looking at the Midwest last week, we’re comparing the presidential voting trajectory of the bigger counties versus the rest of the state in a number of eastern states.
— Georgia had exactly opposite top and bottom halves in 2020, with a very Republican (but stable) bottom half and Democratic-trending top half driven by changes in Atlanta.
— North Carolina and Pennsylvania are mirror images on opposite sides of the political divide.
— Florida’s turn toward the Republicans has been a bit more pronounced in its top half of bigger counties compared to its bottom half, making it an outlier among the states we’ve studied.
— South Carolina’s status as a red state is much more about its top half than its bottom half.
James Brown’s version of the song “Night Train” — one of the best songs ever recorded, in my humble opinion — calls out the path of a train starting from Miami and moving up the eastern seaboard. Among other places, the train stops in Atlanta, Raleigh, Richmond, and Philadelphia.
What does this have to do with presidential politics? Well… nothing really. It’s just that I heard the song over the weekend as I was trying to tie together the collection of eastern states I’m analyzing this week. This is a follow-up to last week’s exploration of how the biggest counties in a state vote for president compared to the rest of the state. So, I thought, the Night Train’s path kind of does the trick. Plus, if this apparent non sequitur inspires you to listen to the song, well, trust me, your day will be better off for it.
After analyzing 7 Midwestern states last week, we turn east this week, looking at a series of states extending from Pennsylvania in the north to Florida in the South. They are geographically connected, except that we skipped Maryland on account of it being so overwhelmingly Democratic.
These are a politically diverse group of states, including red South Carolina, bluish Virginia, reddening Florida, and 3 of the nation’s premier battlegrounds: Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Just like last week, we split each state in half, grouping together the biggest-voting counties that added up to roughly half the statewide vote in the 2020 presidential election (the top half) and comparing them to the other counties that make up the rest of the state (the bottom half). We used Dave Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections for the results, and Dave’s Redistricting App to highlight the top half counties in orange on the maps that follow. For a more detailed explanation of methodology, see last week’s piece.
All aboard?
Top half counties that add up to half the statewide vote: Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach in South Florida cast about a quarter of the statewide vote. Others in this group are Hillsborough and Pinellas, which make up the core of the Tampa/St. Petersburg/Clearwater area; Duval (Jacksonville) in the northeast; Orange (Orlando) in central Florida; and Lee (Fort Myers/Cape Coral in the southwest). Joe Biden won all of these but Lee; Barack Obama won 6 of the 8, losing Duval and Lee.
Bottom half counties that make up the other half of the statewide vote: The state’s other 59 counties; Obama lost all but 7, Biden lost all but 5.
Of the 13 Midwestern/eastern states we’ve looked at as part of this analysis, Florida has an unusual distinction: It is the only 1 of the 13 where the Democrats’ margin in the top half dropped more than their margin in the bottom half from 2012 to 2020. As you can see in Table 1, the drop was similar — 4.4 points in margin in the top half and 3.9 in the bottom half — which makes it an outlier, too, as generally (not always) the bottom halves of these states have gotten substantially more Republican as the top halves have seen only a modest Democratic decline or, sometimes, a small or even large pro-Democratic shift.
A big reason for a Republican shift in the big counties is that the 3 big South Florida counties were considerably less blue in 2020 than they were in 2012: Obama won the trio by 26 points, while Biden won them by 16 points. Miami-Dade has driven that shift, going from a 24-point Obama margin (and 29 for Hillary Clinton in 2016) to just 7 for Biden in 2020, but the other 2 got less blue as well, albeit not as dramatically.
Overall, Florida has a bottom half that is comparable to some states in the Midwest, perhaps in part because Florida’s booming retirement communities (many of which have big populations but are included in the bottom half) have many Midwestern expats (we looked at some of these counties last year). Trump won Florida’s bottom half of counties by 18 points, very similar to Wisconsin (15 points) and Minnesota (17 points). But the top half of Florida only voted for Biden by 11 points, comparable to the top half of Iowa (12 points), a state that like Florida has shifted right recently. Florida is definitely more competitive than the double-digit victories by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R) last year, but it’s also clearly trending toward Republicans.
Top half: 11 counties, with 9 of those being part of the Greater Atlanta area (Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb, Cherokee, Forsyth, Henry, Clayton, and Hall, in order of most to least populous). The other 2 counties outside of Atlanta’s orbit are Chatham (Savannah) in the southeast and Richmond (Augusta) in the east. Biden won 8 of these 11, with the exceptions being Atlanta exurbs Cherokee, Forsyth, and Hall. Obama won just 5 of the 11: Clayton, DeKalb, and Fulton in the Atlanta area in addition to Chatham and Richmond.
Bottom half: Georgia has a lot of counties, and 148 of the 159 make up the bottom half. Obama won 29 of these counties, while Biden won 22. Like many other Southern states, Georgia has a lot of rural and heavily Black Democratic counties, which helps account for Democrats’ ability to win these counties, although as their dwindling number suggests, many of these counties have still drifted towards Republicans.
The change in Georgia has been essentially entirely driven by its top half counties, which is dominated by counties in the Atlanta orbit. The Democratic presidential margin in Georgia’s top half has swelled from 10 points in 2012 to 26 points in 2020. Meanwhile, the bottom half has hardly changed at all, moving from a 25-point Republican margin to a 26-point margin. In Georgia, Republicans were effectively already maxed out with rural white voters prior to Trump, and there also are a substantial number of votes in the bottom half from majority Black rural counties and a few larger Democratic-leaning counties to keep Democrats from getting completely blown out in that group (the bottom halves of Iowa and Ohio, for instance, are redder now than the bottom half of Georgia). The bottom and the top halves gave their respective candidates 25.7-point margins — exactly the same, down to a tenth of a point. Biden won because the top half counties cast slightly more of the vote, based on this calculation (50.5% vs. 49.5% for the bottom half).
The bottom line is if Republicans can’t stop the bleeding in the Greater Atlanta area, Georgia eventually could go the way of Virginia and become bluer than the nation as opposed to redder (which it still is).
Top half: The dozen counties that make up North Carolina’s top half are generally centered around Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, and the Piedmont Triad (Greensboro/High Point/Winston-Salem). The biggest source of votes is Wake (Raleigh), and neighboring Durham and Johnston counties are also in this group. Mecklenburg (Charlotte), the second-largest source of votes, is also included, along with neighboring Union, Cabarrus, and Gaston. Guilford (Greensboro) and Forsyth (Winston-Salem) cast the third and fourth-most votes, respectively, and are located west of the Raleigh-Durham metro area. Finally, Buncombe (Asheville), Cumberland (Fayetteville), and New Hanover (Wilmington) provide other vote anchors in, respectively, the western, south-central, and southeastern parts of the state. Biden won 8 of these 12 counties, losing only the suburban/exurban Johnston south of Raleigh as well as the suburban/exurban satellites of Mecklenburg: Cabarrus, Gaston, and Union. Obama won 7 of the 12, with the same lineup as Biden except Obama narrowly lost New Hanover while Biden won it.
Bottom half: The other 88 counties: Obama won 23, Biden won 17.
The Tar Heel State is in a period of considerable flux, with the gap between its top and bottom halves expanding. But for all of the positive Democratic trends in the top half, the bottom half has gotten considerably more Republican over the same time period, too, keeping the state persistently right of center.
At the topline level, North Carolina voted very similarly in 2012 and 2020, producing a 2-point margin for Mitt Romney and then a 1.3-point margin for Donald Trump. In each election, the state was the Republican nominee’s closest victory. Yet like other states, that statewide similarity masks a lot of changes happening at the sub-state level, with Democrats getting bigger margins in the major urban areas but losing ground elsewhere. Biden was the first postwar Democratic nominee to clear 60% of the vote in both Mecklenburg and Wake counties and still came up short, speaking to how much the rest of the state has moved. Two key places of Democratic slippage have come in the northeast, home to several heavily Black rural counties where Democratic performance is not as strong as it once was, as well as a mix of counties near the South Carolina border between Charlotte and Fayetteville. Robeson County, home of the Lumbee Indian tribe, is a prime example, as it went from 58%-41% Obama to 59%-41% Trump in just 8 years.
Two key differences between Georgia and North Carolina are 1. North Carolina is not dominated by a single metro area and 2. Democrats had further to fall in the state’s bottom half in North Carolina but did not in Georgia, at least at the moment. (My colleague J. Miles Coleman took a deeper look at North Carolina trends for the Crystal Ball recently.) Demographically, it is also worth noting that about one-third of Georgia’s residents are Black while less than one-quarter of North Carolina’s are, which is likely another larger-scale factor keeping the latter in the red column.
Top half: The 8 counties in this group are all in southeast/south-central Pennsylvania with the exception of Allegheny (Pittsburgh), which narrowly trails Philadelphia County as a source of votes in presidential elections despite only having a population roughly 80% the size of Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s core suburban counties — Montgomery, Bucks, Delaware, and Chester — along with growing Lancaster and York to Philadelphia’s west round out the list. Obama won 5 of the 8, losing Chester, Lancaster, and York. Biden won 6 of the 8, adding Chester.
Bottom half: The other 59 counties: Obama won 8, Biden won 7. They both won the same total number of counties statewide (13), with the only difference between the two being that Obama lost Chester in the Philadelphia suburbs while carrying Luzerne (Wilkes-Barre) in the northeast — Biden won the former and lost the latter, which is adjacent to his childhood home in Lackawanna (Scranton).
Pennsylvania’s top and bottom halves are now very similar to North Carolina’s, as they are close to being mirror opposites of one another. Like many of the states in the Midwest, Republicans have gotten much stronger in Pennsylvania’s bottom half counties in the Trump era, although the Pennsylvania top half has gotten a little bluer.
The Keystone State is often lumped in with the 2 other so-called “Blue Wall” states of Michigan and Wisconsin, which together have all voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992, with the exception of 2016. Compared to those states, Pennsylvania’s top half is bluer — but its bottom half is redder. It does bring to mind the old adage attributed to Democratic strategist James Carville that the state is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between (although that’s apparently not exactly what he said, as Politico noted many years ago).
That said, Biden did run better than Hillary Clinton in much of the state (including almost all of its eastern half, with Philadelphia itself being one of just a few exceptions). This helps explain how he flipped the state back after she narrowly lost it. But Democrats are in trouble in Pennsylvania if the native Pennsylvanian’s candidacy was only effectively a rearguard action against more significant Democratic erosion in the smaller counties. Democrats performed quite well in Pennsylvania in the 2022 midterm — but they also did in 2018, and that didn’t prevent the 2020 election from being a nail-biter.
Top half: The largest source of votes in the Palmetto State is not Charleston County (which is second), but rather Greenville in the northwestern part of the state. Its eastern neighbor, Spartanburg, is fifth. The others in this group are Richland (Columbia) and its western suburban neighbor Lexington in the center of the state, Horry (Myrtle Beach) on the state’s northern coast, and York, which is just south of Charlotte on the other side of the North Carolina border. Obama and Biden each carried just 2 of the 7: Charleston and Richland.
Bottom half: The other 39 counties; Obama carried 19 while Biden carried 11. Some of the state’s smaller, rural counties are majority Black (as is the case in other Southern states) and heavily Democratic. Still, Republicans generally dominate the most vote-rich counties in the bottom half.
South Carolina is the least competitive state among these 6, but we included it basically just to show why it is staunchly Republican even as its 2 neighbors along the coast — North Carolina to the north and Georgia to the southwest — are 2 of the nation’s premier battlegrounds.
South Carolina’s big counties, collectively, are not blue, nor are they really even purple. While the state’s top half got a little less red from 2012 to 2020, Trump still won the group by 9 points. Of the 13 states we’ve looked at as part of this series, it’s the only state so far where Trump won the top half. Interestingly, South Carolina’s bottom half was actually less red than its top half in 2012, which likely is explained by the voting habits of several smaller, heavily Black rural counties predominantly located between Columbia and Charleston in the southeastern half of the state. But by 2020, the familiar pattern of the top half being more Democratic than the bottom half had been established in South Carolina.
In order for the state to get competitive, one would need to see a real Democratic trend in the top half, including big swings to the left in historically conservative and strongly Republican places like Greenville and Spartanburg in upstate South Carolina. Greenville actually did get less Republican from 2012 to 2018, but it went from a 28-point Romney margin to an 18-point Trump margin (and Spartanburg actually got a few points redder over the same timeframe). Something much more dramatic than that is needed to make South Carolina an actual swing state, and South Carolina was actually a little closer for president in 2012 than it was in 2020.
Top half: All 11 of the localities included here are based in Northern Virginia, Greater Richmond, or Hampton Roads — the 3 components of the state’s heavily-populated “Urban Crescent.” We say “localities” because Virginia has both counties as well as independent cities. Fairfax County is by far the biggest voting locality in the state, casting more than double the votes of anywhere else, although it only casts about 13% of the total statewide vote. Prince William, Loudoun, and Arlington counties as well as Alexandria City join it as Northern Virginia components of the top half. The 3 core Richmond localities — the city itself plus neighboring suburban Chesterfield to its south and Henrico to its north — as well as the biggest Hampton Roads localities, the independent cities of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, and Norfolk, round out this group. Biden won all 11 of these counties/cities; Obama won all but Chesterfield and Virginia Beach.
Bottom half: The other 122 counties/independent cities. Biden carried 35, comparable to the 37 that Obama carried.
The trajectory of Virginia’s top half from 2012 to 2020 mirrors that of the top half of Georgia, as both zoomed roughly 15 points toward the Democrats in terms of margin. Biden won the top half of Virginia by 32 points, a margin greater than the 30 points by which Biden won the top half of Minnesota, which we explored last week. Meanwhile, the Republican margin in the bottom half of Virginia was only about 11 points, or just about 3 points better than it was in 2012.
Democrats are buoyed by the presence of several key voting centers among the bottom half counties/cities, such as overwhelmingly Democratic Newport News, which was the biggest source of votes in the bottom half. There are paths for Republicans to win statewide — as shown in the 2021 state elections — but Virginia has still pretty clearly moved toward the Democrats in federal elections.
Table 7 shows how these 6 states voted in 2020 overall, as well as how their top and bottom halves voted. In all 3 sections, the states are ranked from most Democratic to most Republican.
Some takeaways:
— Virginia had both the bluest top and bottom halves, unsurprising for a state that is much more Democratic than the other 5 at the federal level.
— Georgia had the second-bluest top half, but also the reddest bottom half, which contributed to the state’s tiny margin in favor of Biden in 2020. However, the top half got way bluer from 2012 to 2020 while the bottom half hardly moved at all, so the arrow may be pointing up for Democrats in Georgia moving forward.
— There are more than 40-point marginal gaps between the top and bottom halves of both North Carolina and Pennsylvania, with the top halves each being around 20-point Democratic margins and the bottom halves each being around 20-point Republican margins. Each gave their winning presidential candidate a margin of just a little over a point in 2020, so it wouldn’t take much change to flip either.
— Florida’s top half is considerably less blue than those of Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, which goes a long way toward explaining why it’s become redder than those other states.
— South Carolina’s bottom half is not very red compared to the others, but its top half definitely is.
— In last night’s high-stakes state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, Democratic-aligned Janet Protasiewicz comfortably dispatched former Justice Daniel Kelly, giving liberals a 4-3 majority on the court.
— Compared to some previous Democratic-aligned judges, Protasiewicz had a more “nationalized” voting coalition, although she still carried several Republican-leaning parts of the state.
— A liberal state Supreme Court could revisit redistricting-related matters, to the benefit of Democrats, although there are a lot of moving pieces. With that in mind, we are downgrading our rating for southeastern Wisconsin’s 1st District from Safe Republican to Likely Republican.
| District | Old Rating | New Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Bryan Steil (R, WI-1) | Safe Republican | Likely Republican |
In Wisconsin last night, Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly in what became a nationally-watched (and very expensive) race. Importantly, Protasiewicz will be replacing the retiring Pat Roggensack, a conservative veteran of the court — this will give the court’s liberal bloc a 4-3 majority on the bench. During the campaign, Protasiewicz was clear that, if elected, she would side with Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) over the Republican leadership in the legislature when it came to high-profile issues like abortion or gerrymandering (more on that later).
In our write-up last week, we called Protasiewicz a mild favorite: though the race was hard to nail down exactly, we wrote that we expected anything from a double-digit Protasiewicz win to a slight Kelly win. A commanding Democratic win would have followed the pattern of 2 of the last 3 state Supreme Court races (2018 and 2020) while the 2019 race offered a template for a Republican-aligned upset.
The result last night was nearly a carbon copy of the 2018 and 2020 results: Protasiewicz won by 11 points, or about the same margin as now-Justices Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karoksfy, who she will soon join on the bench.
Though former President Trump’s indictment happened a day after we put out our analysis last week, it was something that would, according to some punditry, rally Republicans. But, as we’ll explore here, last night’s returns offered scant evidence that Kelly disproportionately benefited from any Trump-inspired backlash.
One of our other pre-election predictions held up well: high turnout was a hallmark of last night’s election. In February’s primary election, roughly 960,000 votes were cast. As of this writing, that number roughly doubled in the second round, with close to 1.84 million votes cast. 2023 featured the second highest-turnout April state Supreme Court race of the last decade, falling only behind 2016. About 1.95 million votes were cast in that 2016 race — importantly, it was held in conjunction with the presidential primary that year, where both sides saw competition.
Though turnout was down slightly from 2016’s contest, it rose in 10 counties. Dane County (Madison), which is one of the two Democratic powerhouse counties in the state, was among those 10 — it easily had the largest increase, casting 23,000 more votes than in 2016. The county that saw the largest decrease was actually the state’s other blue bastion, Milwaukee, which tallied 45,000 fewer votes this year. But that Milwaukee decline was not necessarily to Democrats’ detriment. Kelly earned only half as many votes in Milwaukee (124,000 compared to 63,000) as Justice Rebecca Bradley, the conservative that year, while Protasiewicz garnered 17,000 more votes there than JoAnne Kloppenburg, the liberal candidate who lost statewide by 5 points.
As noted earlier, in terms of the percentage margin, 2023 lined up nicely with the toplines from 2018 and 2020: in all 3 instances, the Democratic-aligned judges won by about 11 points.
Conveniently, for the sake of comparison, Kelly was the conservative candidate in both the 2020 and 2023 elections. Last week, we wondered whether the increasingly partisan nature of state Supreme Court elections, coupled with the expected high turnout this year, could lead to a more “presidential” coalition. As Map 1 shows, that was basically the case.
Protasiewicz fared about half a percentage point better than Karofsky overall but lost ground in 59 of the state’s 72 counties. The 3rd District, which takes up a large swath out west, illustrates some of the gains Kelly made in non-metro Wisconsin. According to our rough unofficial calculations, Protasiewicz carried the district by about 10 points — which is quite respectable, considering it gave Trump a 5-point margin and flipped to Republicans last year. But in 2020, Karofsky would have carried the 3rd District by closer to 15 points (the seat was barely altered in redistricting).
Though we flagged the area as a potential Democratic cause for concern — mostly because it torpedoed their chances in 2019 — Protasiewicz performed well in metro Milwaukee. As the third image on Map 1 illustrates, Milwaukee County was the sole county where Protasiewicz improved by more than 10 points on Karofsky’s showing. In fact, Protasiewicz swept all 19 municipalities within the county — this has likely not been done by a Democratic or liberal candidate since 2017, when Evers was reelected in a 40-point landslide to his previous position, state Superintendent of Public Instruction.
In an era when, from election to election, Democrats have seen their most obvious gains come in the suburbs, last night’s result represented something of a change of pace. Compared to Karofsky, Milwaukee proper was one of the municipalities that shifted most to Protasiewicz, as Table 2 shows.
To be clear, Table 2 is not meant to single out Karofsky as a poor performer in Milwaukee (her numbers were quite robust), but it is more to emphasize how strong Protasiewicz’s showing was. In fact, Protasiewicz’s 81.9% within the city of Milwaukee was even stronger than the 80.1% two-party share that Joe Biden received there.
Aside from Menominee County, a small county in the north that consists of an American Indian reservation, the county that shifted most to Democrats since February’s first round was Waukesha, one of the Republican-leaning “WOW” suburban counties that border Milwaukee County. Six weeks ago, Waukesha County gave the Republican-aligned candidates a combined 64%-36% share over the Democrats. Kelly’s advantage there last night slipped to 58%-42%. In February, Kelly’s GOP rival was Judge Jennifer Dorow, who had a base in Waukesha and performed better than him in most Milwaukee metro counties. Given last night’s result, we have to wonder if Dorow would have been a stronger conservative candidate than Kelly. At minimum, Kelly likely suffered some defections from Dorow voters.
A notable result from last night — and one that Democrats will certainly try to replicate in actual partisan races — was that Protasiewicz narrowly carried the City of Waukesha, the largest municipality in the similarly-named county.
The victory by Protasiewicz opens the door to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to potentially intervene against the state’s congressional map, which is a version of a Republican partisan gerrymander. Other state courts have done so in recent years against both Republican and Democratic gerrymanders.
This has national implications given the closely-divided U.S. House. Despite being one of the nation’s most competitive states, Republicans now hold a 6-2 advantage in the state’s U.S. House delegation. After losing the red-trending Obama-to-Trump WI-3 in western Wisconsin last year, Democrats are now confined to just a pair of heavily blue enclaves centered around Madison and Milwaukee.
The current congressional map is actually one drawn by Evers. Following Evers’s decision to veto the Republican legislature’s maps during the post-2020 census round of redistricting, the state Supreme Court and its 4-3 Republican majority asked both sides to submit maps, but they asked for only minimal changes to the existing map. So the map, which is a Republican partisan gerrymander from a decade ago, was just tweaked. The court, in a 4-3 decision reached by the 3 Democratic-aligned justices as well as Republican-aligned Brian Hagedorn, picked Evers’s map. But, again, it’s still functionally a Republican gerrymander, although Wisconsin’s political geography also lends itself to Republican advantages in redistricting. Our understanding is that one might not expect a “fair” map, however defined, to produce 50-50 outcomes in a 50-50 political environment in the state, although we also don’t think a 6-2 Republican advantage in the congressional delegation and huge Republican state legislative majorities really reflect the political makeup of Wisconsin. (We analyzed the current map in depth last year.)
So we’ll see if the court decides to intervene now that Democratic-aligned justices are in charge. Protasiewicz does not take office until August, and litigation that would eventually lead to the state Supreme Court ruling against the congressional map remains only a hypothetical at this point, although a progressive law firm plans to ask the state Supreme Court to hear a redistricting case once Protasiewicz takes office, the New York Times reported.
