Carlos Osorio/AP Photo
Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer speaks on election night, November 8, 2022, in Detroit. Whitmer was elected to a second term on Tuesday.
Perhaps the brightest spot for Democrats in last week’s midterms is at the state level. Their prospects for retaining control of the Senate look reasonably good—it may come down to a runoff in Georgia, depending on what happens in Nevada and Arizona—but the GOP will probably take control of the House by a tiny margin.
The state-level results were notable not so much for their success as for the fact that they tracked the national results. For years now, Democrats have failed to match Republican efforts to control state legislative posts, often not even fielding candidates in winnable races—while spending tens of millions on impossible races against liberal hate objects. Amy McGrath spent over $90 million to get trounced by Mitch McConnell in Kentucky in 2020; this year, Charles Booker spent just $6 million against Rand Paul and actually did slightly better than McGrath, while still losing by a wide margin.
But this time was different. Thanks to some canny spending and organizing, Democrats didn’t lose control of a single legislative chamber, flipped the Michigan state Senate, and are still in the running to flip chambers in Minnesota, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. They also fended off Republican supermajorities in North Carolina, and won trifectas in Maryland and Massachusetts by snapping up open governor’s seats.
Back in 2010, by contrast, Democrats lost badly on the national level and got simply massacred at the state level, losing control of several legislatures that hadn’t been in Republican hands since the 1870s. That was a census-and-redistricting year, and Republicans subsequently drew up some of the most extreme gerrymanders in American history. Democrats would have taken the House back in 2012 with fair maps, but instead Republicans kept a 33-seat majority. Subsequent elections saw the same pattern.
All this legislature-control maneuvering had been planned by conservative donors and activists for years. They saw that state legislative campaigns are extremely cheap compared to national races, and that control of state governments would allow them to rig the district boundaries to entrench their power at both the state and national levels. They suspected, correctly, that state-level Democrats could be caught napping en masse, and that rank-and-file liberals would be fixated on the presidency and Congress, where victory is difficult and expensive.
This year, however, was different. Democratic groups like The States Project have been pointing to the crucial importance of legislative control for years, and raising money that goes to the most winnable legislative races through their Give Smart project. Their messaging finally clicked. “I think the grassroots really understood the threat posed by far-right state legislatures and was ready to be mobilized by someone,” Aaron Kleinman, the organization’s director of research, told the Prospect. He explained that they contributed eight times as much as anyone else to state races in Michigan; 30 times more in Arizona, where Democrats are currently 425 votes from ending the Republican trifecta; and 80 times more in Pennsylvania, where control of the state House currently hinges on a race that is within two votes. The fact that Pennsylvania state candidates ran ahead of their statewide counterparts shows that the spending made a difference.
Thanks to some canny spending and organizing, Democrats didn’t lose control of a single legislative chamber.
It wasn’t just The States Project, to be fair. The DLCC threw in $47 million across the board—a decent sum for state races, but very little compared to the $374 million spent on the Pennsylvania Senate race alone. Still larger investments are going to be needed in the next election cycle. “We hope that the party will also see this is possible and invest accordingly,” Kleinman said.
Alas, two states were notably absent from the overall patter—Florida and New York. In the former, repeated losses have left the state party in apathy and ruins; in the latter, old-school blue-state party machine rot has created terrible dysfunction and incompetence. Clearly, some housecleaning is indicated. Moreover, Republicans remain far more dominant overall at the state level—Democrats will have to win several more times when other legislative and gubernatorial seats are up to match the GOP.
It should be emphasized that state legislatures should not be nearly as important as they are. Surveys indicate that a majority of Americans have no idea who their state representative or senator is—part of a general problem of far too many elected offices and layers of government in this country.
But that is the system we have. So long as it remains, it will be vitally important for Democrats to build on this year’s victories and create thriving state parties that can contest every single winnable seat. For the first time in well over a decade, they’re off to a good start.
