Midterm Math Favors Democrats in Statehouses. That’s No Reason to Relax.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Every election cycle, as the national narrative swirls ceaselessly around federal races, I think about a ceramic bowl in Richmond, Virginia.

In 2017, the first big electoral test of Trump’s first term, Democrats flipped 15 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates, and control of the chamber came down to a single district. When Democrat Shelly Simonds’ race was certified a tie, election officials dropped two film canisters into a bowl and drew out her Republican opponent’s name. Just like that, the GOP kept the chamber, 51-49.

Two years later, Simonds won her rematch, and Democrats took full control of Virginia’s government for the first time in more than 20 years. In their first legislative session with the majority in both chambers, Democrats ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, enacted tighter gun control, expanded voting access, banned discrimination against LGBTQ Virginians, and rolled back abortion restrictions. A year later, Virginia became the first Southern state to abolish the death penalty. A draw from a bowl had delayed all of it by two years.

The stakes in statehouses have only grown since.

With a revanchist Supreme Court stripping away federal rights and Congress limping through one of its least productive sessions in 40 years, Washington has all but stopped governing, and states have stepped into the breach. But while power has moved downstream, our attention largely hasn’t. The most consequential races on your ballot next week may be the ones you’re most tempted to skip.

With more than 6,000 state legislative races on the ballot, there’s cautious optimism in the air. It’s well placed, but not foretold. History favors the party out of the White House in midterms, but history only tilts the odds. State legislative chambers are won in a small number of districts, by a small number of votes. Now is not the time to rest on polling or historical trends. Now is the time to run up the score.

Surge and Decline

In 2022, I led research on what political scientists call “surge and decline”: the president’s party tends to gain congressional seats in presidential years and lose them in midterms. We found the pattern typically holds in state legislatures too, with a twist: the decline is bigger than the surge. In the battleground states we studied, every midterm loss for the president’s party from 2006 to 2018 was larger than any presidential-year gain.

Republicans grasped this first. Their Project REDMAP bet that Obama’s first midterm could be brutal downballot, and they made sure it was. Republicans netted 680 state legislative seats and 20 chambers in 2010, just in time to draw a decade of maps. In Trump’s first midterm, Democrats returned the favor, gaining more than 300 seats in state legislatures nationwide.

This year looks like another decline year for the president’s party. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates 15 chambers as competitive, and all 10 of its final rating changes moved toward Democrats. One projection puts likely Democratic gains at roughly 400 to 600 seats.

The Tyranny of Small Numbers

None of that is a reason to relax. Democrats roll off their ballots more than Republicans do, the margins are tiny, and the districts that decide control are few.

First, Democratic voters skip downballot races. In studying state legislative ‘roll-off’, my findings were consistent: Democratic voters routinely vote at the top of the ballot and leave state legislative races blank, far more often than Republicans do. This ballot rolloff has major consequences. In 2022, Democrats lost the four closest races they needed to flip the Pennsylvania Senate by a combined 35,790 votes. In those same districts, nearly 41,000 more votes went to Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor, than to the Democratic state senate candidates. In Virginia in 2021, Democrats lost the House of Delegates by 733 combined votes in its three closest districts, while 63,666 fewer people voted for Democratic legislative candidates than for gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe. Had even a sliver of those McAuliffe voters in the right districts finished their ballots, Democrats would have held the majority.

Second, control of state chambers can turn on mere handfuls of votes. In 2017, Virginia’s House came down to a chance draw from a bowl. In 2022, Pennsylvania’s entire House flipped blue when Missy Cerrato won her district by just 58 votes. And in a blood-boiling example from Mississippi, Democrat Bo Eaton won his tied 2015 state House race the way state law prescribes: by drawing straws. But two months later, the Republican-led House contested a handful of votes for Eaton that brought him to the tie in the first place and seated his opponent anyway. With that crass and craven move, Republicans claimed an ill-gotten three-fifths supermajority, the threshold to pass revenue bills over Democratic opposition.

Third, the battlefield is small. Just as gerrymandering has slashed the number of competitive congressional seats, control of a state chamber also turns on a small set of swing districts. With so few districts in play and margins this tight, even a little voter suppression can change outcomes — something to watch as Trump’s Justice Department dispatches election monitors and unleashes election-related lawsuits, arrests and raids.

What Majorities Make Possible

State leaders now decide whether you can access a safe abortion, whether your water is clean, and whether Judy Blume stays on library shelves. The levers that govern our bodies, our ballots, and our health increasingly sit in state capitols.

New majorities would put those levers to work. When Michigan Democrats won a trifecta in 2022, they repealed the state’s right-to-work law, struck a 1931 abortion ban from the books, and passed gun safety and clean energy laws. This year, Democrats could win trifectas in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Even where majorities are out of reach, supermajorities are not. When Democrats broke North Carolina’s GOP supermajorities in 2018, every single one of Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s 47 vetoes over the next four years held. Today, Republicans hold exactly the 30 state Senate seats needed to override Democratic Gov. Josh Stein, and the legislature has overridden a dozen of his vetoes. One Democratic Senate pickup ends that. In Ohio, Iowa and Kansas, Democrats could break Republican supermajorities this year, which would matter most if these states elect governors eager to wield a veto pen.

We don’t yet know the final tally, but we do know this: next January, hundreds of new legislators who ran to protect the environment from climate catastrophe, expand access to affordable health care and abortion, and rein in Big Tech will arrive in state capitols. They’ll step into gutted federal programs, rising costs, and a hostile administration. But they’ll also step into a landscape where lawmakers who share their values are finally coordinating across state lines. Conservatives have long understood that states acting together can move markets and shape national agendas. Progressives were slow to build a counterweight, but we’re catching up. State Futures has grown to more than 900 values-aligned state policymakers in 18 months, and we’re readying the bunting for the post-election welcome party.

But first, they have to win. History may favor one party this year, but the districts that decide control are few and the margins thin. Voters must tick the boxes all the way down the ballot, as though their literal lives depend on it. Increasingly, they might.