Still, we are not going to necessarily assume that Wisconsin will have a new U.S. House map next year. There are a number of hurdles to be jumped first. That could include the Moore v. Harper U.S. Supreme Court case, which could end up constraining the ability of state Supreme Courts to intervene in cases regarding congressional gerrymandering. That case concerns the formerly Democratic North Carolina state Supreme Court’s intervention against a Republican congressional gerrymander there. But now that the North Carolina court flipped to Republican control last November, the new state court is rehearing a related case and may reverse the old decision. So it’s possible that the U.S. Supreme Court will just punt on Moore v. Harper following the change on the North Carolina court.
However, consider this possibility: What if the U.S. Supreme Court stands down on Moore v. Harper, and then the Wisconsin Supreme Court intervenes against its state’s congressional map? Couldn’t Moore v. Harper be revived, only this time as a Wisconsin case, as opposed to a North Carolina one? That is one of the moving pieces we’re keeping in mind as we think about the Wisconsin congressional landscape.
One other thing: As part of last night’s election, Republicans narrowly held a state Senate seat in a Trump +5 seat in a special election, which gives Republicans a supermajority in the Senate. That gives Republicans the power to potentially convict officials, such as Supreme Court justices, as part of an impeachment process initiated in the state House. State Sen.-elect Dan Knodl (R), who won the state Senate race last night, suggested the possibility of impeaching Protasiewicz in a pre-election interview. So a high-stakes battle over redistricting could also involve the “I” word. (And that doesn’t even get into abortion, the issue that likely played a huge role in Protasiewicz’s victory.)
We are making one rating change following the liberal takeover of the Wisconsin court. Rep. Bryan Steil (R, WI-1) moves from Safe Republican to Likely Republican. We considered listing Steil — Paul Ryan’s successor in the House — in our initial ratings, as he holds a district that is competitive on paper (Trump only won it by 2 points, and Protasiewicz carried it with about 53% in last night’s contest). The added uncertainty of redistricting gives us more reason to list it, as it’s possible that if the court imposes a new map and if it is in place for the 2024 election, both WI-1 in southeast Wisconsin and WI-3 in western Wisconsin could take on blue chunks of the Milwaukee and Madison areas, respectively. Those changes could seriously imperil newly-elected Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R, WI-3) and Steil in WI-1.
So they’ll both be Likely Republican for now, with the potential for much more dramatic changes down the line depending on how what appears to be a looming redistricting legal battle goes.
| Dear Readers: Join us on Monday, April 3 for “Drawing the Lines: Political Cartoons in the Digital Age,” a conversation with 4 of the nation’s top political cartoonists. Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato will moderate the discussion with Lalo Alcaraz, winner of the 2022 Herblock Prize and two-time Pulitzer finalist; Darrin Bell, Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist and creator of the comic strip “Candorville”; Ann Telnaes, Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post; and Matt Wuerker, Pulitzer-winning staff cartoonist and illustrator for Politico.
The program begins at 6:30 p.m. eastern at Ridley Hall, Room G008, on the Grounds of the University of Virginia. It is free and open to the public to attend with advanced registration through Eventbrite; it will also be livestreamed at https://livestream.com/tavco/thepowerofpoliticalcartoons. — The Editors |
— This piece analyzes recent presidential voting patterns in the Midwest by comparing the big counties that cast roughly half the statewide vote with the smaller counties that cast the rest of the statewide vote.
— In Illinois and Minnesota, more than half of the statewide vote comes from dominant metro areas, and improvements in those areas from 2012 to 2020 allowed Democrats to maintain their strong position in both states.
— The smaller-county halves of Iowa and Ohio have zoomed right, pushing them out of the roster of competitive states.
— The bottom hasn’t dropped out for Democrats in nearly the same way in Michigan and Wisconsin.
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation back home in Cleveland about the trajectory of Ohio’s presidential voting. The book I wrote several years ago about the state, The Bellwether, is clearly a work of history now, examining what was as opposed to what is. The Buckeye State has moved to the right, removing it from its long-held position as one of the nation’s key presidential bellwethers.
One of the main factors driving that change is a clear Republican shift in the state’s smaller counties — back in 2012, I noted to the audience, there were just 6 of Ohio’s 88 counties that gave Mitt Romney more than 70% of the vote. By 2020, 44 counties — fully half of the state’s total — had given Donald Trump greater than 70%.
However, it is worth remembering that half of a state’s counties does not mean half of a state’s votes. Those 44 Ohio counties that gave Trump landslide margins cast just about 15% of the statewide vote in 2020. Starting from the county that cast the least votes and working up, you would need to put together 79 of the 88 counties to get roughly half the statewide vote in Ohio. The other half of the vote is cast by just the 9 biggest-voting counties.
This got me thinking about looking at the Midwest more broadly, and dividing not just Ohio, but also 6 other classically-defined Midwest states (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) into halves, and comparing how they voted in 2012 (when Barack Obama won all but Indiana) to 2020 (when Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 4 of the 7, with the former winning Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and the latter carrying Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio).
What follows is an examination of how these states vote, divided into halves: the votes cast by the biggest counties adding up to roughly half the state (which we’ll call the top half) compared to the other half of the vote cast by the rest of the state (which we’ll call the bottom half). The story told is a familiar one: Throughout the Midwest, the vote cast by the top half is markedly more Democratic than the vote cast by the bottom half, and the bottom half generally zoomed right from 2012 to 2020 while the top halves varied.
The location and voting habits of the more populous counties in a state also factors into the differences among them. Illinois and Minnesota, for instance, are dominated by their respective main metro areas (Chicago and the Twin Cities), which helps explain why they are the most Democratic states in the region. Likewise, the diffuse nature of Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio’s most vote-rich counties combined with the strong Republicanism of their smaller counties accounts for their recent surge to the right (particularly in the case of Iowa and Ohio, which both voted for Obama twice but are no longer credible Democratic presidential targets). This also gets at the urban versus rural divide in these states, although we don’t really use that distinction in our commentary below, largely because it oversimplifies the divide between the big county half and the small county half. As you’ll see, there are lots of decently-sized or even big counties that are not included in the “top” half in each state, meaning that we wouldn’t really call them “rural.”
Before we go state by state, let’s explain how we did this. We used our favorite source for presidential election results, Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, and sorted the counties in each state according to how many votes they cast in 2020. Starting with the most vote-rich county, we kept adding counties until we got closest to half the statewide vote. As you’ll see in the tables, this was different for every state, as we did not split any counties, so the total share of the vote cast by the group of bigger counties ranged from about 49%-52% of the vote. We calculated the voting patterns for each “half” of the state — the big county group (top half) versus the small county (bottom half) group — and then compared how each half voted in 2012. Even though in a few instances the lineup of counties in each group was a little different in 2012 than 2020, we stuck with the 2020 order when looking at the 2012 results — and the tables show what percentage of the vote each group of counties cast in both elections. Percentages in the tables may not add precisely to 100% because of rounding.
The maps shade the counties included in the top half group in each state in orange; all of the remaining counties, combined, cast roughly the other half of the vote in the state and make up the bottom half group. We created the maps using Dave’s Redistricting App.
Top half counties that add up to half the statewide vote: Cook, DuPage, and Will. Cook is Chicago, while DuPage and Will are 2 of its collar counties. Back in 2012, one of the other collar counties — Lake, directly north of Cook — was the third-largest source of votes, but it has since been surpassed by Will, which is directly south of Cook.
Bottom half counties that make up the rest of the state: 99 of the state’s 102 counties, including the other Chicago collar counties: Lake, Kane, and McHenry.
Illinois, which at one time was a bellwether state, is dominated by Chicago and its collar counties: Those 6 counties cast nearly two-thirds (64%) of the statewide vote in 2020, with Cook itself accounting for 38%. The interplay between Chicago and its suburbs kept Illinois competitive: Cook has long been Democratic (although it has gotten bluer more recently), the collars were long Republican, and downstate was marginal. But Joe Biden carried all of the collar counties except for narrowly losing McHenry in 2020, and while Republicans have gained downstate, those improvements have been canceled out by Democratic gains closer to Chicago. The changes have kept Illinois in Democratic-leaning stasis: Its margins in favor of Democrats in the last 3 presidential elections were nearly identical each time. Barack Obama won the state by 16.84 percentage points in 2012, Hillary Clinton won it by 16.88, and Biden won it by 16.94.
Top half: Marion (Indianapolis), along with 3 of its collar counties (Hamilton to the north, Hendricks to the west, and Johnson to the south); Lake and Porter in the northwest; St. Joseph (South Bend) and Elkhart in the north central; Allen (Fort Wayne) in the northeast; and Vanderburgh (Evansville) in the southwest. Biden carried only Marion, Lake, and St. Joseph.
Bottom half: The other 82 counties. Biden carried only 2: Monroe and Tippecanoe, home of, respectively, Indiana University and Purdue University.
Of these 7 states, Mitt Romney carried only Indiana in 2012. This was after the state voted very narrowly for Obama in 2008, which was a blip in what is otherwise a clearly Republican-leaning state.
The Hoosier State’s biggest source of votes is Marion County (Indianapolis). But it only casts about 13% of the statewide vote. Several of its surrounding suburban/exurban counties are also in the bigger county bloc, as are several northern counties covering Gary/Hammond (Lake) and South Bend (St. Joseph). Fort Wayne’s Allen County and Evansville’s Vanderburgh are also in this group. As it was, Biden actually performed slightly better than Obama in the bigger counties, but they were very closely contested, while the Republican margin swelled in the counties in the smaller-county half. As Illinois is the most Democratic state in the region, Indiana is the most Republican, and an examination of its halves tells the tale: The big county portion is only barely Democratic, and the small county portion is redder than any other examined here.
Top half: Polk (Des Moines) casts only about 15% of the statewide vote. It’s joined in this group by its growing suburban/exurban western neighbor, Dallas, and its northern neighbor, Story. The other major vote centers are mostly east of Des Moines: Black Hawk (Waterloo), Dubuque, Linn (Cedar Rapids), Johnson (Iowa City), and Scott (Davenport). Pottawattamie, in the southwest, is on the other side of the state border from Omaha, Nebraska. The only county that switched from 2012 to 2020 was Dubuque, which voted for Obama by 15 but Trump by 3.
Bottom half: 90 other counties. Obama carried 31 of them in 2012; Biden carried none.
No state in the region swung as heavily Republican between 2012 and 2020 as Iowa, which went from a 6-point Obama victory in 2012 to an 8-point Trump win in 2020. The Democratic fall was largely about the smaller counties: Biden’s margin in the bigger counties was 12 points, just 3 points worse than Obama’s 2012 margin. Biden lost a lot of ground in the big population centers of eastern Iowa, with the exception of the most Democratic county in the state, Johnson, home to the University of Iowa. But he did better than Obama in the 3 vote centers in central Iowa: Polk (Des Moines), as well as its western neighbor, Dallas, and Story to its north, home of Iowa State University.
The big change was that Obama came within about 2.5 points of carrying the small-county group in 2012; Biden lost it by nearly 30 points. This was the biggest swing of any of the state halves we examined in this region.
Top half: Wayne (Detroit), along with its suburban neighbors, Oakland to the northwest and Macomb to the northeast. Genesee (Flint) is just outside of Detroit’s orbit, while Kent (Grand Rapids) is in western Michigan. Biden won 4 of 5, losing only Macomb; Obama won 4 of 5, losing only Kent. While pro-Democratic suburban trends have shifted Kent and Oakland leftward, the other 3 have swung rightward to varying degrees.
Bottom half: This group contains 78 of the state’s 83 counties. Washtenaw, which was the bluest county in the state in 2020 and is the home of the University of Michigan, is the biggest county in this group. Biden won 7 of these counties, down from Obama’s 16.
Michigan’s big half vs. small half dynamic is somewhat similar to Illinois and Minnesota, in that a lot of its vote is concentrated in a single metro area (Detroit), but Detroit does not quite dominate Michigan the way that Chicago or the Twin Cities dominate their respective states — which is part of why Michigan is more competitive than the other two, at least at the moment. Another key difference is that Macomb, the suburban/exurban Detroit county that became synonymous with the so-called “Reagan Democrats,” is not a Democratic-leaning county (it voted for Obama twice, but also Trump twice). Democrats have seen erosion in both the top and bottom county halves, but the decline in the latter is more modest than many of these other states, probably because there are some major Democratic vote anchors included in that group, including Washtenaw and Ingham (home to Lansing, the state capital, and Michigan State University) as well as Kalamazoo (Western Michigan University).
Top half: All 5 are anchored in the Twin Cities: Hennepin, by far the state’s largest source of votes, covers Minneapolis, while Ramsey contains Saint Paul. Dakota is to the Twin Cities’ south, Anoka is to its north, and Washington is to its east. Both Obama and Biden carried 4 of the 5 counties, as they both lost Anoka, although only by a few points apiece.
Bottom half: A couple of the counties covered by the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council, Carver and Scott both to the southwest of the Twin Cities, are included in this group, underscoring the political weight of the Twin Cities metro area. Carver and Scott are Republican but getting more competitive: In 2012, Carver was Romney’s 13th best county in the state, but by 2020, Trump did better in 69 other counties. Scott has seen similar trends. More broadly, this group includes 82 of Minnesota’s 87 counties. Obama carried 24 but Biden only carried 9.
The Twin Cities provide a strong anchor for Democrats: Together, Hennepin and Ramsey counties cast a little under a third of the statewide vote (32%), and they gave Biden a 44-point margin. They do not quite have the weight of Cook in Chicago — 38% of the statewide vote and a 50-point Democratic margin — but they are comparable. The movement in the 5 key Twin Cities counties has made that half of the vote much bluer in 2020 than it was in 2012 — a 30-point Democratic margin for Biden compared to 19 for Obama.
Meanwhile, the rest of the state has indeed moved right, collectively: The roughly 13-point Republican improvement in margin is effectively the same as Wisconsin’s change in its half of smaller counties, and the overall Republican margin in Minnesota’s bottom half counties was actually a couple points better in 2020 than Wisconsin’s. But the Twin Cities are just bluer than the collection of Wisconsin counties that make up its heaviest-voting areas.
The net result of these changes is that Minnesota’s overall statewide margin was very similar in 2012 and 2020, with Democrats winning the state by 7.7 points in 2012 and 7.1 in 2020. (Trump did come within 1.5 points of carrying Minnesota in 2016, but the full weight of Trump-era realignment stabilized Democratic performance in 2020.)
Top half: The “3 Cs” big city counties — Cuyahoga (Cleveland) in the northeast, Franklin (Columbus) in the center of the state, and Hamilton (Cincinnati) in the southwest — cast a little less than 30% of the statewide vote. The other pieces of this group are Lorain and Summit (Akron), located to Cleveland’s west and south, respectively; Stark (Canton), south of Summit; Lucas (Toledo) in the northwest; and Montgomery (Dayton) and Butler (suburban/exurban Cincinnati, plus Miami University) in the southwest. Romney only won Butler; Trump added Lorain and Stark.
Bottom half: The remaining 79 other counties include the red suburban/exurban collar counties around the big urban centers not previously mentioned, as well as Obama-to-Trump bastions like Mahoning (Youngstown) and Trumbull (Warren) in northeast Ohio on the Pennsylvania border. Obama won 9 of these counties, while Biden won just 1: little Athens in the southeast, home to my alma mater, Ohio University (and even then, Biden’s 15-point margin was 20 points less than Obama’s).
Collectively, Biden held up OK in the half of bigger counties, running only about 2.5 points in margin behind Obama. That’s largely because Franklin and Hamilton are getting bluer even as the others are not as blue as they used to be — or even flipped to Trump, like Lorain and Stark in Northeast Ohio. At one time, Stark was seen as a bellwether county: Perhaps no single county in the whole country got as much attention as it did during the 2004 presidential election (and John Kerry actually carried it even as George W. Bush was winning the state and the election). But Trump won Stark by about 19 points.
Meanwhile, Trump won the bottom half of Ohio by 32 points, just a couple points shy of Indiana’s tally and a margin much larger than that in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Iowa and Ohio have both moved clearly right of center because those states’ smaller counties have zoomed right while the big ones, collectively, have also gotten a little less Democratic, too.
Top half: Milwaukee and Dane (Madison) together cast a quarter of the statewide vote. Joining them are a few counties in Milwaukee’s orbit: Waukesha, a suburban county directly west of Milwaukee, and Racine and Kenosha directly south. The other 3 counties in this group are Brown (Green Bay), Outagamie (Appleton), and Winnebago (Oshkosh), 3 adjacent counties in central/eastern Wisconsin sometimes called the “BOW” counties. Biden carried only Milwaukee and Dane, although many are competitive (Obama carried Kenosha, Racine, and Winnebago as well).
Bottom half: This group has 64 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. Obama won 30 of these counties, while Biden won only 12. There are some Democratic-leaning counties in this group, such as La Crosse and Eau Claire, although the biggest single source of votes in this group (albeit casting just about 2.5% of the statewide vote) is Washington County, the reddest of the so-called “WOW” suburban counties around Milwaukee (the others are the aforementioned Waukesha west of Milwaukee and Ozaukee north of Milwaukee — the Republican margin in each dropped double digits from 2012 to 20202, while it only fell a couple of points in Washington).
The story in Wisconsin takes from both the pro-Democratic and pro-Republican trends seen in other states. Democrats actually did a little bit better in the top half in 2020 than in 2012, making Wisconsin similar (at least in terms of direction) to Illinois and Minnesota. However, the Wisconsin top half is still considerably less Democratic than the top halves of those bluer states. Meanwhile, Republicans did make big gains in the bottom half, although the gains were not as big as those seen in redder Iowa and Ohio.
Milwaukee has gotten a little bluer in terms of margin, but it also is the only county in the state that saw its total votes cast decline from 2012 to 2020, likely both because of the county’s falling population and also reduced Black turnout from the very high levels of the Obama era (Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County is experiencing something similar, but the difference is that Cuyahoga’s Democratic margin of victory got smaller, too, from 2012 to 2020). In 2020, the closer-in suburbs actually cast 7,000 more votes than they did in 2012, but that was more than offset by the 40,000-vote drop in the city itself over the same period. That Milwaukee dynamic helps explain why the top half counties cast a slightly larger share of the vote in 2012 than they did in 2020.
Dane, meanwhile, has explosive growth and is getting more Democratic, to the point where it actually produced a bigger percentage margin for Democrats than Chicago’s Cook County did in 2020. But Dane only casts about 10% of the statewide vote, making it far less impactful in Wisconsin than Cook is in Illinois.
A little bit more erosion for Democrats in the bottom half would likely doom them in Wisconsin — however, it’s not clear that will happen, as Democrats held up OK there in 2022 as they held the governorship and came close to unseating Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). For more on Wisconsin, see my colleague J. Miles Coleman’s state Supreme Court race preview, which we published yesterday.
Table 8 lists the 2020 results in each of these 7 states, essentially summarizing the tables from above.
Some takeaways:
— Illinois has both the most Democratic top and bottom halves, explaining its position as the most Democratic state in the region. The presence of several populous Democratic-trending Chicago collar counties in the “bottom half” is a big reason why. Likewise, Indiana has the reddest halves in both categories, explaining its position as the most Republican state in the region.
— Minnesota’s bottom half is actually redder than Michigan’s and Wisconsin’s, but the Twin Cities metro sets the political tempo for the state and has zoomed left over the past decade.
— While its top half is way less Democratic, Michigan’s bottom half is comparable to that of Illinois, in part because Michigan’s bottom half contains some significant Democratic vote centers, like Ann Arbor and Lansing.
— Ohio’s top half is fairly similar to Michigan’s and Wisconsin’s, but its bottom half is way redder — more Republican even than Iowa’s, which also has moved quickly right over the past decade.
— In one of the biggest elections of the calendar year, a Democratic-aligned justice appears favored in next week’s Wisconsin state Supreme Court election. But that was also true in 2019, when a Republican-aligned justice pulled an upset.
— Democrats often underperform in such races in Milwaukee, so that is a key place to watch.
— Judicial voting patterns largely reflect voting in partisan races, but there are some key differences.
Next week, Badger State voters will head to the polls to weigh in on what has been billed as the most important judicial election of the year. If Democratic-aligned Judge Janet Protasiewicz prevails, liberals will assume a 4-3 majority on the state’s highest court. If voters send Daniel Kelly, a former justice who is effectively the GOP nominee in the contest, back to the body, conservatives will retain control.
From what we can tell, Protasiewicz is a favorite, although given the marginal nature of Wisconsin, we wouldn’t rule out a Kelly win. One indicator has been fundraising. Given the stakes, the race has been expensive: the two sides have combined to spend at least $26 million. Protasiewicz has significantly outspent Kelly, although the latter is getting a late boost from third party groups. Though there has been no public polling, Protasiewicz reportedly leads in private surveys. Early voting has been in progress for over a week, but Wisconsin is a largely Election Day-voting state, so we would not read much into early tallies — indeed, one map that considered the early vote, posted yesterday, has a decidedly “choose your own adventure” feel.
With that, we are going to look at a few areas of the state that may be useful to watch next week. We are assuming anything from a double-digit Protasiewicz win to a narrow Kelly win is possible.
But first, a bit of context. For the tables in this article, we’ll consider returns from 4 recent statewide races. In the 2019 state Supreme Court race, liberal judge Lisa Neubauer was seen as a tenuous favorite but lost to now-Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative, by fewer than 6,000 votes. The 2019 result is reason enough to not rule out a conservative win this time. The following year’s election, 2020, went better for Democrats. In the spring, Democratic-aligned Jill Karofsky defeated Kelly, who was appointed to the court in 2016, by a better-than 55%-45% margin. Then, in November, as Joe Biden patched up the Democrats’ Midwestern “Blue Wall,” he narrowly beat Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Though this was not a court contest, we’ll examine some differences between coalitions in partisan and judicial races. Finally, we’ll consider results from late February, which was the “first round” of this contest. As we covered at the time, in a 4-person race, Democratic-aligned candidates combined for 54% of the vote to 46% for the GOP-aligned candidates.
To start, Wisconsin’s two most populous counties are Dane (where Madison is located) and Milwaukee — both are deep blue. As a pair, they typically cast about a quarter of the votes in statewide elections, which gives Democrats a relatively high “floor.” In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden netted just over 180,000 votes out of each county. While both counties have voted heavily Democratic in most recent state Supreme Court races, the turnout dynamics don’t always mirror those of presidential (or partisan) races. Table 1 breaks down the 4 recent races there.
One pattern is that Democratic-aligned state Supreme Court candidates overperformed Biden in Dane while running a few points behind him in Milwaukee. The simple explanation for this seems to be that the Madison electorate is made up of higher-propensity voters. The Democratic base there — including students, University of Wisconsin faculty, other state employees, and white collar professionals — has a front row seat to state government (and all the tumult that has come with it over the past decade or so). In recent presidential elections, Milwaukee County cast upwards of 100,000 more votes than Dane, but in each of the last 3 supreme court races, the pair has been much more evenly balanced (when Karofsky won in 2020, for example, Milwaukee cast 200,000 ballots to Dane’s 196,000). Even while losing statewide, Neubauer came close to surpassing 80% of the vote there, a few ticks better than Biden’s showing 19 months later.
Table 1 separates Milwaukee City, which makes up about 60% of the county’s population, from the rest of the county, which includes a diverse selection of suburbs. Neubauer’s share was 7 points lower than Biden’s in the city itself and 5 points lower in the suburbs — something that proved costly in a close race. Though Karofsky carried the suburbs by a better-than 60%-40% spread, she underperformed Biden in Milwaukee City. As a result, despite doing about 10 points better than Biden statewide, Karofsky did 5 points worse in Milwaukee County.
So the bottom line here is that, if Protasiewicz wins next week, she’ll likely clear 80% in Dane County, but will probably fall short of 70% in Milwaukee County, even if she wins by double-digits. In February, the Democratic performance in Milwaukee tracked closely with Karofsky’s showing — which should put Protasiewicz in a strong position if it holds. If Protasiewicz is stuck in the low-60s in Milwaukee County, though, Kelly may have a path to win.
Though each is exhibiting distinct trends, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties are often grouped into the memorably-named “WOW” counties category — and it is hard to discuss Wisconsin’s electoral landscape without mentioning them. Generally speaking, the WOW counties, which border Milwaukee and take in many of its exurban communities, have been the state’s “GOP heartland” for much of recent history. The area was former Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) electoral bread and butter, and its voters boosted Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) in his come-from-behind reelection win in 2016. In fact, in 2019, Neubauer’s weakness in the Milwaukee area was not limited just to the city and its closer-in suburbs: as Table 2 shows, Hagedorn outpaced subsequent conservative candidates there.
Though Table 1 considers all 3 WOW counties, Waukesha County, which is the most populous, often tracks closely with the group as a whole. Essentially, Ozaukee and Washington counties seem to cancel each other out — the former, which is directly north of Milwaukee City, has seen some blue trends, while Washington, which has a more exurban character, is the reddest of the three.
In February’s result, Republican-aligned candidates combined for 64.5% of the WOW vote, which was an improvement from either of the 2020 contests listed on Table 2. However, both Kelly and his leading GOP-aligned rival, Judge Jennifer Dorow, hailed from Waukesha County, so it seems possible that Kelly has room to fall if Dorow’s voters are not enthusiastic. Put somewhat differently, 15.1% of the total votes in round 1 came from the WOW counties. As Hagedorn won in 2019, that share was a slightly lower 14.9%, suggesting that any Republican enthusiasm from February may be hard to maintain next week, although Dorow was quick to endorse Kelly.
As with the blue counties we discussed earlier, Kelly’s path to victory would be to basically replicate Hagedorn’s showing by carrying the WOW counties by a roughly 70%-30% spread. If Democrats are having a good night, Protasiewicz could keep Ozaukee County within single-digits (actually carrying it may be too heavy a lift) — in that scenario, she would likely be close to 40% among the group as a whole.
As an aside, another important contest will be taking place in the WOW counties on Tuesday, although one on the legislative front. If Republicans win a special election for state Senate District 8, located in the northern Milwaukee metro area, they will claim a supermajority in the chamber. While they could not override Gov. Tony Evers’s (D-WI) vetoes (they are a few seats short of a supermajority in the state Assembly), state Senate Republicans could theoretically impeach officers in other branches of government. In fact, the GOP nominee, state Assemblyman Dan Knodl, recently threatened to vote to impeach Protasiewicz, should he be elected. Donald Trump carried SD-8 by 5 points in 2020, so a Knodl win would not be a surprise.
So, thus far in our survey, we’ve learned that Dane and Milwaukee counties should heavily favor Protasiewicz while Kelly should sweep the 3 suburban WOW counties — in other words, the allegiance of those counties is not in question, it’s just an issue of margin and turnout.
But moving further north, the BOW counties — a moniker that is, by now, well known to followers of state pollster Charles Franklin — are a more marginal group of counties. Sometimes referred to as the major counties of the Fox Valley, the BOW counties consist of Brown (Green Bay), Outagamie (Appleton), and Winnebago (Oshkosh). This manufacturing-heavy stretch usually accounts for 10% of the ballots cast in most statewide elections. Table 3 considers the BOW counties’ voting patterns.
In each race, every BOW county has voted at least a point or so more Republican than the state. They typically vote together, but not always, and they have some interesting idiosyncrasies. Biden, for example, despite winning the state, performed slightly worse than Neubauer did there a year earlier — a fact that speaks to Biden’s relative strength in the Milwaukee area.
If next week’s vote is close (either way), expect Kelly to carry all 3 by relatively modest margins. But if Democrats are replicating their first-round performance, Protasiewicz will likely at least carry Winnebago, the most Democratic of the trio. In 2012, Barack Obama won the state by a comparable 7-point margin — he carried just Winnebago County while keeping the other 2 very close. Finally, if Prostasiewicz is running away with the race, the dam may break, as it did in 2020 when Karofsky swept the BOW counties.
Finally, in something of a catch-all category, don’t be surprised if Protasieiwicz carries at least a few Trump-won rural counties — this will probably be necessary, but not sufficient, for a Democratic win. Specifically, keep an eye on the state’s western border. If she is carrying most of the counties in the southwestern corner, that would be a great start, but if she sweeps most of the western border counties, that would probably signal a win.
We say this because, in 2019, Neubauer won over several Trumpy counties in western Wisconsin — she even carried the Obama-to-Trump 3rd District — but was done in by her underperformance in Milwaukee. Map 1 shows the difference.
So, for Protasiewicz, we’d expect some strength in southwestern Trump counties like Crawford, Grant, and Vernon. In Karofsky’s 10-point 2020 win, she added a few Trump-won counties around the Eau Claire region to her coalition, like Dunn, Jackson, and Pierce — all 3 of those counties favored Democratic-aligned judges. Even further north, Iron County was 1 of 2 Kerry-to-Romney counties in the state, with the other being Pierce. Iron County is smaller and considerably more rural than Pierce, though — Karofsky didn’t carry Iron County, but it narrowly favored Democrats in February. If Protasiewicz holds Iron, it could be another sign that Democrats are beating expectations in rural areas.
Throughout this survey, we’ve emphasized Democratic softness in the Milwaukee metro in past state Supreme Court races, as it has typically manifested to at least some degree. But it’s possible that this year’s contest is so nationalized that a more “presidential” coalition takes form, with Protasiewicz making considerable gains in urban areas while doing worse than expected in the west and north — this would essentially be the opposite of Neubauer’s result.
Finally, to name one last county we’ll be watching, we’ll sneak a more urban county into the non-metro section of the article. We flagged this one in our initial February write up, but Kenosha County, in the southern orbit of Milwaukee, will be interesting. Typically a purple-to-light blue county in state races, it was the scene of nationally-watched riots in the summer of 2020. It has since not voted for any statewide Democrats in partisan races, although Republicans have not carried it in blowouts. Democratic-aligned candidates took a small 50.6% majority there in February, so if Kelly is making up ground, look for Kenosha to turn red again.
Next week’s contest will be the most closely-watched Wisconsin state Supreme Court race since 2011. A dozen years ago, conservatives narrowly came out on the winning side of a contest that was seen as a referendum on then-newly minted Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation. This time, issues like abortion and gerrymandering seem to be animating the electorate, if asymmetrically so, to the benefit of Democrats. Still, again, we cannot rule out a conservative win.
With that, we’ll end on something that we can be fairly certain of: next week’s race will be a high turnout affair, at least for a judicial race. In February, 961,000 ballots were cast, which was a 36% increase from the 2020 spring primary — it dwarfed the 2016 and 2018 primaries by even larger amounts.
— The American electorate has changed dramatically over the past 40 years, and a pair of factors — race and education — have driven the changes.
— The electorate has become more diverse and more highly educated. Democrats rely heavily on nonwhite voters and have improved with white college-educated voters, while Republicans have cut deeply into Democratic support with non-college whites.
— Racial and cultural issues, rather than economic ones, have fueled Republican gains with the non-college white electorate.
The American electorate has changed dramatically over the past 4 decades. This transformation has involved changes in both the demographic composition of the electorate and the party loyalties of major demographic groups. In this essay, I describe long-term trends in the demographic composition of the electorate and in the party loyalties of key demographic groups, focusing on two crucial demographic variables: race and education. I then examine the forces driving the striking shift in the party loyalties of the group that still makes up the largest share of the American electorate — white voters without a college degree, a group often referred to as the white working class.
Figure 1 displays trends in the demographic composition of the American electorate between 1980 and 2020. The data displayed in this graph show that the electorate that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 was very different from the electorate that voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Over these 40 years, the electorate has become both more racially diverse and more educated. The white share of the electorate has fallen from 84% in 1980 to 66% in 2020. At the same time, the share of the electorate without a college degree has fallen from 84% in 1980 to 63% in 2020.
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
The combined impact of growing racial diversity and rising levels of education is that the share of the electorate made up of whites without a college degree has fallen drastically, from 69% in 1980 to 39% in 2020. In 40 years, non-college whites have gone from an overwhelming majority to a minority of the American electorate. This decline in the non-college white share of the electorate has been very consistent, averaging about 3 percentage points every four years, and shows no signs of abating. At this rate of decline, the proportion of the electorate made up of non-college whites will fall to approximately 30% by 2032.
The dramatic changes in the composition of the American electorate over these 40 years, especially the substantial decline in the white share of the electorate, would appear to favor the Democratic Party because it has historically received the large majority of the nonwhite vote. However, despite the decline in the white share of the electorate, the data displayed in Figure 2 show that the proportion of Americans identifying with the Republican Party actually increased between 1980 and 2020. Although this trend has been uneven, the Democratic advantage in party identification has declined steadily since 2008, falling from 13.9 percentage points to only 4.1 percentage points over these 12 years. The 4.1 percentage point Democratic advantage in party identification in 2020 was the smallest recorded in ANES surveys in the past 40 years.
Note: Democratic and Republican identifiers, including leaning independents
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
In order to understand how the Democratic Party’s advantage in party identification has been shrinking even as the nonwhite share of the electorate has been growing, we have to examine trends in the party identification within different racial groups. Figure 3 displays these trends among whites, Blacks, and other nonwhites — a category that includes Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and persons of mixed racial ancestry.
The most significant long-term trend apparent in these data is the decline in Democratic identification among white Americans. In 1980, Democrats enjoyed an 11-point advantage in party identification among whites. As recently as 2000, Democrats still enjoyed a 2-point advantage in party identification among whites. However, between 2008 and 2020, a 2-point Democratic deficit among whites turned into a 16-point deficit.
No such long-term shift in party identification is apparent in these data among either Blacks or other nonwhites, although there have been some short-term swings within these groups, especially among other nonwhites. The Democratic advantage among other nonwhites did fall from 39 points in 2008 to 25 points in 2020. However, that 39-point lead in 2008 was considerably larger than in any of the previous 4 elections. This variability in party identification among other nonwhites may reflect both short-term effects of the national political environment and random variation due to relatively small sample sizes.
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
Along with race, the other key demographic characteristic that has undergone substantial change over these 40 years is education. According to the ANES data, the proportion of eligible voters with a college degree more than doubled between 1980 and 2020, going from 16% to 37%. The proportion of college graduates rose from 17% to 40% among whites and from 11% to 30% among nonwhites.
As the proportion of college graduates has grown since 1980, there has been a dramatic realignment in party identification along educational lines. According to the ANES data, during the 3 elections between 1980 and 1988, Democrats enjoyed an average advantage of 14 points in party identification among Americans without a college degree. At the same time, Republicans enjoyed an average advantage of 5 points in party identification among college graduates. By 2016-2020, the Democratic advantage among Americans without a college degree had fallen to only 1 point while the 5-point Republican advantage among college graduates had turned into a 14-point Democratic advantage.
Note: Net party identification measured by difference between percentage of Democrats and percentage of Republicans, including leaning independents. In order to ensure adequate numbers of nonwhite respondents, the data are grouped into 4 electoral eras: 1980-1988, 1992-2000, 2004-2012, and 2016-2020.
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, some pundits and political observers have argued that a class-based realignment of American politics has been occurring among nonwhites as well as among whites. According to analysts like Ruy Teixeira, declining support among nonwhites without college degrees is becoming a major problem for the Democratic Party. However, the data displayed in Table 1 indicate that the realignment of support along educational lines in recent elections has thus far been confined mainly to white Americans.
The data displayed in Table 1 show that over this 40-year period, there was a very dramatic realignment along educational lines among white Americans. Between the Reagan-H.W. Bush era and the Trump-Biden era, Democratic identification collapsed among non-college whites. At the same time, Democratic identification increased substantially among white college graduates. No such realignment is apparent in these data among either Blacks or other nonwhites, however. By 2016-2020, there was a yawning divide in party identification between non-college whites and college-educated whites. In contrast, there was very little difference in party identification between Blacks with and without college degrees or between other nonwhites with and without college degrees. The so-called class divide in American politics today appears to be almost entirely a white phenomenon.
There are two prominent explanations for the dramatic realignment of party identification among white Americans along educational lines since the 1980s. One explanation for this realignment emphasizes economic stress and insecurity caused by changes in the structure of the American economy that have disproportionately affected those without a college degree. The other explanation emphasizes racial and cultural resentment caused by changes in American society that disproportionately affect those without college degrees because they tend to hold more conservative attitudes on racial and cultural issues. I will test both of these explanations using data from ANES surveys between 1980 and 2020.
Note: Net party identification measured by difference between percentage of Democrats and percentage of Republicans, including leaning independents
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
In order to examine the role of economic stress and insecurity in driving support for the Republican Party among non-college whites, I examined the relationship between family income and party identification among college and non-college whites in 2020. One would expect that to the extent that economic stress and insecurity are causing whites to move toward the GOP, there should be an inverse relationship between family income and Republican identification among both non-college and college-educated whites. In addition, the gap in party identification between non-college and college-educated whites should become much smaller or disappear once we control for family income.
The findings displayed in Figure 4 provide no support for the economic stress hypothesis. There was only a weak relationship between family income and partisanship among whites in 2020 and among non-college whites, those with lower incomes were actually somewhat less likely to identify as Republicans than those with higher incomes. Moreover, at every income level, whites without college degrees were much more likely to identify as Republicans than those with college degrees.
Note: Net party identification measured by difference between percentage of Democrats and percentage of Republicans, including leaning independents
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
To test the racial and cultural resentment hypothesis, I examined the relationship between the standard 4-item racial resentment scale and party identification among whites with and without college degrees. The results are displayed in Figure 5. The findings here contrast dramatically with those in Figure 4. There is a very strong relationship between racial resentment and party identification among those with and without college degrees. Whites who scored low in racial resentment identified overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party while those who scored high in racial resentment identified overwhelmingly with the Republican Party. Moreover, once we control for racial resentment, the educational divide in partisanship disappears completely. In fact, at moderate to high levels of racial resentment, whites with college degrees were slightly more likely to identify as Republican than whites without college degrees.
Note: Net party identification measured by difference between percentage of Democrats and percentage of Republicans, including leaning independents. In order to ensure adequate numbers of nonwhite respondents, the data are grouped into 4 electoral eras: 1980-1988, 1992-2000, 2004-2012, and 2016-2020.
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
The findings in Figures 4 and 5 indicate that racial and cultural resentment rather than economic distress and insecurity has been driving non-college whites toward the Republican Party in recent years. As one additional test of this hypothesis, I analyzed the relationship between racial resentment and partisanship among non-college whites over time. The results of this analysis, displayed in Figure 6, strongly support the racial/cultural resentment hypothesis. Over these 40 years, the relationship between racial resentment and partisanship became much stronger among whites without college degrees. At the beginning of this time period, non-college whites who scored very high on the racial resentment scale were only slightly more likely to identify as Republicans than as Democrats. By the last 2 elections in this series, however, those who scored very high on the scale identified overwhelmingly as Republicans. Meanwhile, over the same 40-year time period, non-college whites who scored very low on the racial resentment scale actually shifted strongly in the direction of the Democratic Party.
The evidence examined in this article indicates that the realignment of party identification along educational lines among Whites has actually been a realignment of party identification based on racial and cultural resentment. As a result of this realignment, white Democrats today, regardless of education, are much more likely to hold liberal attitudes on racial and cultural issues than in the past. This shift has been very dramatic since 2012. According to the ANES data, the proportion of white Democrats scoring either low or very low on the racial resentment scale increased from 36% in 2012 to 57% in 2016 to 76% in 2020. Among white Democrats without a college degree, the proportion scoring either low or very low on the racial resentment scale increased from 26% in 2012 to 44% in 2016 to 63% in 2020. Among white Democrats with college degrees, the proportion scoring either low or very low on the racial resentment scale increased from 56% in 2012 to 75% in 2016 to 86% in 2020.
Note: Loyalty based on those voting for major party candidates
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
This dramatic change in the racial attitudes of white Democrats has had important electoral consequences because racial attitudes are strongly related to party loyalty in voting. White Democrats with liberal racial attitudes are much more likely to support Democratic candidates than white Democrats with conservative racial attitudes. The decline in the proportion of white Democrats with conservative racial attitudes has contributed to a substantial increase in party loyalty among members of this group. In 2020, according to the ANES data, 96% of white Democrats reported voting for the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. This was the highest level of loyalty among white Democrats in any presidential election in the entire ANES series, going back to 1952. As recently as 1988, only 80% of white Democrats reported voting for the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis.
The sharp increase in party loyalty among white Democrats has largely offset the impact of declining Democratic identification among whites since the 1980s. The Democratic base today is somewhat smaller than it was 40 years ago but it is much more loyal in its voting behavior, as shown in Figure 7. That is a major reason why Democratic candidates have won the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections.
 Alan I. Abramowitz is the Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University and a senior columnist with Sabato’s Crystal Ball. His latest book, The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump, was released in 2018 by Yale University Press. |
— The fate of Wisconsin’s state supreme court will be decided next month.
— About two-thirds of the states will have supreme court elections next year.
— Key states with supreme court elections to watch in 2024 include Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, and Ohio.
A high-stakes state supreme court election that will determine the ideological control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is set to take place on April 4. The contest between liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz and conservative candidate Daniel Kelly, who was involved in the state GOP’s “fake elector” scheme after the 2020 presidential election, is on track to become the most expensive judicial race in history. Another key swing state, Pennsylvania, also has a state supreme court race this year to fill a currently-vacant seat previously held by late Chief Justice Max Baer, a Democrat. Democrats still have a 4-2 edge on the court, so they would retain the majority even if Republicans win the seat later this year.
With growing attention being given to the role of state courts in determining political representation and other key issues, we look ahead to state supreme court elections in 2024, outlining who is up for election and the issues at stake in each state. Thirty-two states will hold supreme court elections in 2024, with 73 seats currently up for election. There are basically 3 types of judicial elections: partisan, ostensibly nonpartisan, and retention elections. Table 1 shows a breakdown of the states by election type and number of seats up for election in 2024, and Map 1 shows where elections will be occurring by the current partisan lean of state supreme courts.
Click on the map to scroll over states and view characteristics by state, including: election method; partisan lean of state; incumbent win rates (2008-2022); seats up for election in 2024; number of seats on court; mandatory retirement; and term length.
The stakes of elections are not evenly distributed, partly attributable to the structure of judicial elections in states. For instance, it is rare for a state supreme court justice facing a retention election to be defeated. States with partisan or ostensibly nonpartisan elections have the potential for higher stakes contests with increased politicization of judicial races and rulings. We also expect high levels of spending in the 2024 elections, at least on par with 2020 election spending, in which nearly $43 million was spent on supreme court elections in states with nonpartisan elections and over $54 million was spent in states with partisan elections. We charted spending in partisan and nonpartisan elections over the last two decades.
What follows is a summary of supreme court elections in each state by election type. In 2024, we suggest paying close attention to supreme court races in Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, and Ohio.
Alabama
One of the 5 seats up for election is that of Chief Justice Tom Parker, who has aged out of running again under an Alabama law that bars judges over 70 from running. Associate Justice Sarah Stewart, who is up for reelection in 2024, announced she will seek the Republican Party’s nomination for chief justice. No other candidate has announced a bid for chief justice, though others are expected to join the race. Following Stewart’s announcement, Criminal Appeals Judge Chris McCool announced a run for Stewart’s current position. Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth has endorsed McCool for the open seat. Manufacture Alabama and the Alabama Farmers Federation PAC have endorsed 3 other incumbents in their reelection bid: Supreme Court Justices Jay Mitchell, Tommy Bryan, and Will Sellers.
Illinois
The current balance of the court is 5 Democrats and 2 Republicans, as Democrats won 2 key races last year to maintain control. The outcome of the 2024 election will not alter the partisan balance of the court, but the justices don’t always vote along party lines on issues. This year, the state supreme court will likely take up a state-level challenge to Illinois’s gun ban, which is likely to draw attention to the 2024 elections. One justice from each party is up for election in 2024: Joy V. Cunningham (D) and Lisa Holder White (R). Both are Black women who were appointed to fill vacancies in 2022.
Louisiana
Louisiana has partisan Supreme Court elections, which trace back to the state’s 1913 constitution (before this, justices were appointed). Justices serve a term of 10 years, and unlike other states — like Texas where the chief justice is elected separately — in Louisiana, the judge with the longest term on the court serves as chief justice. The court is currently composed of 5 Republican justices as well as a Democrat and an Independent.
Republican Scott Crichton is up for reelection in 2024; he won in an unopposed election in 2014. It remains to be seen if Crichton will face any challengers, but the partisan control of the court will not change even if he loses.
The biggest recent news related to the Louisiana supreme court is that Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is running for governor, is seeking to end a 1992 federal court agreement that led to the state’s first Black justice being elected to Louisiana’s once all-white Supreme Court. Landry argues that federal oversight of the state’s supreme court is no longer needed, while voting rights advocates and the U.S. Justice Department argue it still is.
North Carolina
Ever wonder where the principle of judicial review originated? If you thought it was Marbury v. Madison, think again. It actually originated in North Carolina in 1787 in Bayard v. Singleton and was later adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court is currently composed of 5 Republicans (including the chief justice) and 2 Democrats. In a high-stakes election with millions poured in from outside groups, Republicans reclaimed a majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022 with the elections of Richard Dietz and Trey Allen, both of whom won seats previously held by Democrats. (Republicans also flipped 2 seats in 2020, so the court has gone from 6-1 Democratic to 5-2 Republican over the course of the last 2 election cycles.) For 2018, the GOP-led state legislature passed a law that made judicial elections partisan — in this light red state, the addition of party labels likely aided their candidates. The Republican victories were especially notable because they should help Republicans redraw the state’s congressional map in the party’s favor after yearslong battles between the Republican-controlled legislature and Democratic state supreme court.
North Carolina’s supreme court, with its new Republican majority, has already agreed to rehear a case asking it to overturn gerrymandering rulings the court issued in 2022 (oral arguments were held on Tuesday). One case, NC NAACP v. Moore, took 4 years to work its way through the state supreme court process and was decided by a 4-3 vote along party lines. The court ruled that a racially gerrymandered legislature cannot propose amendments to the North Carolina Constitution. The case stemmed from a U.S. District Court decision in 2016, which said that North Carolina’s state district maps were illegally racially gerrymandered. It is also the case that has led to Moore v. Harper, in which the U.S. Supreme Court has been asked to decide whether the North Carolina Supreme Court has the power to strike down the legislature’s illegally gerrymandered congressional map for violating the North Carolina Constitution. Republican legislators argue under an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution known as the “independent state legislature theory” that state courts and the state constitution are powerless in matters relating to federal elections. The U.S. Supreme Court recently hinted that it might not render a decision after control of the North Carolina Supreme Court shifted to a Republican majority.
The Republican-majority supreme court could potentially take up reproductive rights cases, allowing for stronger restrictions on abortion. Currently, abortion access is legal in North Carolina through 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Democratic Justice Michael Morgan is up for reelection in 2024 — he was first elected back in 2016, back when judicial races were nonpartisan. In a contest rife with tensions over racial gerrymandering, Morgan defeated a 16-year conservative incumbent, Justice Robert H. Edmunds Jr. Morgan’s win changed the partisan balance to a Democratic majority, and more than $5.5 million was spent on the race, making it the most expensive at the time. Morgan was previously elected twice to North Carolina’s Superior Court. As of now, there are no challengers for 2024, but the contest is worth watching to see whether Democrats can retain this seat on the state’s high court.
Ohio
Until June 2021, judicial elections in Ohio were ostensibly nonpartisan. Parties had nominated candidates in primary elections, but party designations for the candidates were not permitted on the general election ballot. In response to the 2020 election of Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner, which cut the Republican majority to 4-3, Ohio Republicans passed a law making general elections partisan, with party labels on the ballot.
Last year saw a highly contested election with the partisan balance of the court at stake. Republicans retained their majority, winning all 3 races on the ballot. Retiring Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a moderate Republican, was replaced by the more conservative Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy. O’Connor and the court’s 3 Democrats formed majorities that limited Republican gerrymandering efforts; the new court, still 4-3 Republican, likely will be more amenable to GOP redistricting plans.
In 2024, 2 Democrats and a Republican will stand for reelection, with potential for highly contested elections.
Justice Joe Deters was appointed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to replace Kennedy and will stand for election in 2024. Deters is known for his tough-on-crime stance and has a long history of service in the criminal legal system, including as the Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney and as clerk of courts for Hamilton County (Cincinnati). He was also twice elected to serve as the Buckeye State’s treasurer. With the success Deters has had in previous elections and in office, it’s difficult to see him losing. In the 2020 Hamilton County prosecutor election, Deters won crossover support and was reelected despite the once-Republican county continuing to shift toward Democrats at the presidential level.
Justice Michael P. Donnelly was elected to the Ohio Supreme Court in 2018, defeating Republican Judge Craig Baldwin by 61% to 39%. Justice Melody J. Stewart was also elected to the Ohio Supreme Court in 2018, in a challenge against appointed incumbent Justice Mary DeGenaro. She was the first Black woman elected to the Ohio Supreme Court. Both are Democrats.
Texas
All 9 sitting justices on the court are Republicans, 5 of whom were appointed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. Three of the 9 justices will be up for reelection in 2024.
Justice Jimmy Blacklock was appointed by Abbott in 2018. That year, Blacklock won election over Democratic challenger Steven Kirkland, a district court judge in Harris County (Houston), with 53.2% in a relatively high-turnout statewide election.
Justice John Devine was first elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 2012. Devine won 34.2% of the vote in the Republican primary and then faced off against incumbent Republican Justice David Medina in a runoff, garnering 53.3%. He was then elected without a Democratic Party opponent in the general election. In 2018, Devine was reelected with 53.7% of the vote.
Abbott appointed Jane Bland to the supreme court in 2019. She ran for election in 2020 to serve the remainder of Justice Jeff Brown’s term, garnering 55.2% of the vote against Democratic challenger Kathy Cheng. Previously, Bland served for 6 years as a state district judge in Houston. Along with many other Republican incumbents on the court (located in Democratic-trending Harris County), she lost her reelection bid in 2018, and returned to private practice.
Arkansas
In 2022, conservative and Republican groups spent heavily in unsuccessful efforts to reshape the supreme court in Arkansas. Justice Robin Wynne defeated Chris Carnahan, a conservative challenger funded by Republican groups and business interests. The Arkansas supreme court has upheld some COVID-19 mandates and signed off on progressive ballot measures.
Chief Justice John Dan Kemp Jr. is 1 of 2 justices up for election in 2024. In 2016, Kemp challenged sitting Justice Courtney Hudson for the chief justice position and won.
The other justice up for reelection is Shawn Womack, who formerly served as a circuit court judge for the 14th Judicial District and as a Republican state legislator.
Georgia
Eight out of the 9 current Georgia Supreme Court justices were initially appointed by a Republican governor. Four justices are up for election in 2024.
Chief Justice Michael P. Boggs and Presiding Justice Nels S.D. Peterson were initially appointed by Republican Gov. Nathan Deal after the court was expanded from 7 to 9 justices in 2017. Both ran for election unopposed in 2018 and won. Boggs was previously a judge of the Georgia Court of Appeals. In 2013, President Barack Obama nominated Boggs to serve a U.S. District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. That nomination failed because he could not win support from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee owing to his conservative positions, including his votes in the Georgia state legislature to retain Confederate insignia in the state flag, to restrict abortion, and to ban same-sex marriage. Peterson, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, previously served as former Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue’s executive counsel and as Solicitor General of Georgia under the direction of then-Attorney General Sam Olens (R).
John J. Ellington was elected to the Georgia Supreme Court, unopposed, in 2018.
Andrew Pinson was appointed to the supreme court by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022, who had previously appointed him to the Georgia Court of Appeals. He formerly clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Idaho
Four out of the 5 currently serving justices were initially appointed by a Republican governor. G. Richard Bevan ran unopposed and won election in 2018, and is up for election in 2024. In 2021 he became chief justice of the court. Previously, Bevan ran unopposed, was elected and served as a district court judge. In January 2023, Bevan asked state lawmakers to give raises to judges and protect their security amid a “dangerous” political climate.
Kentucky
Chief Justice Laurance B. VanMeter is up for reelection in 2024. VanMeter won the 2016 election to the Supreme Court with 74%. VanMeter is a member of the Federalist Society. Previously, he served as a district court judge and practiced private law.
Conservative groups and the Republican Party have set their sights on changing the make-up of the state supreme court, especially since Republicans took control of the state legislature in 2016. The Kentucky Republican Party has proposed changes to the state’s judicial system, including ending judicial elections. In 2019, state Senate Majority Leader Damon Thayer went so far as to say justices “need to be reined in.” Last month, the court allowed state abortion bans to remain in place, a decision that anti-abortion groups applauded, but left the door open for future challenges. The court’s decision came despite the fact that Kentucky voters rejected a ballot measure in November that would have amended the state constitution to say there is no right to abortion.
Michigan
Michigan has a unique judicial selection system. Candidates are nominated by political parties and then all run together on the same ballot without party labels, with the top 2 finishers winning. Last year, 2 incumbents (a Democrat and a Republican) won reelection to the court.
The court is currently composed of 4 Democratic justices and 3 Republicans, which will make the 2024 elections in which incumbents David Viviano (R) and Kyra Harris Bolden (D) are running, one to watch closely. A change in partisan control of the court could also have implications for election administration. In 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the state’s election results. However, Republican justices dissented from some of the decisions.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) appointed Bolden to the state Supreme Court in November 2022. She was a candidate in 2022 but came in third behind incumbents Richard Bernstein (D) and Brian Zahra (R). She is the first Black woman to serve on Michigan’s Supreme Court.
Former Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder appointed Viviano in 2013, and he won a 2014 election. Viviano dissented from a 2022 Michigan Supreme Court decision ordering the Board of State Canvassers to allow a ballot proposition, “Reproductive Rights for All,” that would amend the Michigan Constitution to provide for a right to abortion before viability with limitations afterwards. Voters approved the proposition in the November 2022 elections with 56.7% voting yes.
Minnesota
The court is composed of 7 justices, and the current balance of the court is 5-2 Democratic (although the elections themselves are technically nonpartisan). In 2024, 4 justices will be up for reelection, including Chief Justice Lorie Skjerven Gildea and Barry Anderson, both initially appointed by former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R), and Margaret Chutich and Anne McKeig, both initially appointed by former Gov. Mark Dayton (D).
Gildea was not challenged for reelection as chief justice in 2018. In 2012, she defeated challenger Dan Griffith with 60% of the vote and garnered 55% of the vote to win over Deborah Hedlund in 2008.
Anderson has been unopposed in 2 of the last 3 elections, and defeated challenger Dean Barkley in the 2012 general election, winning 58.9% of the vote. Anderson is a former member of the Minnesota Court of Appeals.
Prior to serving on the supreme court, McKeig was a family court judge of the Minnesota Fourth District Court in Hennepin County, appointed by Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2008. McKeig was not challenged in a 2018 election. She is the first Native American justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court and the first woman Native American on any state supreme court.
In 2018, Chutich won with 55.9% of the vote — Dayton had previously appointed her to the court in 2016. Chutich is the first openly gay justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Prior to serving on the supreme court, Chutich was also appointed by Dayton and served as a judge at-large on the Minnesota Court of Appeals.
Mississippi
Four of the 9 sitting justices are up for reelection in 2024, including Presiding Justice James W. Kitchens and Robert P. Chamberlin, both previously elected to court seats, and James D. Maxwell II and Dawn H. Beam, both initially appointed to the court by former Republican Gov. Phil Bryant.
Kitchens was elected to the supreme court in 2008, winning 53.4% of the vote and defeating sitting Chief Justice James W. Smith. He was reelected in 2016 with 53.5% of the vote, defeating challenger T. Kenneth Griffis (who was later appointed to the court by Bryant).
Chamberlin was first elected to the supreme court in 2016 in a runoff election with 55% of the vote. He previously was a municipal judge and prosecutor.
Maxwell was initially appointed to the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2015 and then elected unchallenged to a full 8-year term in November 2016. He previously served on the Mississippi Court of Appeals, appointed to that court in 2009 by former Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, and twice elected unopposed.
Beam was initially appointed to the court in 2015 and then elected to a full 8-year term in November 2016 after garnering 67.3% of the vote in a contest against challenger Michael Shareef. Prior to serving on the supreme court, Beam was a judge for the 10th Chancery District in Mississippi, a county prosecutor and practiced private law for over a decade.
This year, the Republican-dominated Mississippi House of Representatives passed a bill to create a separate, unelected court system in the city of Jackson that would fall outside the purview of the city’s voters, 80% of whom are Black. The bill, which local leaders have compared to apartheid-era laws and described as unconstitutional, would also expand a separate capitol police force, overseen by state authorities. The new court district would feature two judges directly appointed by Mississippi’s supreme court chief justice, Michael K. Randolph. Amendments to require the judges to be residents of the Jackson area and to compel elections for the positions failed. The revised Senate version of the bill would allow the Mississippi Supreme Court chief justice to appoint one judge to work within the existing Hinds County Court system through December 2026.
Montana
Chief Justice Mike McGrath will be up for reelection in 2024. He was elected as chief justice in 2008 with 75.1% of the vote and was reelected in 2016 with 81.8% of the vote. Prior to his election to the Supreme Court, McGrath served as the attorney general of Montana as a Democrat.
Also on the ballot in 2024 will be Justice Dirk Sandefur. He was backed by Democratic groups and elected to an open seat on the supreme court in 2016 with 56.1% of the vote in a highly contested race against law professor Kristen Juras. The election was the most expensive judicial contest in the state’s history, totaling some $1.8 million in spending, with half of the spending coming from outside groups, the majority of which spent in support of Sandefur. Prior to his election to the supreme court, Sandefur was a district judge.
Yearslong conflict between Republican lawmakers and the judiciary system has led to proposals in the state legislature to reshape the court and its procedures. Senate Bill 311, sponsored by Republican Senator Barry Usher, would eliminate 2 supreme court justices, and in one scenario laid out in the bill, eliminate the 2024 election for Sandefur’s seat. If passed, the bill could also create a constitutional conflict because the constitution only discusses increasing seats on the court, while saying nothing about shrinking them.
Nevada
In 2024, 3 justices are up for reelection. Chief Justice Lidia S. Stiglich was appointed by former Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval in 2016. Previously Stiglich served as district court judge of the Second Judicial District Court in Nevada. She is one of 11 openly LGBT justices currently serving in state supreme courts. In the 2018 election, Stiglich defeated challenger Mathew Harter in the general election with 46.6% of the vote.
Elissa F. Cadish won a seat on the Nevada Supreme Court in the 2018 election, defeating challenger Jerome T. Tao with 45.3% of the vote. Previously, Cadish was a district court judge. In 2012, President Barack Obama nominated Cadish to be a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Nevada. However, former Republican Nevada Sen. Dean Heller blocked her nomination over a statement Cadish made on the right to bear arms. Eventually, Cadish requested President Obama to withdraw her nomination.
Patricia Lee was appointed by former Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak in 2022. Lee is the first Black woman and the first Asian American to serve on the Nevada Supreme Court.
North Dakota
Four current justices were appointed by Republican governors, and 1 was elected in a nonpartisan election. Appointed by Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, Justice Douglas Bahr will stand for election in 2024 to fill the remainder of the unexpired term.
Oregon
All 7 justices on the court were appointed by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown. Chief Justice Meagan Flynn will be up for reelection in 2024. She was initially appointed in 2017 and won reelection to the Oregon Supreme Court outright in the primary in 2018. Previously, Flynn served on the Court of Appeals.
Rebecca Duncan will be up for reelection in 2024. She was initially appointed in 2017 and won reelection to the Oregon Supreme Court outright in the primary in 2018. Previously, Duncan served on the Court of Appeals.
Justice Bronson James was appointed in 2022 and will stand for election in 2024. Previously, James was appointed by Brown and then elected in 2018 to serve on the Oregon Court of Appeals.
Justice Stephen Bushong was appointed in 2022 and will stand for election in 2024. Previously, Bushong was elected without opposition in 2014 and 2020 to serve on Oregon’s 4th Judicial District Circuit Court.
Additionally, new Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek will be appointing a replacement for Supreme Court Justice Adrienne Nelson, who was recently confirmed as a federal judge. So there should be a fifth state supreme court election next year, too (Kotek has not yet made the appointment).
In November 2022, Oregon voters narrowly approved Measure 114, which would require purchasers to take a safety course, pass a background check and obtain a permit before obtaining a firearm. It would also ban magazines or ammunition feeders that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. In February 2023, the Oregon Supreme Court denied a request by Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to allow the measure to go into effect, allowing legal challenges to the gun-control measure to move forward, while parts of the law remain paused.
Washington
With the adoption of General Rule 37 in 2018, the Washington Supreme Court became the first court in the nation to adopt a court rule aimed at eliminating both implicit and intentional racial bias in jury selection. Over the past 5 years, the Washington Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings aimed at combating implicit racial bias using an “objective observer” test to determine whether racial bias was a factor in determining who gets to serve on juries, who gets convicted, and who wins in court. In State v. Sum, the court said the subject’s race must also be considered in determining the legality of police stops. In Henderson v. Thompson, the court said defense lawyers evoked harmful racial stereotypes when they described the Black female plaintiff as “combative.” Conservative media outlets have called the Washington Supreme Court’s efforts to address racial bias unworkable, while supporters have called them revolutionary. The California legislature has adopted the “objective observer” test for jury selection.
In 2024, 3 justices will face reelection, including Chief Justice Steven C. González. He was initially appointed in 2011 as an associate justice by former Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire. He won elections in 2012 and 2018.
Justice Susan Owens was first elected to the Washington Supreme Court in 2000 and won reelection in 2006, 2012, and 2018.
Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud was first elected to the Washington Supreme Court in 2012 and reelected in 2018.
West Virginia
In 2024, 2 appointed justices are up for election and, if the seats are contested, the outcome could determine the ideological balance of the court.
Justice John A. Hutchison was appointed by Republican Gov. Jim Justice to the supreme court in 2018. Hutchison fended off two challengers in the 2020 general election, winning with 39.2% of the vote. Previously, Hutchison was appointed to the bench in the Tenth Judicial Circuit by former Democratic Gov. Gaston Caperton in 1995, and he was subsequently reelected to that seat in 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2016.
Haley Bunn was appointed by Justice to the supreme court in 2022, becoming the youngest woman to serve on the court. Previously Bunn was an assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, specializing in prosecuting opioid-related cases.
Alaska
In 2024, Justices Dario Borghesan and Jennifer S. Henderson will face retention elections. Only one state supreme court justice has ever lost a retention election in the state’s history.
Arizona
All of the current supreme court justices were appointed by a Republican governor. Clint Bolick, who previously worked for the conservative/libertarian Goldwater Institute, and Kathryn Hackett King, who was Deputy General Counsel for former Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, will face retention elections in 2024. Bolick handily won an election retention in 2019 with 71% of the vote, despite efforts by the National Education Association to oust Bolick over his vote in a case to remove a 2018 ballot initiative proposing a tax increase on individuals making more than $250,000 that would have created a dedicated revenue stream for education. No supreme court justice has ever lost a retention election in Arizona.
Colorado
All of Colorado’s current supreme court justices were appointed by a Democratic governor. There are 3 justices up for retention election in 2024. First is Chief Justice Brian Boatright, a registered Republican who previously served as a judge on the Colorado District Court from 1999 to 2011. Second is Monica Márquez, who previously worked in the Colorado Attorney General’s office. Márquez is the first Latina and first openly gay person to serve on the Colorado Supreme Court and the longest-serving of 11 openly LGBT state supreme court justices serving in the United States. Maria Berkenkotter is the third justice who will be on the ballot. She presided over the high-profile 2016 trial of Dynel Lane, who was sentenced to 100 years in prison for cutting the fetus out of another woman.
No justice has ever lost a retention election since the system was put in place in Colorado in 1966.
Florida
Renatha Francis, appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022 and the state court’s first Jamaican-American justice, will face a retention election in 2024.
Indiana
All 5 of the current justices were appointed by a Republican governor. There will be 3 retention elections for Indiana Supreme Court justices in 2024.
Loretta Rush has been a member of the Indiana Supreme Court since 2012, becoming chief justice in 2014. She is Indiana’s first female chief justice and won a retention election in 2014 with 69% of the vote.
Mark S. Massa, also appointed by former Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, also won a retention election in 2014 with 67.3% of the vote. Previously he served as Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of Indiana and as General Counsel to Daniels.
Derek R. Molter was appointed by Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, and 2024 will be Molter’s first retention election. Molter previously served as a judge on the Indiana Court of Appeals from 2021 to 2022.
Iowa
All 7 of the current justices Iowa Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican governor with assistance from a judicial nominating commission.
Justice David N. May will face a retention election in 2024 after his initial appointment by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds in 2022. He was previously a state district judge.
The Iowa Supreme Court may take up women’s reproductive health before the 2024 elections. Reynolds recently asked the Supreme Court to lift an injunction to allow the state’s fetal heartbeat bill — which was signed in 2018 and prohibits elective abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected — to go into effect. The Iowa Supreme Court put an injunction on the law in 2019 after ruling that abortion is a state constitutional right. However, in June 2022, the Court, in a 5-2 vote, found that the Iowa Constitution did not protect a right to an abortion, overruling its 2018 decision and upholding a law establishing a 24-hour waiting period. Reynolds filed to challenge the injunction in 2022, but a Polk County judge ruled she did not have the authority to overturn the injunction.
Maryland
Six of the 7 sitting justices were appointed by former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who made a record 190 judicial appointments during his 2-term tenure, and many historic appointments among them. The other sitting justice was appointed by former Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley.
Chief Justice Matthew J. Fader and Justices Angela M. Eaves and Shirley M. Watts will have retention elections in 2024. Fader was previously appointed by Hogan to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals and won a retention election to that seat with 84.4% of the vote.
Watts was the second Black woman appointed to the Maryland Supreme Court. Watts was a judge on the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, and was also appointed to that position by O’Malley.
Eaves was appointed by Hogan. She made history as the state’s first Afro-Latina supreme court justice.
In 2024, the Maryland Supreme Court is expected to render a decision in a case that questions whether the state’s ban on gun possession by someone sentenced to more than 2 years in prison for a nonviolent common law crime violates a constitutional right to keep and bear arms. This comes in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s broad interpretation of the Second Amendment in 2022’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen.
Missouri
From Dred Scott v. Sandford (slavery) to Minor v. Happersett (women’s suffrage) to Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health (euthanasia), the Missouri Supreme Court has decided a number of important cases. The court has also rendered decisions on several critical issues in recent years, including expansion of Medicaid, municipal court reform, and limits to collective bargaining for state employees.
Justice George William Draper III, appointed to the court in 2011 by former Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon, will face a retention election in 2024. Draper served as chief justice of the court from 2019-2021.
The Missouri Supreme Court has agreed to take a case weighing the authority of local and state health officials to issue public health orders. The court will also likely be asked to consider the constitutionality of the Second Amendment Preservation Act, which limits enforcement of federal gun laws.
Nebraska
In 2024, Justice Stephanie F. Stacy will face a retention election. She was initially appointed to the court by former Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts in 2015 and was retained in the 2018 election with 81% of the vote. Stacy previously served as a judge on the Third District Court. As a district court judge, Stacy ruled in November 2014 that the governor did not have the authority to approve the passage of the Keystone XL pipeline, an oil pipeline traveling from Canada to Texas, through the state of Nebraska. The state appealed to the Nebraska Supreme Court, where a ruling by 4 of the 7 justices found the legislation authorizing the governor to approve the pipeline unconstitutional. However because the Nebraska Constitution requires 5 justices to concur to hold a legislative act unconstitutional, Stacy’s ruling was ultimately vacated.
Nebraska Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael Heavican recently warned state lawmakers of judiciary branch staff shortages, amid rising concerns about increasing workload and limited resources of the judiciary branch in the state.
Oklahoma
Three of 9 Oklahoma Supreme Court justices will face retention elections in 2024; all of them were initially appointed to the court by Democratic governors. Oklahoma has strong ethics restrictions for justices, who are forbidden from campaigning for reelection unless there is active opposition to their retention in office, and even if they do actively campaign for retention, they cannot personally raise funds for their campaign. Unlike most other states, there’s no mandatory retirement age for justices in Oklahoma, and 5 of the 9 sitting justices, including the 3 facing retention elections in 2024, are age 70 or older as of 2023.
Justice Noma Gurich was appointed by former Democratic Gov. Brad Henry in 2010 and is the third woman appointed to the supreme court in the state’s history. She retained her seat in the 2018 election with 61.6% of the vote.
Justice Yvonne Kauger was appointed by former Democratic Gov. George Nigh in 1984, and served as chief justice from 1997 to 1998. Kauger was retained in the 2018 supreme court election with 62.2% of the vote and in the 2012 election with 65.7%.
Justice James E. Edmondson was appointed by former Democratic Gov. Brad Henry in 2003. In 2018, he retained his seat with 59.4% of the vote, and in 2012, he retained it with 66.9% of the vote.
South Dakota
All 5 judges on the court were appointed by a Republican governor. Justice Scott P. Myren was appointed by Republican Gov. Kristi Noem in 2020 and Myren will face a retention election 2024. Previously, Myren served as a judge on the state’s Fifth Judicial Circuit.
Utah
All 5 judges on the Utah Supreme Court were appointed by a Republican governor. Chief Justice Matthew Durrant, first appointed by Gov. Mike Leavitt in 2000, will face a retention election in 2024. Durrant was retained to the court 77.6% of the vote in 2014.
Wyoming
All 5 sitting justices were appointed by Republican governors, and 3 will face retention elections in 2024.
Chief Justice Kate M. Fox will face a retention election in 2024 will reach the mandatory retirement age in 2025. Fox joined the supreme court in 2014 after being appointed by Republican Gov. Matt Mead, making her the second woman appointed to the Wyoming Supreme Court. Fox won a retention election in 2016.
Justice Keith Kautz was appointed to the supreme court in 2015 by Mead. In 2016, he won a retention election with 76.6% of the vote.
Justice John Fenn was appointed to the supreme court in 2021 by Republican Gov. Mark Gordon. Previously Fenn served as a state court judge from 2007 to 2022.
There is a potential for the Wyoming Supreme Court to take up reproductive rights. Previously, the Wyoming legislature passed a trigger ban on abortion that went into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The Wyoming trigger ban is currently being challenged and one of the main arguments against it is that it violates Article 1, Section 38 of the Wyoming Constitution on health care access, which was voted into law in 2012 in response to the Affordable Health Care Act. It reads: “Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions. The parent, guardian or legal representative of any other natural person shall have the right to make healthcare decisions for that person.” Wyoming courts now may decide if abortion is defined as healthcare.
— The calendar year before the presidential primary voting begins is often defined by winnowing, as contenders emerge and then fade.
— But Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are taking up so much oxygen that we may already have the top contenders, with everyone else who runs essentially an afterthought.
— DeSantis is polling well for a non-candidate, but we need to see how he actually performs before assuming that his support is solid.
— If another candidate supplants DeSantis (or Trump), or at least vaults into their stratosphere, don’t necessarily assume it will be someone who is currently well-known now or has a lot of formal political experience.
It feels late — and also early — in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
It may be late because despite the fact that we are still nearly a year away from the actual voting, the top 2 contenders seem to be so clear. The winnowing process that so often defines the year in advance of the primary voting may have effectively already happened – it’s just that the winnowed candidates, some of whom aren’t even candidates yet, don’t know that their fate is already sealed.
And yet it may be very early because the person who seems like Donald Trump’s chief rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), is both in an enviable, impressive position but also is unproven as a national candidate, which means he is not guaranteed to have staying power.
Donald Trump already served a single term as president, lost reelection, and is seeking to be renominated, putting him in the position of being a quasi-incumbent. In national polls of the GOP presidential primary that ask about multiple candidates, Trump typically registers in the 40s, sometimes getting into the 50s. That is a strong starting point, but he is not the undisputed leader of the party, like he was in 2020 when he was an incumbent running for reelection. He also may be coasting to some degree on name ID. Still, Republicans have long struggled to actually land punches on him — to the extent they have even tried.
Meanwhile, DeSantis remains an undeclared candidate, but he is acting very much like an actual candidate. He just released a book, and he embarked on a national tour recently, including speaking at one of the great Republican forums in the country, the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. While he generally polls considerably lower than Trump in national polls, DeSantis still registers a level of support ranging from the mid-20s to the low-to-mid 30s. That is impressive for someone who has never before run for president or been part of a presidential ticket, as Nate Cohn recently documented in the New York Times.
In the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Trump and DeSantis together get about 75% of the total support. That’s a little bit more than what national polls showed in the early days of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, which turned into a 2-way contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: At this time in 2007, Obama and Clinton generally shared about 60%-65% of the support in national polls. Maybe this race will just end up looking a lot like that 2008 Democratic contest — one in which many candidates competed, but only 2, Clinton and Obama, ever really showed much ability to actually win the nomination.
But this race is not guaranteed to follow the Clinton-Obama model. The composition of the debate stage — or stages, depending on the number of candidates — at the first Republican presidential primary debate in August remains a mystery. Political scientist Seth Masket has identified 14 potential Republican candidates, but only 5 of them have announced bids — and only 2 are people we would consider prominent national politicians. There is Trump, of course, as well as former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. Beyond them, there is businessman Perry Johnson, who was last seen failing to secure a place on the Michigan gubernatorial ballot; Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and author; and Corey Stapleton, the former Montana secretary of state who has previously lost several primaries for higher office. Meanwhile, a couple of potential contenders have said they will not run: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and former Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD).
That still leaves several other possible candidates who are technically undecided but have been behaving as though they might become candidates. DeSantis obviously leads that list, but we would also add former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others.
Whether those candidates can get any traction depends very much on the first of 5 questions and observations we have about the GOP field.
As mentioned above, DeSantis is in an unusually strong position for a newcomer to presidential politics. In addition to garnering a quarter or more of GOP support in national polls, DeSantis has arguably been even more competitive with Trump in state-level polls. He even sometimes leads Trump in polls of key states that ask about multiple candidates, as opposed to just a hypothetical head-to-head with Trump (where DeSantis often fares better). DeSantis has led Trump in recent multi-candidate polls of likely or registered voters released since Feb. 1 in California, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, while Trump has led DeSantis in Arizona, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, and South Carolina (we used the latest polls list from FiveThirtyEight to track these surveys). So the individual polls vary, but both Trump and DeSantis backers can point to good results for their candidate in individual states.
Say what you want about Trump, and we have said plenty, but he is basically a proven commodity at this point. He has won, he has lost, he has been at the center of politics for almost 8 years now and has been a well-known figure in American life for much longer than that. He is well-defined. He continues to face several ongoing legal questions — Insider laid all of them out here. These cases are obviously worth monitoring but we’re not going to assume in advance that any of them will ensnare him or cause his campaign serious damage. That is not to say that we should assume Trump’s level of support will be static in the primary — he may rise or fall depending on his own performance or the performance of his rivals — but at this point we think it’s less likely that he experiences huge gyrations in his level of support.
DeSantis is different — or at least might be different. We have no idea how he will perform as an actual presidential candidate, and the public’s perception of him is less solid. Maybe he enters the race, is well-received, and emerges more clearly as Trump’s chief rival, perhaps even surpassing the former president. Or maybe he flames out, as other seemingly formidable but ultimately unsuccessful candidates before him, like then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry after he was a relatively late entrant to the 2012 GOP presidential race. Perry skyrocketed to the top of the GOP field but then fell off quickly as he performed poorly as a candidate.
Current polling numbers are not going to help us project how DeSantis will actually perform. We don’t know what to expect — all we know is that we don’t know.
How well DeSantis campaigns is really the key to the question posed at the start of the article, whether it is late or early in the primary process. If DeSantis is as strong as he now appears, there just is not much oxygen for anyone else besides Trump.
The astute political journalist Ron Brownstein long ago coined the term “wine track” versus “beer track” to analyze presidential primary coalitions. He recently discussed the history of the dynamic and how it has often applied to Democratic primaries, but now is very salient on the GOP side (we recommend his CNN piece for a fuller exploration of this dynamic).
Basically, on the GOP side, the “wine track” means having a 4-year college degree, while “beer track” means not having a 4-year degree. Trump won in 2016 by not only doing better among beer track voters than wine track voters, Brownstein writes, but also because wine track voters were more divided in 2016 among different candidates than beer track voters were.
This blue collar/white collar divide is evident in polling. For instance, a recent national survey from the GOP firm Echelon Insights showed Trump leading DeSantis 46%-31%, with Pence at 9% and Haley at 6%. Trump dominated among those who do not have a bachelor’s degree, 54%-27%, but DeSantis led Trump, narrowly, 36%-33% among those who had a bachelor’s degree or more. The Pence/Haley combo also got more support among college graduates — 22% combined compared to 11% among the non-college group. This poll — and others show similar findings — illustrates the basic dynamic: Trump is stronger with the non-college group than the college group, and the college group is more divided than the non-college group.
We can see this at the state level, too. The GOP firm Differentiators polled likely Virginia GOP primary voters in late February, finding DeSantis up 37%-34% in a multi-candidate field. But the regional splits were telling: DeSantis led Trump by 14 points in the highly-educated Washington, DC suburbs/Northern Virginia region, while Trump led DeSantis by 17 points in rural, western Virginia, where 4-year college attainment is not nearly as high. This reflects the pattern we saw in Virginia in the 2016 primary: Trump beat the second-place finisher, Rubio, by about 3 points statewide. Rubio won the core DC suburban counties, as well as Richmond and its most vote-rich suburban counties. Trump won almost everywhere else, including landslide margins in many western Virginia locales.
So one can see the outlines of a dynamic similar to 2016, and how in order to defeat Trump, a single candidate likely needs to consolidate the “wine track” (college-educated) vote at least as well as Trump consolidates the “beer track” (non-college) vote. That candidate very well may be DeSantis but, again, we’ll just have to wait and see.
While individual states varied, exit polls in many GOP contests in 2016 pointed to an overall electorate that was basically split 50-50 between those who held 4-year college degrees and those who did not. Non-college voters more clearly outnumber college-educated voters in the broader electorate, but remember that primaries (even very competitive ones) are going to have lower turnout than presidential general elections, and that people with degrees are likelier to vote than those who do not have degrees. That said, it’s also possible that exit polls, which have a reputation for overstating the education level of the electorate, may have suggested that the 2016 electorate had a bit higher of an education level than it did in reality.
Trying to determine the education level of the likely GOP electorate is going to be a challenging but important task for pollsters in the leadup to the primary season, because there is likely to be a difference in the preferences of college graduates versus non-graduates, with Trump drawing more support from voters who do not have a 4-year degree and his main rival, or rivals, doing better with those who do have a 4-year degree.
Though the 1988 presidential election is most remembered for its largely negative general election campaign between then-Vice President George H. W. Bush (R) and Gov. Michael Dukakis (D-MA), it was also the first of 3 attempts that Joe Biden made at the White House. While Biden ended up dropping out before the first primary votes were cast, there were a handful of other Democrats in the running — the press sometimes referred to the group of hopefuls as the “Seven Dwarfs.”
Some primaries that have taken place more recently — namely the 2016 GOP and 2020 Democratic contests — have felt more like watching 101 Dalmatians, to use another Disney reference. In the latter primary, roughly 2 dozen candidates ended up participating in at least one debate.
The ballooning number of candidates in recent cycles has been driven, at least to some degree, by the entrance of lesser-known, electorally inexperienced candidates. Could one or more of them break through, at least for a time, in 2023 or 2024?
Trump is the ultimate example of what has become a familiar dynamic on the Republican side: Someone with no previous elected experience achieving prominence within the party. But there were other examples in recent GOP presidential primaries. In late October/early November in 2011, the late businessman Herman Cain took a lead in national GOP primary polling. Four years later at almost the exact same time in the GOP primary, Trump very briefly relinquished the national polling lead to Ben Carson, a prominent former neurosurgeon. Neither first-time candidate lasted at the top for very long, and both ended up as afterthoughts when the voting actually began, but we do wonder if we may see similarly shocking rises this time.
It may be that the dominance of Trump and DeSantis prevents anyone else from breaking through. But if someone does, it may not necessarily be the most obvious, or most experienced, alternatives who do.
One thing to watch out for, especially as candidates enter the race, will be the strength of candidates in their own home states. Throughout the past several primary cycles, some candidates have been able to perform well in their home state, or region, despite having limited support elsewhere. For someone trying to actually win a nomination, doing well in one’s home state seems like a prerequisite.
One of the more recent examples, on the Republican side, came in 2016: Kasich carried his home state by 11 points over the then-ascendent Trump. Though it earned the governor a less-than flattering nickname — after that mid-March contest, Trump derided him as “1 for 38 Kasich” — it did give the Kasich campaign some credibility, in that he became 1 of only 3 candidates in a wide field to actually beat Trump in a nominating contest. The Ohio primary that year also previewed some of the dynamics that took hold in the general election: Kasich took majorities in several metro counties, but Trump won almost every county in the state’s post-industrial Appalachian east. Still, on that same primary day, Trump easily won Florida over home-state Sen. Rubio, which pushed Rubio out of the race.
In past cycles, the “favorite son” effect has made some contests that occur earlier on the calendar less predictive. In 1992, the Iowa caucus, which kickstarted the campaigns of future presidents Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008, got little attention. That year, its home state senator, prairie populist Tom Harkin, was running. As other Democrats eschewed Iowa, and Harkin won with close to 80% of the vote. But in the next contest, the New Hampshire primary, Harkin’s fourth place showing cast doubt on his national viability. Bill Clinton, a southerner who finished second to former Sen. Paul Tsongas of neighboring Massachusetts, meanwhile spun his relatively strong showing by famously declaring himself the “comeback kid.”
South Carolina — which has, all things considered, been one of the more predictive early states — has also occasionally been impacted by home region candidates. In the 2004 Democratic contest, Sen. John Edwards, from next door North Carolina, won the contest handily but struggled in subsequent primaries, although he remained competitive in some other southern contests — most notably, he won his home state’s caucus despite having dropped out. Edwards, of course, eventually found his way onto the national ticket that year. In early 2012, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) seemed to have some momentum but similarly stalled out — he carried South Carolina and then his neighboring home state, Georgia, on Super Tuesday. Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) then emerged as the most viable conservative alternative to eventual nominee Mitt Romney (R-MA). Had Gingrich not been in the running, would things have been different if his voters consolidated behind Santorum?
The 2024 GOP field might include at least 2 South Carolinians, each of whom could conceivably have some similar home-state appeal: former Gov. Haley entered the race last month, while Sen. Scott has been sounding like a candidate in recent months. Still, with presidential politics becoming more nationalized, the home state bonus candidates receive has been lessening. In the 3 most recent South Carolina polls (all from conservative sources), Trump and DeSantis were first and second in the state, with Haley and Scott behind them.
In our home state, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) has been widely rumored to be an eventual national candidate. While he gets a near-unanimous (87%) positive favorability from Republicans in the commonwealth, the aforementioned Virginia poll from the Differentiators found him taking just 6% against a field of potential candidates (another February poll from Roanoke College found Youngkin also at 6% in Virginia). Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH), a Trump critic and potential candidate, polled at just 7% in a recent Emerson College survey of his home state. To the extent that any of these announced or potential candidates break through, one would think they would first have to show significant strength at home.
Trump is effectively in an unprecedented position in the modern history of presidential nominations, a time period that covers basically the last half-century, when presidential nominations became much more about winning primaries and caucuses as opposed to using backdoor wheeling and dealing to win the nomination at the convention. In that timeframe, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Trump lost reelection bids. None of the prior trio later sought a return to the presidency, although Ronald Reagan and Ford did discuss the latter joining his ticket as the vice presidential nominee in 1980. So what Trump is attempting is unfamiliar, as is so much else about his political persona.
In a webcast held shortly after the 2020 election, longtime Almanac of American Politics co-author Michael Barone looked to history when evaluating the GOP’s future. One of Barone’s conclusions was that past Republican presidents were typically popular with their party while in office, but had difficulty winning over their fellow partisans when trying to stage a comeback.
The best example of that phenomenon was from over a century ago (which, again, speaks to how rarely former presidents seek a return to the White House). After leaving office, Teddy Roosevelt remained a popular figure, and actually finished first in most states that held Republican primaries in 1912 — but he could not convince Republican convention delegates to dump his successor, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt famously ran as an independent “Bull Moose” candidate in the general election, which handed the presidency to Democrats. Pundits have discussed the prospect of a third-third party run by a snubbed Trump since at least 2016, but looking to 2024, Trump may face some logistical hurdles if he opts to go that route.
While history has not been a perfect guide in today’s politics — a recent example being Democrats overperformance in last year’s midterms — Trump’s standing with Republicans is not as strong as it once was — a sign that the party may be ready to move on.
Trump is probably the favorite to start, if only because — as mentioned above — we need to see how DeSantis performs. If the Florida governor does enter, and does maintain or grow his level of support after becoming a candidate, then the battle for the nomination becomes more of a coin flip.
— If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes, the U.S. House of Representatives elected in the 2024 election would decide the presidency.
— Republicans are very likely to continue to control enough House delegations to select the GOP nominee as the winner, meaning that 269 is effectively the winning Electoral College number for Republicans, while it’s 270 for Democrats.
— Republicans currently control 26 of the 50 House delegations, the bare majority to win in the House if the Electoral College does not produce a majority winner.
Next year, 2024, coincides with a pair of bicentennial anniversaries in American presidential election history.
The presidential election of 1824 was the first one in which there is a tabulation of the actual popular vote for president, albeit not from every state. A majority of states in the Union at the time had adopted a popular vote for presidential electors; previously, presidential electors had generally been chosen by state legislatures. Thus, one can describe 2024 as representing the 200th anniversary of a popular vote for president, even if the totals represented only 18 of the 24 states voting at the time. (This history is from What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe).
The 4-way presidential race failed to produce a majority winner in the Electoral College: Andrew Jackson finished first, with 41% of the popular vote and 38% of the electoral votes, short of the majority required for election. The election went to the House of Representatives, which brings us to the second bicentennial anniversary in 2024: 1824 was the most recent election in which the House decided the presidential winner. The 12th Amendment stipulates that in the event no one wins a majority of the Electoral College votes, the House chooses among the top 3 finishers in the Electoral College, with each state’s delegation getting a single vote. The House ended up backing the second-place finisher, John Quincy Adams. Jackson would get his revenge in a landslide victory 4 years later.
The dueling anniversaries illustrate the conflicting realities at the heart of the American presidential election system. On one hand, the 1824 election represents an important step in the evolution of the mass electorate’s role in presidential elections, with the franchise slowly being expanded to women, Black Americans, 18-20 year olds, and others over the course of the past 2 centuries. The expansion of the franchise has at its heart a very basic assumption — the voters should pick the president.
On the other hand, the dusty, old system used in 1824 to resolve an inconclusive election endures, lying in wait to befuddle most Americans (and enrage many of them) if it is ever needed. It is reminiscent of the Electoral College itself — an ancient foundation upon which we have constructed our modern representative democracy. Like the Electoral College, the House tiebreaking procedure was created at a time before rank-and-file voters were truly involved in selecting the president. So if the people (the voters) don’t produce a clear verdict, they effectively forfeit the choice to an elected representative body, albeit divided in such a way (into 50 state-level subgroups) that might not make it representative of the full membership of the whole House. This is not neatly compatible with majoritarian ideals — but, then again, neither is the Electoral College or the U.S. Senate. Would we design a system like this today? The answer is obvious, but it also just doesn’t matter in the context of the upcoming election, as the system is not going to change. So we need to understand it in order to be ready for all possible outcomes.
The House tiebreaking procedure — unlike the Electoral College, which is endlessly debated and analyzed — is not a prominent feature of election analysis and commentary, probably because it has never been used in anyone’s lifetime and because the odds of it being used are so low. But as we showed in yesterday’s Crystal Ball, a tie came close to happening in 2020, and there are plausible scenarios under which it could happen in 2024.
If there is a tie, Republicans continue to have an advantage in the House tiebreaking procedure, and they are very likely to retain it following the 2024 election, regardless of which party wins the overall House majority.
That’s because in the House tiebreaking vote, each of the 50 states gets a single vote, and a majority of the votes (26) are required to select a president. Presumably, members of the party that hold a majority of seats in a given delegation would cast their vote for their party’s presidential candidate. Evenly-divided states might end up unable to cast a vote. The new House — meaning the one elected in 2024, not the current one — would break the tie. The Senate, meanwhile, would select the vice president. That is a more straightforward process, as each of the 100 senators gets a single vote.
Map 1 shows the control of the individual House delegations by party.
Republicans currently control 26 of the 50 House delegations, the bare minimum needed to elect the president in a House vote. Democrats control 22, and a pair of states — Minnesota and North Carolina — are split. This is almost the exact same division as there was the last time we wrote about this, in advance of the 2020 election, when Republicans held a 26-23-1 advantage (a handful of states have changed hands either way since then). Back when we last looked, in September 2020, Democrats held a 232-198 advantage in the House, with 4 vacancies at that time and with now-former Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan serving as an independent after leaving the GOP. Now, Republicans will have a 222-213 majority once Rep.-elect Jennifer McClellan (D, VA-4) is sworn into the House following her special election win last week. Democrats held the majority back in 2020, but now Republicans do.
We recently released our initial House ratings for 2024. Those ratings help inform our state-by-state assessments of the delegations. Let’s start with the delegations we consider to be effectively Safe Republican, then those that are Safe Democratic, and finally those where there is at least a little bit of a question about which side will control the delegation following next year’s elections.
First of all, 22 states have House delegations we consider Safe Republican in 2024: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Meanwhile, Democrats have just 13 Safe delegations of their own: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.
That leaves 15 states where there is at least some question about which party will control the delegation following 2024. We’ll go through them in alphabetical order:
Alaska: Rep. Mary Peltola (D, AK-AL) is the single member of this House delegation. In addition to facing what will likely be a competitive reelection challenge, Peltola also would face pressure to cast her vote for the presidential winner in her state, assuredly a Republican in a situation where a tie is possible (we could imagine a Democrat carrying Alaska for president, but only as part of a national landslide). Leans Democratic
Arizona: Republicans flipped this delegation from 5-4 Democratic to 6-3 Republican last year. However, 2 of the GOP seats are very marginal, so Democrats could win the delegation back as soon as next year. Leans Republican
Colorado: Democrats have a 5-3 edge, but Rep. Yadira Caraveo (D, CO-8) only very narrowly won a new swing seat, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R, CO-3) also came very close to losing a Republican-leaning seat. If things broke right for Republicans, they could get to a 4-4 tie. Leans Democratic
Iowa: Republicans have a 4-0 edge, which they completed last year with Rep. Zach Nunn’s (R, IA-3) very close win over former Rep. Cindy Axne (D) in the marginal Des Moines-based IA-3. Democrats would have to win that seat back and flip 1 of 2 competitive but Republican-leaning eastern districts to get to a tie (we rate both seats Likely Republican). Iowa may not be quite Safe Republican, but it is close. Likely Republican
Maine: Republicans could forge a tie here if they knocked off Rep. Jared Golden (D, ME-2), who holds a Trump-won seat. Leans Democratic
Michigan: Democrats hold a narrow 7-6 statewide lead, but they are defending the open MI-7, which was very narrowly decided for president in 2024. Reps. Dan Kildee (D, MI-8) and John James (R, MI-10) also hold marginal districts. Toss-up
Minnesota: The delegation is split 4-4, and the only truly competitive seat is held by Rep. Angie Craig (D, MN-2), but it is Biden +7 and Craig won a solid, 5-point victory last year. Leans Split
Montana: Republicans should hold on to their 2-0 edge here, but the seat held by Rep. Ryan Zinke (R, MT-1) is somewhat competitive (Trump +7) and Zinke won by just 3 points last year in an open-seat race. He may or may not run for Senate. Leans Republican
Nevada: The Democrats’ gerrymander helped preserve the party’s 3-1 edge here, and they remain favored in all 3 seats to start this cycle. Likely Democratic
New Hampshire: Republicans hypothetically could compete for either of the state’s seats, but both are a bit bluer than the nation as a whole. Likely Democratic
North Carolina: The state is split 7-7 right now, but it appears to be only a matter of time before Republicans redraw the map, which was imposed last cycle by a Democratic-majority state Supreme Court that has now flipped to Republican control. Assuming the Republicans end up being able to gerrymander North Carolina, they should easily win a majority of the state’s seats next year. Likely Republican
Oregon: Democrats have a 4-2 statewide edge, and the most competitive district is OR-5, which Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R) flipped last year. Likely Democratic
Pennsylvania: Democrats hold a slim 9-8 edge here, but Reps. Matt Cartwright (D, PA-8) and Susan Wild (D, PA-7) are defending Toss-up seats. Toss-up
Virginia: Rep. Jen Kiggans (R, VA-2) flipped the state’s most marginal district to cut the Democratic edge to 6-5, but Republicans will have to unseat Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D, VA-7) in a Biden +7 district to flip the delegation. Likely Democratic
Wisconsin: Republicans hold what on the current map is a fairly solid 6-2 statewide lead after flipping WI-3 last cycle, but if a Democratic-aligned justice wins next month’s state Supreme Court election, Democratic-aligned justices will control the court 4-3. That could open the door to litigation that would force a new congressional district map, perhaps splitting the Milwaukee and Madison areas and getting the delegation to 4-4. There are a lot of what ifs here, but the situation merits watching. Likely Republican, for now
So Republicans start with 22 Safe delegations. Iowa and North Carolina are likely to be delegations 23 and 24, and we favor Republicans to hold the majorities in Arizona and Montana. That’s 26 right there, and it doesn’t even include Wisconsin because of the redistricting situation. It also wouldn’t take much for Republicans to flip the Toss-ups, Michigan and Pennsylvania, particularly in a world where an Electoral College split is happening, which would suggest a close and competitive presidential election.
Meanwhile, it’s exceedingly difficult to imagine Democrats getting to a bare majority themselves, 26, in the midst of an otherwise competitive national election. There are circumstances where they could deny Republicans a majority by winning or forcing ties in almost all of the competitive states noted above.
How a deadlocked House would resolve a presidential election if neither side had a majority of delegations is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it wouldn’t. It is also unclear how a majority party that nonetheless did not control a majority of delegations would act from a procedural standpoint. If the Senate could produce a vice president (that chamber is 51-49 Democratic but is very gettable for Republicans next year), that vice president would serve as president if the House does not produce a president.
The bottom line here is that Republicans appear likely to maintain control over the presidential tiebreaking process in the House, meaning that their Electoral College magic number is effectively 269, not 270.
One other alternative that could throw the election to the House is a scenario in which a third candidate wins enough electoral votes to prevent either of the major party nominees from getting to 270. This would make the situation more comparable to 1824, when there were multiple, credible candidates who got electoral votes, making it difficult for anyone to get a majority.
While there have been protest votes cast by faithless electors in some instances over the past few decades, the last time a third party candidate actually won electoral votes in his own right was George Wallace, the Dixiecrat segregationist who way back in 1968 carried 5 Southern states and 46 electoral votes. Richard Nixon still won the Electoral College, but enough states were close that had things gone a little differently, the election could have gone to the House (which Wallace wanted as a way to dictate terms to the eventual winning candidate). That led to a serious effort to amend the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College. President Nixon supported a constitutional amendment that easily passed the House, but it died in the Senate (Washington Post history blogger Gillian Brockell wrote about this after the 2020 election).
What third party candidate could win electoral votes in 2024? While the likeliest answer is that no one will, Donald Trump is the most plausible candidate. Republicans have long feared Trump running as a third party candidate, and he could potentially do so if he loses the 2024 Republican nomination (we’ll believe it when we see it, but one cannot rule anything out with Trump). A recent poll by Republican pollster Whit Ayres for the Bulwark found that 28% of Republican primary voters would back Trump in a general election even if he ran as an independent — a group the publication’s Sarah Longwell called the “Always Trumpers.” Again, this is all hypothetical, but if Trump ran as a non-major party candidate, got on ballots, and actually attracted and maintained this kind of support, he could potentially win some states — West Virginia, where he turned in a blockbuster performance for a GOP presidential nominee, comes to mind.
In all likelihood, this kind of GOP split — where Trump was strong enough to be winning states despite not being the GOP nominee — would swing the election to the Democratic nominee as opposed to forcing the election to the House (it could be a version of the 1912 election, when a GOP split allowed Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency). Although if this 3-way 2024 election did go to the House, imagine the political theater of House Republicans having to choose between their party’s nominee and Trump.
OK, we’ll admit, our imagination might be getting a bit out of hand here. Meanwhile, we very much hope that the 200-year streak of the House not having to pick a presidential winner goes on for many years longer. Because if that streak stops, Americans are going to be reminded just how arcane our nation’s electoral rules can be.
The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia announced Wednesday that former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) has accepted an appointment to serve as a Professor of Practice with the Center for Politics. The inaugural appointment is effective immediately and will run through the conclusion of the 2023 fall semester with an option to renew for one or more additional years.
“I am delighted to be joining the UVA Center for Politics as a Professor of Practice. Preserving our constitutional republic is the most important work of our time, and our nation’s young people will play a crucial role in this effort. I look forward to working with students and colleagues at the Center to advance the important work they and others at the University of Virginia are doing to improve the health of democracy here and around the world,” said Cheney. “There are many threats facing our system of government and I hope my work with the Center for Politics and the broader community at the University of Virginia will contribute to finding lasting solutions that not only preserve but strengthen our democracy.”
“The Board of Visitors, which endorsed a Statement on Free Expression and Free Inquiry in 2021, and the University of Virginia are committed to offering our students an array of diverse viewpoints, and Liz Cheney — a strong conservative who never hesitates to put honesty ahead of all other considerations — is a model of leadership not just for the students at the University of Virginia but for all people concerned for the wellbeing of this country,” said Whitt Clement, Rector of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors.
UVA President Jim Ryan welcomed the appointment, stating, “Our students will have an incredible opportunity to learn from Liz Cheney, who has fiercely defended democracy as part of a distinguished career. I’m delighted that she has chosen the University of Virginia and the Center for Politics as a next step, and I very much look forward to working with her.”
Professor Larry J. Sabato, director of the UVA Center for Politics, noted, “With democracy under fire in this country and elsewhere around the world, Liz Cheney serves as a model of political courage and leadership. Liz will send a compelling message to students about integrity. She’s a true profile in courage, and she was willing to pay the price for her principles — and democracy itself.”
Over the course of her tenure as a Professor of Practice, Cheney will participate in university-wide lectures, serve as a guest lecturer in student seminars with Professor Sabato and other Center faculty, contribute to Center for Politics research, and participate in other University and community events to be announced at a future date.
Cheney served as the U.S. representative for Wyoming’s at-large congressional district from 2017 to 2023. She chaired the House Republican Conference, the third-highest position in the House Republican leadership, from 2019 to 2021, and served as the Vice Chair of the Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. She was also a member of the House Armed Services Committee, China Task Force, Natural Resources Committee, and the House Committee on Rules. Cheney served previously at the State Department as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and in positions for USAID and the Department of State working in Poland, Hungary, Russia, and Ukraine. An attorney and specialist in national security and foreign policy, she is the co-author, along with her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, of Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America.
Cheney graduated from McLean High School in Northern Virginia. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Colorado College, and received her Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School. In 2022, Cheney, along with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, received the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s prestigious Profile in Courage Award, with a commendation for her “consistent and courageous voice in defense of democracy.”
As Vice Chair of the Select Committee investigating the Capitol insurrection, Cheney participated with the Center for Politics in a national forum on the first anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, which is available on the Center’s YouTube channel, UVACFP.
| Dear Readers: This is the latest edition of Notes on the State of Politics, which features short updates on elections and politics.
— The Editors |
The 2020 election came fairly close to ending in an Electoral College tie. While Joe Biden won the national popular vote by about 4.5 points, his margins in several key states were much narrower. Specifically, Biden’s 3 closest wins were by 11,779 votes (or .24 percentage points) in Georgia, 10,457 in Arizona (.31 points), and 20,682 (.63 points) in Wisconsin. Had these states voted for Donald Trump and everything else had been the same, the Electoral College would have produced a 269-269 tie, leaving both candidates short of the magic number of 270 electoral votes.
If this ever happens, the U.S. House of Representatives would have to decide the election — we’ll have more about how this would work in tomorrow’s Crystal Ball. But before we do that, we wanted to look at whether there are plausible paths to 269-269 in 2024.
Changes to the electoral vote allocations as a result of the 2020 census have altered the overall math slightly. Using the new allocation based on the 2020 results, the election would have been slightly closer: 303-235 Biden, instead of the 306-232 edge he enjoyed in reality. The 2020 map with the new Electoral College totals is shown in Map 1.
This also would have changed what would have happened had Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin voted for Trump. Under the new allocation, that map would produce a 272-266 Republican victory as opposed to a 269-269 tie.
So the new apportionment of electoral votes alters the potential Electoral College tie scenarios and, as we assess the map, makes such a scenario less likely, because the specific pathway apparent back in 2020 is now closed. But a tie is still possible, even if one restricts hypothetical Electoral College scenarios to only include changes to the states that were the closest in the 2020 election. In other words, one doesn’t have to go to absurd lengths — such as a blue Wyoming or a red Massachusetts — to come up with a tie.
Using 270toWin — our go-to site for Electoral College strategizing — we played around with realistic scenarios for an Electoral College tie. We locked most of the 2020 Electoral College results into place, not altering any states beyond the 7 from 2020 that were decided by less than 3 points (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). As part of this scenario, we also locked in the 2020 electoral vote allocations from Maine and Nebraska, the only 2 states that award electoral votes by congressional district. Both states split in 2020, and under the new district lines, Donald Trump would have carried Maine’s 2nd District by about 6 points, with Joe Biden carrying Nebraska’s 2nd District by about the same margin.
So that set a baseline electoral vote floor for each side at 226-219 Democratic, with 93 electoral votes from the 7 most competitive states outstanding. Using these Electoral College puzzle pieces, we came up with 3 scenarios, although scenarios 2 and 3 are very similar.
Map 2 shows the first tie scenario. This one would effectively be a realigning map, where Democrats lose the old “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — states that Donald Trump won in 2016 but not 2020 — as well as Nevada, a state that Trump never carried but where Democrats only won by a little under 2.5 points in both 2016 and 2020. Meanwhile, Democrats would hang onto Arizona and Georgia and also flip North Carolina, which was Trump’s closest win in 2020. We don’t find this scenario that plausible because we don’t envision a world in which Democrats are winning Arizona but not its usually bluer northwestern neighbor, Nevada. Nor do we see North Carolina — clearly, to us, the reddest of these 7 states and the only one that backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020 — going blue while 4 of the others go red. The Tar Heel State also is the only one of these 7 states where Democrats had no statewide success in 2022, losing both an open-seat Senate contest and a pair of high-profile state Supreme Court races, making it even harder to imagine it voting Democratic while any of the others are going Republican.
Map 3 shows another scenario — and this one seems a bit more plausible. Democrats again hang onto Arizona and Georgia. They also keep Nevada and lose North Carolina. All of those states would be replicating how they voted in 2020. Meanwhile, Republicans claw back Michigan and Pennsylvania, but Democrats hold Wisconsin. While this doesn’t require North Carolina to vote blue, it does require Michigan and Pennsylvania to both vote more Republican than Wisconsin, which neither did in 2016 or 2020 (although Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had almost identical margins in 2016). Wisconsin still seems the shakiest for Democrats of these 3 states — Republicans did, after all, defend Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) there last cycle and kept the gubernatorial race much more competitive than in Michigan or Pennsylvania, and Biden’s margin was under a point there in 2020. But these states still vote similarly enough that scenario 2 is not out of the question.
Finally, Map 4 is identical to Map 3, except North Carolina votes blue while Georgia votes red. This one seems less likely than the second scenario, as Georgia has pretty clearly trended blue in recent years while North Carolina has not.
Overall, an Electoral College tie remains unlikely — landing on a specific 269-269 outcome is something we would not rule out, but we wouldn’t bet on it, either, without getting great odds.
Again, we’ll have more to say about how an Electoral College tie would be decided in tomorrow’s Crystal Ball. But we first just wanted to say that, yes, it’s possible, even under the new Electoral College allocation and even if you just focus on the states that were most competitive in 2020.
In January, the first Democratic Senate retirement of the cycle came in a light blue state. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who has held elected office in the state since the 1970s, announced that she would not seek a 5th term. Though Stabenow’s retirement announcement was, in some reporting, considered to be an ominous sign for her party’s prospects, it came at a time of triumph for Michigan Democrats: They had a nearly perfect 2022 cycle. Democrats won most of the marginal House districts, flipped the legislature, and won each of the state’s 3 statewide races with comfortable majorities — their biggest disappointment was the Macomb County-centric 10th District narrowly slipping away.
Surely, with the Michigan Democrats’ large bench, there would be a flurry of candidates ready to get into the open-seat Senate race, right?
Instead, the past several weeks were relatively quiet on that front. If anything, the Democratic “shadow primary” seemed defined by the process of elimination. Almost immediately, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was just reelected to a second term, ruled out a run. Other prominent Democrats followed, with the more notable exceptions of 7th District Rep. Elissa Slotkin and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Though Benson and a few other notable Democrats are still considering the race, Slotkin announced her campaign on Monday.
The Republican field, meanwhile, remains in flux, although Rep. John James (R, MI-10) — the party’s nominee in the 2018 and 2020 Senate races — recently filed for reelection to the House. While that deprives Senate Republicans of a potential recruit, it does give House Republicans an incumbent to seek reelection in a swingy seat next year.
Slotkin, who was first elected amid the 2018 blue wave that crashed in the House, ran after serving in the Obama administration and has a background in the U.S. Intelligence Community. In the House, she has been part of a bloc of center-left Democrats that have taken an interest in national security issues — other examples from the 2018 class include Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D, VA-7) and Mikie Sherrill (D, NJ-11), both of whom could also be future statewide candidates.
Slotkin’s district, which is essentially the successor to a seat that Stabenow held in the late 1990s, is centered on Lansing but extends into the Detroit metro area. Numbered MI-8 last decade, Slotkin flipped the seat by 4 points in 2018 after it gave Donald Trump a 7-point margin 2 years earlier. As Trump carried the district again in 2020, Slotkin replicated her 2018 margin, making her one of only 7 “crossover seat” Democrats that year.
For 2022, redistricting turned Slotkin’s seat into a Biden-won seat, although his margin there was narrow (he would have carried it by less than a percentage point) and it would have narrowly voted against Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) in 2020. Though the district was a bit friendlier to Democrats, Republican state Sen. Tom Barrett represented much of the area that was new to Slotkin, making him almost a co-incumbent in the race. Overall, the MI-7 contest turned into 2022’s most expensive House race. But as Map 5 shows, the result was a clear win for the (actual) incumbent: Slotkin won a third term by just over 5 points.
Note: Map 5 uses unofficial data, but the official result was almost identical
Source: Jackson Franks
Barrett is running again, and his candidacy could deter other GOP entrants (he was unopposed for the nomination in 2022). Democrats have several prospects for the seat, but it seems possible that whomever they nominate will have a home base in Lansing’s Ingham County — the blue bastion of the district, it gave Slotkin over two-thirds of the vote each time she was on the general election ballot. Aside from running up the score in Ingham County, one of the keys to Slotkin’s electoral success has been keeping Livingston, the district’s second-largest county and the one directly east of Ingham, relatively close. Livingston County essentially consists of the exurban communities between Detroit and Lansing, and Slotkin has held the GOP margin there to under 20 points. The Crystal Ball is starting the open MI-7 race as a Toss-up.
The last time Michigan saw an open-seat Senate contest, in 2014, now-Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) had no opposition to succeed the late Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). A competitive primary may force Democratic contenders to better establish themselves with Black voters, although any statewide Democratic campaign in Michigan worth its salt should emphasize outreach to minorities. At the time of his election to the Senate, Peters was in the odd position of being a white member who represented a Black-majority House district — the credibility that he established with the Black community likely helped him in 2014 and 2020. Slotkin’s district is only about 7% Black by composition, a number half the statewide 14%, so look for her campaign to aggressively court that key demographic.
Speaking of majority-minority districts, let’s take a quick detour to our home state. Last week, we wrote about the special election in the 4th District, a heavily Black seat that elected Rep.-elect Jennifer McClellan (D), who will be leaving the state Senate to enter the U.S. House. McClellan’s victory was not a surprise but her margin was — her roughly 3-to-1 edge was notably better than what most Democrats get in the district.
Turnout dynamics often are different in special elections than typical general elections, which sometimes accounts for odd partisan results. In one fairly recent example, Louisiana had a special election for state treasurer in 2017. The treasurer runoff election was held concurrently with a mayoral runoff in heavily Democratic New Orleans. With the mayoral election on the ballot, Orleans Parish cast close to a quarter of the votes in the statewide treasurer’s race (the parish usually casts more like 10% of the state’s votes). With New Orleans exerting a disproportionate influence, the Democratic nominee for treasurer, Derrick Edwards, took close to 45% against now-Treasurer John Schroder (R). Considering the lean of the state and his lack of funding, Edwards’s showing was respectable. But when the office was up again, in the regularly-scheduled 2019 election, things looked more typical — Schroder was reelected by 25 points.
Along those lines, we wondered if McClellan’s margin was padded by a disproportionately strong showing in her home area, Richmond. As it turns out, that wasn’t really the case. Richmond City and neighboring Henrico County are 2 of the largest, and bluest, localities in the district. Last week, the pair cast exactly half the total vote in the election — that was up only slightly from the 49% they accounted for in 2022. So McClellan’s showing was more of a broad-based overperformance than anything else.
As a bit of a thought experiment, we took the 2022 result from the 4th District and applied a uniform swing. In other words, last year, the late Donald McEachin (D) was reelected by 30.1 points; last week, McClellan did 18.9 points better, winning by 49%. How would an across the board 18.9% swing towards Democrats compare the actual result? Table 1 considers this.
As it turned out, McClellan ran slightly behind “expectations” in both Richmond and Henrico, although she obviously carried them overwhelmingly. Her biggest overperformance was actually from another locality that she currently represents in the state Senate: Charles City. One of the smaller counties in the district (it only has 3 voting precincts), it was the commonwealth’s most Democratic county in 1990s-era presidential elections, but its blue lean has eroded in recent years. McClellan’s 44-point margin there was 33 points better than what McEachin earned, and 14 points more than what a uniform swing would suggest.
McClellan ran ahead of expectations in several rural Southside counties, one of which was Surry. Just south of Charles City County, Surry County has been undergoing similar larger-scale trends. In 2021, now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin became the first modern GOP nominee for governor to carry this historically deep blue locality (although he did so by just 12 votes).
When McClellan is next on the ballot, in 2024, it seems likely that she’ll have a more “typical” Democratic coalition. Next year, a much larger presidential electorate may be in a more straight-ticket mood. The 110,000 votes that were cast in last week’s election represent just a quarter of the nearly 400,000 ballots the district would have cast in the 2020 election. Still, we’ll be watching to see how McClellan’s initial rural appeal translates with an election held under more “normal” circumstances.
— The overall battle for House control in 2024 starts as a Toss-up.
— Relatively similar numbers of Democratic and Republican seats start in the most competitive Toss-up and Leans categories, although Republicans start with a few more targets in large part because of the likelihood that they will benefit from redistricting in North Carolina and Ohio.
— Big blue states California and New York, where Republicans have made key gains over the past couple of cycles, loom large as Democrats plot a path back to the House majority.
After consecutive election cycles in which the favored side won the House, but by significantly smaller margins than many (including us) expected, we want to be clear from the start how we’re viewing the House this cycle: The race for the majority begins as a Toss-up.
While midterms, and not presidential years, much more frequently serve as the engine of change in the House — 10 of the last 12 shifts in power came in midterm cycles — it is also rare for a midterm to produce such a small majority for the winning side as last year’s did.
The Republicans won a 222-213 edge last year, which is just 4 seats above the magic number of 218. That is the smallest number of seats won by the winning side in a midterm since the 1942 election, when Republicans won the national popular vote for House but were unable to break the Democratic majority (Democrats won 222 seats to the Republicans’ 209, with the remaining few seats going to third parties).
In the years since then, every other majority won in a midterm was at or above 230 seats except for the majorities that Republicans won in 1998 (223) and 2002 (229). Those happened to be a pair of strong midterm cycles for the incumbent president, Bill Clinton’s Democrats in the former and George W. Bush’s Republicans in the latter. This past midterm will also go down as a good one for President Biden’s Democrats, and while they still lost the House, they kept their losses to such a manageable number that they put themselves in striking distance of winning the House majority this cycle. That’s the same thing Republicans did in their impressive albeit losing House effort in 2020 — keeping it close and setting themselves up for the following election.
The bottom line is that parties typically build themselves a bigger buffer in the midterm than Republicans did last year, which likely contributes to the history that the House has not flipped in a presidential year since 1952. Such streaks are noteworthy but are often made to be broken.
Speaking of 1952, which represented 1 of just 2 House victories for Republicans from the Great Depression all the way through the Republican Revolution of 1994 (1946 was the other), Republicans got an assist that year in redistricting. Following the 1950 census, Republicans in California and New York engaged in what the legendary congressional scholar David Mayhew described as “ingenious cartographic efforts” in redistricting that contributed to Republicans flipping the House.
More than 7 decades later, redistricting may also prove decisive in the House — potentially helping Republicans hold on to the majority and keeping the long streak of the House not flipping in presidential years alive. Meanwhile, those key states of California and New York again loom large in this cycle’s battle for the House.
With that in mind, Table 1 shows our initial House ratings for the 2024 cycle. A total of 44 seats — 20 currently held by Republicans and 24 held by Democrats — begin in the most competitive categories (Toss-up or Leans). That’s just 10% of the total seats in the House.
In no particular order, let’s go through the highlights:
— Both North Carolina and Ohio are poised to have new congressional maps this cycle. There will be time to go through the contortions and specifics later, but the overall point is this: State Supreme Courts in both states constrained the maps that the GOP wanted to impose in both states last cycle, and conservatives scored victories in key state Supreme Court races in both states last November, which should give the Republicans a freer hand to operate in both states. New GOP gerrymanders could threaten up to 3 Democratic seats in Ohio and 4 in North Carolina — this is why we are starting all of those potential Republican targets in the Toss-up column for now. This reflects the Democratic exposure in these 2 states while also conveying uncertainty about what is actually going to happen. These potential redistricting losses — not all of which are guaranteed to occur — make up the majority of the Democratic Toss-up column.
— There are a number of other unresolved court cases that could impact redistricting, potentially in favor of Democrats in at least some places. CNN’s Ron Brownstein recently had a good summation. At the moment, the only states where the anticipation of future redistricting changes impacts our ratings are, again, North Carolina and Ohio. If and when other legal developments increase the likelihood of new maps in other states, we will adjust our ratings as warranted.
— We are assuming, for the sake of these ratings, that Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D, MI-7), a proven incumbent in a marginal Lansing-based seat, ends up running for U.S. Senate (she is not an announced candidate, but observers on both sides of the aisle expect her to run). So her district starts as a Toss-up; we will move her district to Leans Democratic if she unexpectedly runs for reelection instead. Also starting in the Toss-up category is CA-47 in Southern California, which Rep. Katie Porter (D) is leaving behind as she pursues an open-seat Senate run of her own. The district voted for Joe Biden by 11 points, which suggests that it should not be a Toss-up. But CA-47 is not as blue down the ballot — as Porter’s 3.5-point victory last cycle suggests — and Republicans have scored some surprising successes in similar kinds of districts in California recently. One other wrinkle is the possibility of a strange outcome in the state’s top-2 primary; all candidates run together on the same ballot in the primary, with the top 2 finishers advancing to the general election regardless of party. Although such a scenario has not come to pass in a truly competitive seat since the 2012 cycle, Democrats sometimes worry about 2 Republicans advancing to a general election in a district like this. It may also be the case that Republicans have a competitive presidential primary going on in California at the time of the primary while Democrats do not, which could impact turnout. Democrats already have credible options running to replace Porter, although the departing incumbent is an exceptionally strong fundraiser, which is helpful in a district covered by the expensive Los Angeles media market. So this is all enough for us to start CA-47 as a Toss-up.
— Beyond CA-47, Democrats don’t have much defending to do in California, as their other seats all start as either Safe Democratic or (in a couple of instances) Likely Democratic. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are defending a trio of incumbents in double-digit Biden seats: Reps. John Duarte (R, CA-13) and David Valadao (R, CA-22) in the Central Valley, and Mike Garcia (R, CA-27) in Southern California. They all start as Toss-ups. Garcia in particular benefited from a weak opponent, former state Assemblywoman Christy Smith (D), in his victories in 2020 and 2022. On Wednesday morning, former Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides (D) announced he will challenge Garcia, and some Democrats are optimistic about his candidacy.
— New York, where Republicans enjoyed something of a localized “Red Wave,” features 5 new incumbents who start in the Toss-up column, including the now-infamous Rep. George Santos (R, NY-3), with his tsunami of scandals and bogus resume. If Santos actually advanced to the general election next November, he would be a significant underdog. But perhaps he resigns before then, resetting the table for a special election, or otherwise retires or loses in a primary. In the other key Biden-won seats held by Republicans, Democrats will hope that the presidential tide helps wash away newly-elected Reps. Anthony D’Esposito (R, NY-4), Mike Lawler (R, NY-17), Marc Molinaro (R, NY-19), and Brandon Williams (R, NY-22), although Democratic recruitment will also be vital in these races. D’Esposito, who holds the bluest seat held by any Republican, won the suburban Long Island district directly south of the one that Santos holds, while the others won districts north of New York City.
— If Democrats win back the House, California and New York will likely play a huge role in the outcome — just like they did way back in 1952, the last time the House flipped in a presidential year. But Democrats often worry about these big, blue states because they are “orphan” states — they are uncompetitive at the statewide level for president and Senate, so there’s not a big statewide mobilization effort to drive turnout in competitive congressional districts. House Majority PAC, the heavyweight outside spending group that backs Democratic candidates, announced Wednesday it is planning a dedicated $45 million fund to target New York House seats, a clear acknowledgement of the state’s importance to the Democratic path to the majority as well as the need for Democrats to spend extensively there.
— Out on the West Coast, newly-elected Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D, WA-3) and Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R, OR-5) benefited from flawed general election opponents who toppled incumbents in primaries. Both rank among the most vulnerable incumbents for their respective sides.
— Eastern Pennsylvania, the native region of President Joe Biden, is the site of a pair of key, Toss-up defensive assignments for Democrats: Reps. Matt Cartwright (D, PA-8) in the Scranton area and Susan Wild (D, PA-7) in the Lehigh Valley.
— Reps. Mary Peltola (D, AK-AL) and Jared Golden (D, ME-2) hold the 2 most Republican districts held by any Democrat. But their strong local brands, paired with ranked-choice voting systems that Republicans have yet to master, give each an edge to start.
— Rep. Lauren Boebert (R, CO-3), an in-your-face conservative who only barely won in a clearly GOP-leaning district in western Colorado, has not moderated her behavior at all in the aftermath of her near-loss. But observers on both sides of the aisle think she should be favored anyway because a more engaged and larger 2024 presidential electorate could help her stabilize her vote. This is something we sometimes hear from operatives: Near-miss upsets can occur precisely because a race isn’t heavily engaged with national money, perhaps lulling an incumbent (and maybe even voters themselves) into a false sense of security.
— The Democratic seats in Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Texas that start in the Likely Democratic category are all ones that Republicans competed for to at least some degree in 2022 but failed to capture. They are all districts where President Biden performed better than he did nationally in 2020, and several are probably less attractive targets for Republicans than they were last cycle. That Democrats held onto all 3 of their Nevada seats last year by fairly clear margins (roughly 4-5 points) despite losing the state’s governorship shows the efficacy of the state’s Democratic gerrymander. The Republicans would have to win the state for president by several points just to carry any of those districts, something that seems unlikely in such a closely-divided state. So we view all 3 as clear favorites to start.
— In the respective Leans columns, we gave the benefit of the doubt to a handful of incumbents, including Reps. Don Bacon (R, NE-2) and Tom Kean Jr. (R, NJ-7) on the GOP side and Reps. Yadira Caraveo (D, CO-8) and Gabe Vasquez (D, NM-2) on the Democratic. The former pair will likely have to create some distance between themselves and the GOP presidential nominee in their blue-trending districts, but Bacon has shown the ability to do that and Kean may be able to after knocking off Tom Malinowski (D) last cycle. Caraveo and Vasquez overcame a tricky political environment to each snatch surprising albeit narrow victories. With Democrats likely to carry their districts for president again, we give them an edge to start. We also gave a small edge to first-term Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R, AZ-6), who won an evenly-divided Tucson-area seat last cycle, but not to his fellow Arizona Republican, Rep. David Schweikert (R, AZ-1) in the Phoenix area. Ciscomani’s district is slightly better for Republicans than Schweikert’s, and the latter has seen his performance sag under the weight of redistricting, realignment, and ethics violations. We may be splitting hairs to rate them differently, but we are also in the splitting hairs business.
Sources on both sides of the aisle generally believe that the House playing field is not going to be that large. Part of it is that redistricting slightly reduced the number of truly competitive districts, and the North Carolina and Ohio maps could chip away at that number a little further. But Republicans also probably will not be casting as wide of a net as they did in 2022, as they came up empty in many districts where Biden did better than he did nationally. That includes arguably red-trending but still blue districts like the ones held by Reps. Frank Mrvan (D, IN-1), Henry Cuellar (D, TX-28), and Vicente Gonzalez (D, TX-34). Republicans were hoping that another turn of the realigning wheel in these places after Donald Trump made them more competitive in 2016 and/or 2020 would flip them red in 2022, but that didn’t happen. So Republicans may not push as hard in these districts as they did last time.
Among the Republican advantages this cycle are that the likeliest redistricting changes, in North Carolina and Ohio, should help Republicans to at least some extent.
Among the Democratic advantages are that they have more Biden-district Republicans to target (18) than Republicans have Trump-district Democrats to target (5).
The correlation between presidential and House results has been growing over time, to the point where there is not nearly as much daylight between the results for president and the results for House in an average district as there once was. But there is still daylight, and those differences may ultimately decide the majority.
Our overall ratings show 212 seats rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Republican, 201 rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Democratic, and 22 Toss-ups. Splitting the Toss-ups evenly, 11-11, would result in a net GOP gain of a single seat. Democrats need to net 5 seats to win the majority. Again, we think this is reflective of an overall Toss-up House race to start.
| Dear Readers: Tonight’s event with Bill Kristol and David Ramadan has been postponed, although we are hoping to reschedule it for some time in the spring.
— The Editors |
— In Virginia, Democrats have held the Richmond-area 4th District with state Sen. Jennifer McClellan. Her nearly 50-point win represented a notable overperformance.
— The most important judicial race of this year will be in the closely-divided state of Wisconsin, where control of the state Supreme Court is on the line.
— In last night’s judicial primary, Democratic-aligned candidates took 54% of the two-way vote in Wisconsin. This could bode well for liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz, who will face conservative Daniel Kelly in April, although there have been surprises in past state Supreme Court elections.
Last night, in what was probably the most widely followed election night so far this year, Democrats overperformed in several special elections across the country. With the 2022 general election out of the way, last night almost seemed like a return to form: After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in summer 2022, Democrats routinely overperformed President Joe Biden’s margins in a string of congressional elections leading up to November.
Kicking off last night’s electoral festivities — yesterday was Mardi Gras, after all — was a special election in our backyard. Following the untimely passing of then-Rep. Donald McEachin (D, VA-4) last year, his district, the heavily-Black VA-4, was left open. Shortly before Christmas, state Sen. Jennifer McClellan won the Democratic nomination in a “firehouse primary” with a smashing 85% of the vote.
In the special general election for VA-4, McClellan again ran extremely well. Though there was no question that Democrats would retain the seat, her overperformance was notable. In a district that reelected McEachin by a 65%-35% margin last year, she prevailed by a nearly 75%-25% vote. Though McClellan is from Richmond, she carried some GOP-trending Southside localities by comfortable margins. In the process, McClellan will also make some history, as the first Black woman to represent the commonwealth in Congress.
Does McClellan’s landslide win mean that Democrats are on track to make gains in Virginia’s legislative elections later this year? Not necessarily. But McClellan, despite standing for election in a safe seat, obviously ran an active campaign. This could be a model that both parties may want to follow: candidates in noncompetitive races should not simply rest on their laurels.
In any case, with VA-4 slated to be filled soon, Congress will be back up to its full 435 members for a time. We say “for a time” because yesterday, Rep. David Cicilline (D, RI-1) announced that he will be resigning from Congress on June 1. Cicilline’s departure will open up another deep blue seat — last year, Republicans made a serious attempt at the more marginal RI-2 but fell about 4 points short. Any number of Democrats could run for the open seat, and we would start it as Safe Democratic.
Now, back to last night’s elections. The most closely-watched election was actually not for anything federal. Wisconsin, one of the nation’s most quintessentially purple states, has spring elections for its state Supreme Court. The court’s 7 justices each run for staggered, 10-year terms. Though judicial elections are nominally nonpartisan in Wisconsin, the parties (and other political groups) get involved on behalf of candidates.
Importantly, the stakes this year are especially high in Wisconsin: currently, 4 justices are Republican-aligned while 3 were elected with Democratic support. The seat up this year is held by the retiring Justice Pat Roggensack, a conservative who was first elected in 2003. If Democrats can flip the seat, they will take control of the court. A friendly court would be a major boost to Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI), who was reelected last year after battling with an overwhelmingly Republican legislature for much of his first term.
Under Wisconsin’s rules, if only 2 candidates file to run for a seat, a single election is held in April — this was the case in 2015 and 2019. But if 3 or more candidates run for the seat, an initial February election is held, and the top 2 candidates meet in April. Last night’s field featured 4 candidates: 2 liberals and 2 conservatives.
Democrats largely coalesced behind Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz. Throughout the campaign, she emphasized her stances against gerrymandering and for abortion rights — two issues that the court may weigh in on in the near future. Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell tried to position himself to Protasiewicz’s left but did not get much traction.
With Protasiewicz essentially a lock for first place, a pair of GOP-aligned judges battled for second place. Judge Jennifer Dorow presided over the trial that ensued after the 2021 Christmas parade attack in Waukesha County. The trial gave her some national exposure, and Roggensack endorsed her. Daniel Kelly was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2016 by then-Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) but lost decisively when the seat came up in 2020. Shortly after leaving the bench, Kelly was involved in the state GOP’s “fake elector” scheme after the 2020 presidential election. Democrats have taken this as evidence of his willingness to subvert the democratic process in the pursuit of his partisan goals. Democrats also preferred him as an opponent instead of Dorow (a liberal group attacked her on television in advance of the first round of voting in what was effectively a bid to boost Kelly).
Map 1 shows the result of last night’s primary.
Protasiewicz finished a clear first, taking just over 46% of the vote. Aside from dominating in the 2 usual Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison — she took 55% in the former and close to 70% in the latter — she also fared well in rural western Wisconsin, an area that has been drifting away from Democrats in partisan races. In fact, she took majorities in some counties that voted against Evers last year (although, again, these judicial races are somewhat different from partisan contests).
Dorow’s base of strength was in the Milwaukee suburbs, an area that has been the backbone of the state GOP coalition in recent years. But Kelly took second place overall due to his strength in the rural areas. In what may be a sign of the times, this dynamic is becoming a pattern in state Republican primaries. Republicans like Scott Walker in 2010, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016 all prevailed in contested primaries because of their margins in the Milwaukee area. But as with last year’s GOP primary for governor, the victor was the Republican who had the more rural coalition. A slight caveat is that the blanket primary format Wisconsin uses for judicial races is different from that of a partisan primary, but it will be interesting to see if this pattern holds going forward.
As the second image on Map 1 shows, Democratic-aligned candidates combined to outpoll their GOP counterparts by a roughly 54%-46% margin. One county to note may be Kenosha, the state’s southeasternmost county. In 2020, it was the scene of some high-profile protests over policing. It was a swing county until then but has since not voted for any statewide Democrats in partisan races, even some of the successful ones (although its margins have been close). So since 2020, it seemed that the Democratic brand there had taken a hit. But Democratic-aligned candidates took a slight majority there last night.
So, what do last night’s results portend for the second round? While they certainly seem promising for Democrats, we do not have a large sample of recent court races to look back on.
The 3 most recent GOP victories came in 2016, 2017, and 2019. In 2016, the second round was held in conjunction with the presidential primary. As Republicans outvoted Democrats by just over 4 points, now-Justice Rebecca Bradley won by that exact margin — she also finished slightly ahead of her main Democratic opponent in the initial round. In early 2017, Democrats, who were apparently still in shock from Donald Trump’s upset in the state, didn’t even field a challenger to now-Chief Justice Annette Ziegler. In 2019, conservatives scored something of an upset when Brian Hagedorn beat liberal Lisa Neubauer by less than 6,000 votes. But for our purposes, 2019 may not be very informative, as there was no initial February round (with only two candidates, the sole bout was in April).
On the other side of the court, none of the 3 most recent Democratic wins were close. In 2015, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, now the body’s most senior member, was easily reelected by 16 points. Democrats are probably hoping that the open-seat 2018 race will be most comparable to this year’s result. The February round, where Democratic-aligned candidates took 54% of the combined vote, lined up nicely with now-Justice Rebecca Dallet’s 11.5-point win in April. In 2020, Kelly, running for the seat in his own right, took a majority in the February vote — but unfortunately for him, Wisconsin does not use Louisiana-style rules and that early result was less predictive. In what was one of the first pandemic-era elections, Democratic-aligned Jill Karofsky prevailed by a margin similar to what Dallet got. That the Democratic presidential primary was still nominally active at the time of the election (even as Joe Biden was clearly on his way to the nomination) also likely helped Democratic turnout.
Finally, with control of the court on the line, it seems likely that turnout will be high in April. Last night, close to a million votes were cast in the primary — this is significantly higher than the 2020 primary, and is almost double what 2016 and 2018 saw.
Note: There were no state Supreme Court races in 2021 or 2022.
Source: Historical data from OurCampaigns, 2023 unofficial data from DecisionDeskHQ.
Wisconsin, which was the tipping-point state in the last 2 presidential elections, will almost certainly be one of 2024’s top electoral prizes. But even in a sleeper year for electoral politics, Wisconsin will remain center stage, at least until April.
— One of the big stories of American politics over the past half-century has been a growing ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans.
— This has also led to more ideological cohesion within parties, including a dramatic increase among Democrats between 2012 and 2020. Democrats are now as ideologically cohesive as Republicans, which is a big change from a decade ago, when Republicans were significantly more cohesive than Democrats.
— While white Democrats have moved more to the left than nonwhite Democrats have on some issues, both groups have become more liberal since 2012.
Growing partisan-ideological congruence has been one of the most important trends affecting American politics over the past several decades. The ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans has increased dramatically since the 1970s as Republicans have grown increasingly conservative and Democrats have grown increasingly liberal. This increase in partisan-ideological congruence has affected rank-and-file voters as well as party elites and activists.
In this article, I use data from American National Election Studies surveys to examine trends in partisan-ideological congruence among Democratic and Republican voters since 2012. To measure partisan-ideological congruence, I examine trends in ideological identification and policy preferences among Democrats and Republicans. In addition, I examine whether there is evidence of an emerging ideological divide between white and nonwhite Democratic voters. The findings indicate that from 2012 to 2020, there was a dramatic increase in liberalism among Democratic voters. This leftward shift has been somewhat greater among white Democrats than among nonwhite Democrats. However, both white and nonwhite Democrats moved to the left over that timespan. As a result, for the first time in recent history, partisan-ideological congruence is as great among Democrats as among Republicans. This trend has important implications for voting behavior.
The ideological divide between Democratic and Republican voters has been increasing since at least 1972, when the American National Election Studies first included a question measuring ideological identification. The long-term trend is displayed in Figure 1, which includes data for every presidential election between 1972 and 2020. The liberal-conservative scale ranges from 1, the most liberal score, to 7, the most conservative score.
Note: Based on average score of those answering the ideology question. Those opting out of the question are not included.
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
In 1972, supporters of the two parties were separated by an average of one unit on the 1-7 scale. The mean score for Democratic voters was 3.7, just slightly to the left of center, while the mean score for Republican voters was 4.7. By 2020, the distance between supporters of the two parties had increased to an average of 2.6 units. The mean score for Democratic voters was 2.8 while the mean score for Republican voters was 5.5. These were the most extreme average scores for supporters of both parties since the ANES started asking the ideological identification question.
Beyond the long-term trends in ideological identification, the data in Figure 1 indicate that the divide between supporters of the two parties has increased considerably since 2012 and that most of this increase was due to a sharp leftward shift among Democratic voters. Between 2012 and 2020, the mean score for Democratic voters went from 3.3 to 2.9 while the mean score for Republican voters went from 5.4 to 5.5.
In order to understand the significance of this shift in ideological identification over the last 3 elections, I looked at trends in ideological congruence among Democratic and Republican voters on several policy issues in addition to ideological identification. The findings are displayed in Table 1. Ideological congruence is measured by the percentage of Democratic voters taking the liberal position and the percentage of Republican voters taking the conservative position on each issue.
Note: Congruence is defined as the percentage taking liberal position for Democrats and percentage taking conservative position for Republicans among those responding to each question. Respondents opting out of answering are not included.
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
The results in Table 1 show that there was a dramatic increase in liberalism among Democratic voters over this 8-year period. The percentage of Democratic voters taking the liberal position increased by an average of more than 20 percentage points across these five questions, with the largest shift occurring on the issue of government aid to Blacks. In contrast, there was no consistent pattern of change among Republican voters over these 8 years. Republican voters became somewhat more conservative on abortion but considerably less conservative on the aid to Blacks question. A key takeaway comes in Table 1’s “Average Congruence” score — notice that it was almost identical in 2020 for Democrats and Republicans, whereas back in 2012, Republicans had a significantly higher score.
As a result of these shifts in ideological congruence between 2012 and 2020, Democratic voters are now as consistent in their liberalism as Republican voters are in their conservatism. Democrats are still somewhat less likely to identify as liberal than Republicans are to identify as conservative. On some specific policy issues, however, such as abortion and aid to Blacks, Democrats are more likely to take the liberal position than Republicans are to take the conservative position.
The sharp leftward movement among Democratic voters in recent years has led some political observers to suggest that Democrats need to be concerned about a growing racial divide in political ideology. Nonwhites make up a large share of Democratic voters — 43% in 2020 according to the ANES data — and nonwhite Democrats have traditionally been less likely than white Democrats to self-identify as liberal. A growing racial divide in ideology could lead to an erosion in support for Democratic candidates among nonwhites, who have been some of the most loyal Democratic voters.
Note: Congruence is defined as the percentage taking liberal position among those responding to each question. Respondents opting out of answering are not included.
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
Table 2 displays data on trends in ideological congruence on liberal-conservative identification and 4 specific policy issues among white and nonwhite Democrats between 2012 and 2020. The evidence in this table shows that there was a large leftward shift among nonwhite as well as white Democrats over these 3 elections. Nonwhite Democrats continue to be somewhat less likely than white Democrats to self-identify as liberal and to support abortion rights. However, they are just as liberal as white Democrats on other issues such as government responsibility for jobs and living standards and aid to Blacks. The most significant trend in attitudes on these issues has been a dramatic shift to the left among white Democrats.
Democratic voters moved sharply to the left in their ideological identification and policy preferences on a range of issues between 2012 and 2020. As a result, for the first time since at least 1972, ideological congruence is now as high among Democratic voters as it is among Republican voters. This rise in ideological congruence among Democratic voters — and especially among white Democratic voters — has had important consequences for voting behavior. The data in Figure 2 show that for many years, white Democrats have lagged behind nonwhite Democrats in loyalty to Democratic presidential candidates. In 2020, however, this gap almost disappeared with white Democratic identifiers almost as loyal as nonwhite Democratic identifiers.
Source: American National Election Studies Cumulative File
The increase in loyalty among white Democratic identifiers is due largely to their increased liberalism because defections among white Democrats have been heavily concentrated among those with relatively conservative ideological orientations. This increased loyalty has also been apparent in other types of elections including those for U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In 2022, according to data from the American National Election Studies Pilot Survey, 96% of Democratic identifiers, including leaning independents, voted for Democratic candidates for U.S. House and U.S. Senate. Growing ideological congruence among Democrats, and especially among white Democrats, suggests that these high levels of loyalty are likely to continue in 2024 and beyond.
| Alan I. Abramowitz is the Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University and a senior columnist with Sabato’s Crystal Ball. His latest book, The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump, was released in 2018 by Yale University Press. |
| Dear Readers: Join us next Wednesday, Feb. 22 for “A Conversation with Former/Future Republicans Bill Kristol and David Ramadan.” Kristol, a longtime political commentator, and Ramadan, a Center for Politics scholar and former member of the Virginia House of Delegates, will discuss the past and future of the Republican Party and their concerns about the state of our democracy.
Their conversation will be held from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. eastern at the Colonnade Club Solarium on the Grounds of the University of Virginia. It is free and open to the public with advanced registration through Eventbrite, and it will also be streamed at https://livestream.com/tavco/defendingdemocracytogether. — The Editors |
— It has been over a decade since an incumbent senator was successfully primaried in a regularly-scheduled election; though a few senators may be vulnerable, 2024 may continue that streak.
— Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) decision to retire removed one vulnerable senator from the primary conversation; Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (I-AZ) decision to leave the Democratic Party removed another. Among the other incumbents who are still deciding whether to run for reelection, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) stands out as someone who could hypothetically be vulnerable in a primary.
— The open-seat Senate contests are all in various stages of flux. Indiana, the sole GOP-held open seat so far, seems to be the most straightforward, as Rep. Jim Banks (R, IN-3) is a heavy favorite to replace Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN).
One of the peculiarities of the 2022 election cycle was that, despite a good deal of political turbulence the past few years, incumbents thrived. Only a single incumbent governor lost (Democrat Steve Sisolak of Nevada), and not a single incumbent senator lost, either in the primary or general elections.
In fact, no sitting senator has lost a primary in any of the last 5 regular elections — they were undefeated for renomination in 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. That ties the 1982-1990 stretch for the longest string of regular elections since World War II where no senator lost a primary, per the Brookings Institution’s Vital Statistics on Congress.
The only incumbent blemish in recent years came in an irregularly-scheduled special election, when appointee Luther Strange (R) lost to Roy Moore (R) in the 2017 Alabama special election primary.
Besides that, the last incumbent senator to lose a primary was way back in the 2012 cycle, when long-serving Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) lost to then-state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R). (Notice that both of the most recent Senate primary defeats saw GOP primary voters swap out a probable general election winner for a loser.)
As we look ahead to the 2024 Senate primary season and ponder whether any incumbent is in jeopardy, it’s worth remembering this history: Incumbent senators are hard to unseat in a primary setting.
Part of what might keep the incumbents’ streak going this cycle is the early decisions by a couple of senators not to pursue renomination next year.
On Tuesday, long-serving Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) announced her retirement: There have been questions for years about the elderly Feinstein’s capacity to serve, and it appears she is finally bowing to reality. A couple of California House members helped nudge her towards the door by announcing their bids before she announced her plans (more on that below).
Late last year, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona left the Democratic Party, opting to become an independent despite continuing to caucus with Democrats. She too would have had trouble in a primary given some high-profile breaks with President Biden and other Democrats over the past few years.
So with those moves, the two senators who might have had the hardest time getting renominated are not running for renomination (or, at least in the case of Feinstein, not running at all — Sinema’s future plans remain a mystery).
So what other primaries merit watching? Let’s go through some others we are monitoring:
— Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has not announced his 2024 plans. During his term, Romney has emerged as a key member of the Senate’s centrist bloc. Romney may have frustrated state partisans last year, as he was not seen as a “team player” — he was the only sitting Republican senator who did not endorse his home-state Sen. Mike Lee (R) for reelection. Lee, who was elected in 2010, actually is the most recent senator who made it to the chamber via a successful primary challenge (remember, Mourdock in 2012 and Moore in 2017 lost). And Lee’s case was special: he defeated the late Sen. Bob Bennett at a convention. Under the rules at the time, Bennett placed third at the May party convention, so he could not advance to the June primary. But under Utah’s current system, Republicans who don’t earn the party’s endorsement at the convention can petition to appear on the primary ballot. In fact, in 2018, Romney placed second at the party convention but went on to easily win with a broader primary electorate.
With Feinstein and Sinema out of the picture, Romney is hypothetically the most vulnerable incumbent in the 2024 primary season (assuming he runs). Bryan Metzger of Insider had a good rundown recently of Romney’s challenges; he quoted an unnamed Utah Republican consultant who said that polling suggested Romney was in the low 40s in a hypothetical primary. That might be enough to win if his opposition is splintered, but Romney may struggle against a single, strong opponent.
— The most recent addition to the Senate has been from Nebraska: after wrapping up 2 terms as governor, Republican Pete Ricketts was appointed to replace fellow Republican Ben Sasse, who began leading the University of Florida earlier this month. Ricketts will run in a special election next year, alongside Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), whose seat was already set to be up. We are not expecting Fischer to have much competition in her primary. Fischer is running for a third term despite previously supporting a two-term limit for senators — but many members who did not abide by their own term limit ideals have been reelected anyway.
Ricketts, meanwhile, may have to at least break a sweat in his primary. Businessman Charles Herbster, who was last seen losing the GOP primary for governor last year, is openly considering the race. In the 2022 primary, Ricketts endorsed now-Gov. Jim Pillen over Herbster, who had Donald Trump’s support. One of Pillen’s first acts in office was to appoint Ricketts to the Senate. Ricketts would be the favorite in a primary, although appointed incumbency is not always the same as elected incumbency, and a challenger could try to capitalize on the circumstances of Rickett’s appointment, perhaps by arguing it seemed transactional. Lingering questions over his selection seemed to hurt Luther Strange in his primary. Before Ricketts, Nebraska’s most recent appointed senator, the late Republican Dave Karnes, actually drew a serious primary challenger when he ran in his own right, in 1988. He beat then-Rep. Hal Daub (R, NE-2) by 10 points in the primary, but had the bad fortune of running against Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who was then a popular former governor, in the general election (Kerrey won by 15 points). Democrats do not have a Kerrey-type figure waiting in the wings, so Republicans would still be favored in the general election this time.
— While there is no sign he faces a competitive primary, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) was just endorsed by the Club for Growth, which often acts as an anti-establishment force in Republican politics. Following an unsuccessful tenure as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Scott failed in a challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for leadership of the caucus. McConnell has criticized Scott for a plan the latter released during last cycle that included a proposal to force Congress to re-approve federal programs, including popular ones like Social Security and Medicare, every 5 years — a proposal that Democrats, including President Biden in last week’s State of the Union, have highlighted. Scott was recently kicked off of the Senate Commerce Committee — as this was likely a form of retaliation from leadership, Scott has spun it as evidence of his anti-establishment credentials in his fundraising appeals.
— On opposite sides of the Delmarva peninsula, Sens. Tom Carper (D-DE) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) are both mulling whether they will run again. Both would likely be fine in both primary and general elections if they run again, although there also are deep benches in both states that would relish the opportunity to compete for an open seat. It is worth noting that Carper attracted a left-wing challenger in 2018, now-state Rep. Kerri Evelyn Harris. With memories of now-Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D, NY-14) upset primary victory over the then-No. 4 House Democrat, Joe Crowley, still fresh, the race generated some attention that summer, but Carper won convincingly with a little less than two-thirds of the vote.
— Speaking of Ocasio-Cortez, she decided to pass on challenging Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in last year’s primary, and there’s not much indication that she or any other Democrat of note would want to challenge Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) this cycle.
— Back in 2018, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) scored an unimpressive 62%-38% primary victory over a little-known activist, Lisa McCormick (D). This came a year after Menendez survived a federal corruption trial, and Menendez is reportedly under investigation again for a separate matter. Menendez has already drawn a couple of challengers, the more notable of whom is Joe Signorello III (D), the mayor of a small town, Roselle Park.
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) would likely be fine in a primary, although Politico’s Massachusetts Playbook did recently float Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D, MA-4) and Ayanna Pressley (D, MA-7) as possible challengers. Both suggested that they weren’t interested. Massachusetts was the site of a big Senate primary in 2020, when Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) fended off then-Rep. Joe Kennedy III by a little over 10 points (Auchincloss succeeded Kennedy in the House). With memories of that divisive 2020 primary still fresh in the minds of state Democrats, there simply may not be much appetite for a Warren challenge — as with Markey, she has not committed any obvious partisan apostasies.
— Arizona, an odd situation where Sinema is now an independent who caucuses with Democrats, may be one of the biggest question marks on the map. For at least the last year or so, it has been evident to all observers that Sinema would have a hard path to renomination — a reality that likely prompted her to leave the party. Even though she’s not running for renomination, we thought her race merited mention, too.
Towards the end of last month, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D, AZ-3) got into the race and has fundraised well. Though Gallego may not have the primary field to himself, he has probably been Sinema’s most vocal intra-party critic over the last few years. It seems likely that most Democratic primary voters will at least identify with his frustrations — he is selling buttons that read “Adios Sinema.” Since her switch, Sinema has kept reeling in donations, although if she pursues reelection as an independent, her path to victory would seem narrow. Republican Sen. John Thune (R-SD) has implored Sinema to go further, and actually cross the aisle. But Sinema’s numbers with Republicans are not impressive, so it’s unclear how GOP partisans would react to a Sinema candidacy, especially if more conservative options enter.
It’s early in the cycle, so undoubtedly there will be more primary action involving incumbents to watch. Beyond the races featuring incumbents running for renomination, let’s close by looking at the 3 states that are hosting open-seat primaries:
— Last year, Republicans bungled a seemingly golden opportunity to flip the Senate due in large part to the poor quality of their candidates in key states. But for the 2024 cycle, there are signs that Senate Republican leadership will take more of an active role in the primary process, with the goal of precluding another 2022-style debacle.
Let’s take Indiana as an example. With first-term Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) forgoing reelection to run for governor, the Hoosier State is the only open GOP-held seat on the map so far. Rep. Jim Banks (R, IN-3), who has represented the Fort Wayne area for 4 terms in Congress, announced his bid for Braun’s seat in mid-January. When former Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN), who had been toying with the idea of a Senate run, passed on a run, the NRSC almost immediately threw its weight behind Banks. The NRSC’s endorsement may have also deterred some other Republicans from entering the race — most notably, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R, IN-5) was reportedly exploring a 2024 statewide run, but she (surprisingly) opted to retire from office altogether. So, with these early-cycle developments, Indiana’s open-seat race seems to be a coronation for Banks.
Indiana is a state that Republicans will probably win by double-digits at the presidential level, and we expect our Safe Republican rating for the Senate contest would have applied even if the outlook for the primary was messier. But, using Indiana as a template, it seems that this cycle’s NRSC wants to leave as little to chance as possible.
— If the Indiana seat seems settled, Michigan’s contest still seems relatively fluid. Since Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s (D-MI) retirement announcement last month, no major candidates have officially jumped in, although several are reportedly considering. We explored the dynamics of that race a bit more last month.
— Even before Feinstein announced her retirement Tuesday, Democrats from the state’s House delegation weren’t waiting for her to step aside. Two Southern California Democrats, Reps. Adam Schiff (D, CA-30) and Katie Porter (D, CA-47), were already running, and Rep. Barbara Lee (D, CA-12), who represents Oakland, has reportedly been preparing to enter the race. Though Schiff, Porter, and Lee each have their own followings, it’s important to remember that, as members from the House’s largest delegation, they only represent small pieces of the state. State senators in California actually have more constituents than U.S. House members do — there are 52 of the latter, but just 40 of the former.
Coincidentally, the last time this seat was truly open, way back in 1982, was also a rare contest that featured 3 sitting House members — they all lost the Republican primary to then-San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. Wilson won in 1982 and 1988 before resigning in 1990 to become governor; Feinstein defeated John Seymour (R), who Wilson appointed to replace him in the Senate, and she has held the seat ever since. One change from 1982, though, will be that the state now uses a top two primary system. With most of the major contenders likely to be Democrats, a pair of Democrats may ultimately face off in November — this was the case in 2016 and 2018.
— President Biden’s successful State of the Union address suggested he’s full speed ahead on running for a second term.
— Despite polls showing that even many Democrats would prefer Biden not to run again, he has no real opposition within his own party — and the State of the Union is unlikely to help generate any.
— Biden’s best friend is weakness within the Republican Party, which was on display once again on Tuesday night.
There are competing realities at the heart of the president’s annual State of the Union address. It is both typically unmemorable, yet also is probably the biggest scheduled event on the political calendar. This is particularly true in odd-numbered years, in which there are few elections of national import.
Content-wise, State of the Union addresses are typically formulaic, a laundry list of presidential accomplishments and asks. While many inaugural addresses have stood the test of time, State of the Union addresses typically have not. The Library of America’s American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton includes only a single State of the Union address in its collection: Franklin Roosevelt’s Jan. 6, 1941 address to Congress in which he laid out his famous “Four Freedoms” — Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. That is not to say that other iterations of the speech, which was revived as an in-person address by Woodrow Wilson a little more than a century ago, are not without memorable moments — see here for some — but rather that the forum is usually not remembered in the annals of American oratorical brilliance.
Still, tens of millions of Americans watch the speech. By this time next year, the nation’s focus will have turned to the presidential primaries. So President Biden’s speech last night may have been the last time for a while where he will have the public stage squarely to himself — and he clearly tried to make good use of it to a broad audience. Biden’s State of the Union last year got about 38 million viewers, up from 27 million for his quasi-State of the Union the year before (technically, the president’s address to Congress right after taking office is not a proper State of the Union). The viewership for Biden’s first State of the Union was lower than that of his most recent successors, who generally got somewhere in the range of 45-52 million viewers (the viewership for Tuesday night’s address was unknown at the time of publication). Some of this, likely, is the splintering of the media environment, from which it seems only the National Football League is immune. But part of it, too, is that Biden himself does not seem to be the kind of lightning rod figure that at least his four most recent predecessors were: Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. This sort of dynamic likely helped Biden and Democrats in last year’s midterms — even though Biden’s standing was underwater, the public did not treat the election as an all-out referendum on the president.
Some recent iterations of the speech have sent signals, and last night’s did too. Clinton gave a typically long-winded State of the Union in early 1998, shortly after details emerged of his affair with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In the lead-up to the speech, many thought Clinton might resign; Clinton’s SOTU, in which he made no reference to the affair, helped muzzle that talk. In his 2002 State of the Union, George W. Bush first referred to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as the “axis of evil.” The following State of the Union, in 2003, he was making the case for the soon-to-come American invasion of Iraq. The signal Biden likely was trying to send last night was this: His plan is to run again, despite his advanced age and sometimes shaky public appearances (although despite some characteristic flubs, Biden was clearly on his game last night).
Beyond that, the speech has sometimes recently provided famous moments — produced by people other than the president. After President Obama scolded the Supreme Court for its Citizens United decision in his 2010 State of the Union, Justice Samuel Alito seemed to mouth the words “not true” in response to the president. In 2020, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a big show of ripping up the physical copy of the speech that then-President Trump had just given. Rep. Joe Wilson (R, SC-2) shouting “you lie” at Obama in 2009 was not during the State of the Union — rather, it was during a speech on health care that Obama was giving to a joint session of Congress in September 2009.
But Wilson’s outburst was front of mind last night anyway, because what may be remembered most from last night was the rowdy “House of Commons” feel that Biden’s address took on — the U.K. Parliament has a reputation for being much more raucous than the U.S. Congress, but that distinction may be getting less sharp. At points during the speech, Biden veered off script, chiding and baiting Republican members. Biden’s ad hoc public bargaining may have had some success — with talks over increasing the debt ceiling looming, he, apparently got Republicans to agree not to touch Social Security and Medicare (although some Republicans had already been suggesting this in the days leading up to the speech, perhaps prompted by former President Trump on the matter). Biden was continually heckled by far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA-14), who Speaker Kevin McCarthy visibly tried to hush at some points. In what became something of a meme on social media, Greene’s white, fur-lined coat drew comparisons to the Disney villain Cruella de Vil.
In 2015, one of President Obama’s most memorable rhetorical nudges in the Republicans’ direction came with the line, “I have no more campaigns to run… I know because I won both of them.” Though some of Biden’s lines received similar reactions from across the aisle — he told members who would like to see the Inflation Reduction Act repealed, “As my football coach used to say, lots of luck in your senior year” — it certainly seems like Biden intends to run one more campaign. Despite his age, little in Biden’s address suggested that he was ready to step aside. In fact, throughout the speech, one of his most repeated lines was “let’s finish the job.” With his second formal State of the Union address in the books, Biden will now embark on a very campaign-like trip, visiting several key states across the country — today, he is taking his message to Wisconsin, which happened to be the tipping-point state in the last 2 presidential elections and will surely be hotly contested again.
Still, as he gears up for a 2024 run, Biden’s standing with the electorate remains subpar. According to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregates, while Biden’s approval spread is not deep in the double-digit negative category, as it was last summer, he stands at an upside-down 43%/52% rating. Tinkering with FiveThirtyEight’s model settings, when only considering polls of registered voters (not just adults), Biden’s disapproval number briefly fell below 50% last month — it had been over 50% since October 2021. The GOP infighting over the protracted speaker vote likely made Biden’s image look better by comparison. With that spectacle over, and Biden dealing with some negative headlines related to his handling of classified documents, Biden’s disapproval number crept back up over 50%.
Though Biden has had a (somewhat surprisingly) productive tenure in office so far and key economic metrics have been largely positive, concerns about inflation and the broader economy persist — while inflation has slowed, prices are still higher than when Biden first took office. A national poll from CBS News, released just before Biden’s address, found that a majority of voters feel his policies have made inflation, gas prices, and the economy as a whole, worse. Gallup also recently reported that 50% of Americans feel like they are worse off financially now compared to this time last year, a high mark last seen in the “great recession” era of 2008 and 2009.
Concerns about Biden’s age do seem to have fostered at least a degree of reticence among Democratic partisans when it comes to his renomination. An Associated Press poll from this week found that just 37% of Democrats want him to run for a second term. Though Biden gets the coolest reaction from younger voters — a group that never seemed his natural constituency in primaries — only about half of Democrats who are over 45 say he should move ahead with reelection plans.
But if and until Biden receives a major primary challenge — and most big names seem to be deferring to him — he starts as a prohibitive favorite for renomination, and he may not have much opposition at all. As Biden himself is fond of saying, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” And at this point there really is no alternative. This is the same sort of dynamic we sometimes see in horserace polls – an incumbent may be shown trailing against a generic unnamed opponent, but leading against a named opponent. It may also be that the president’s generally well-received speech last night could help tamp down whatever problems Biden may have in his own party.
While Biden is not strong at the moment, the alternative to him running again could be a fractious primary that reveals divisions in the party that Biden (and opposition to Trump and Republicans) has papered over for now. A fear of the unknown may also keep Democrats behind Biden, even if it’s possible a new candidate would raise the party’s electoral ceiling — particularly if Republicans opt for a third Trump nomination.
In her State of the Union response, newly-elected Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) argued that American politics was no longer about left vs. right, but rather normal vs. crazy. She may have something of a point, although mostly in a way that she did not intend, as her party’s problem of late has been producing too many candidates who end up on the wrong side of that divide. One of the GOP’s challenges for 2024 is sanding down some of the party’s rough edges, which have turned off some key swing voters. Not that it likely matters much overall, but did Sanders’s base-focused speech paired with GOP House members heckling the president serve to soften the party’s image? Surely not.
In the end, Biden won in 2020 because enough key voters were fed up with Trump and his antics. Democrats held the line in 2022 for much the same reason. His 2024 fate is likely contingent to at least some degree on this very same dynamic — do Republicans offer up a better alternative? On this particular question, Biden is more bystander than participant.
FreshRSS