Republicans grew their legislative ranks in 20 states, erasing Democratic majorities in two critical chambers in Michigan and Minnesota and soaring in a trio of New England states. But Democrats did the same in 11 states. They coalesced with centrist Republicans to flip the Alaska House away from GOP control, broke the GOP’s ability to override vetoes in North Carolina, and scored double-digit swings in Montana and Wisconsin.

Overall, Republicans gained 57 seats out of the roughly 6,000 races on the ballot, Bolts has determined in its third annual review of each state’s legislative elections. 

In 2022, the GOP gained 20 legislative seats, a meager result that deflated their expectations for a Democratic president’s midterms. (Several cycles in the 2010s saw swings that numbered in the hundreds of seats.) Democrats then gained five seats in 2023. 

These legislative results fit a broader pattern of short coattails for Trump: The GOP did not surge downballot as it did in the presidential race. The party secured full control of Congress but Democrats added a seat in the U.S. House and salvaged four U.S. Senate seats in states Trump carried. Bolts also reported that results were also mixed in state supreme court elections.

Going forward, the GOP will enjoy a trifecta—one-party control of both legislative chambers and the governorship—in 23 states, a number that did not change after last month’s elections. Democrats meanwhile will hold a trifecta in 15 states after losing one-party control in Michigan and Minnesota.

That leaves twelve states that will have split governments, though GOP lawmakers will have the votes to override the vetoes of a Democratic governor in two of these. 

This table details the make-up of each of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers, plus the city council in Washington, D.C., before and after the Nov. 5 elections.

A handful of districts’ results are still not final pending recounts and lawsuits later this month. (This affects seats in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, North Carolina, New York, and Washington.) Also, Bolts kept several methodological choices made in the 2022 analysis. Vacant seats are attributed to the party that held them most recently. For the purpose of quantifying a swing and being consistent, Bolts counted lawmakers who left their party since the last election but did not join or caucus with the other party as belonging to their original party. (This affects a handful of seats in New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina.) Lawmakers who outright switched parties are counted as belonging to their new party. 

To dig deeper, here are five takeaways from the 2024 legislative elections.

1. In four states, a party lost the ability to unilaterally pass laws

Democrats in 2022 gained full control of the Michigan and Minnesota governments, huge prizes that they quickly used to adopt a slew of legislative priorities. Bolts covered the passage of voting rights legislation in both states, including an expansion of rights restoration in Minnesota and automatic voter registration for people who are released from prison in Michigan. 

These two trifectas are no more. 

The GOP gained just enough seats to cost Democrats the House in both states: Republicans won an outright majority in the Michigan House, but the Minnesota House ended up in a tie that will force a party-sharing agreement. Democrats will still hold the governorships and Senates in both states, but they won’t be able to pass ambitious legislation on party-line votes. 

Democrats also lost that power in Vermont, where heavy losses in both of the state’s chambers cost them their supermajorities. This means they will no longer be able to pass legislation by overriding vetoes from GOP Governor Phil Scott. Democrats had made liberal use of this ability in recent years, including by increasing property taxes this summer, an issue Scott then seized on to heavily campaign against Democrats. As Bolts reported last year, the Democratic legislature also greenlit requests by several towns to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. 

The GOP lost the power to legislate at will in just one state: North Carolina. 

While Republicans retained majorities thanks to their gerrymandered maps, Democrats broke the GOP’s supermajority in the state House. That means the GOP won’t be able to override the vetoes of Democrat Josh Stein, who won the governor’s race. 

North Carolina Republicans have responded to the impending loss of their veto-proof majority by ramming through a sprawling bill to gut the powers of the governor’s and change election rules during the outgoing legislature’s lame-duck session. The bill was vetoed by Governor Roy Cooper last week but the state Senate overrode his veto on Monday; the state House vote is still pending as of publication.

In no state did a party gain the ability to pass laws on its own: There is no new state trifecta, and there is no new supermajority for a party hoping to override the vetoes of a hostile governor.

This means that Democrats fell well short of their hopes of gaining control of Arizona for the first time since the 1960s, and of flipping New Hampshire. Instead, they lost ground in both states and also failed to break consequential GOP supermajorities in Kansas and Nebraska.

But in the days following the election, Alaska Democrats announced a new coalition with some moderate Republicans to grab control of the state House from GOP leaders. A similar mostly Democratic coalition has already been running the state Senate since the 2022 midterms.

2. In most states, the Nov. 5 elections preserved the status quo

In many places, the GOP’s great night at the top of the ticket did not trickle down to legislative elections. 

Take Pennsylvania. In 2022, Democrats easily won the elections for governor and for the U.S. Senate races; they also scored double-digits gains in the state House. This year, the GOP flipped the script for statewide races, winning the state’s electoral votes and defeating U.S. Senator Bob Casey. But not a single of Pennsylvania’s 203 House seats changed hands. Democrats defended their narrow majority, 102 to 101 seats.

Overall, 28 of the state chambers that held regular legislative elections this fall saw zero partisan change. That compares to 18 chambers that saw no partisan change in 2022. 

Just seven states experienced a partisan swing of at least five legislative seats this year. That’s compared to the 16 states that saw such a swing in 2022.

Four of the seven were in New England. The GOP made major gains in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Republicans cemented their majorities in New Hampshire, while in Maine they soared but fell short of flipping the state’s two chambers. And the starkest swing was in Vermont: By winning 25 additional seats, the GOP flipped roughly 14 percent of all the seats on the ballot.

That’s the national record for a swing this year. 

But in another New England state, Connecticut, Democrats grew their ranks in both chambers, adding five seats overall, a feat they’ve pulled off for at least the third consecutive cycle. Here, too, the result went counter Trump’s substantial gains at the presidential level.

The GOP gained five seats in Kansas. Democratic Governor Laura Kelly had campaigned to break the GOP’s supermajorities; instead, Republicans will have an easier time overriding her vetoes going forward. Some GOP moderates have occasionally sided with Democrats to sustain Kelly’s vetoes, for instance in April to narrowly defeat a ban on gender-affirming care. 

In the final two states that saw a large swing, Montana and Wisconsin, it was Democrats who gained. And in both cases, new legislative maps explain the swing, bringing us to our next takeaway.

3. Wisconsin and Montana showcase the importance of who controls redistricting

Following the 2020 decennial census, nearly all states used new legislative maps in 2022, and the results vividly illustrated how the choice between gerrymandering and independent commissions can transform state politics. The 2024 elections offered the same lesson.

In Wisconsin, aggressive gerrymanders locked in huge Republican majorities in both 2011 and 2021, but the GOP’s plan unraveled in the spring of 2023 when liberals flipped the state supreme court. The court struck down the GOP maps in late 2023, forcing fairer districts. As a result, Democrats gained 14 seats across both chambers in last month’s elections—the party’s biggest gain in any state. They narrowed the GOP majorities from 22-11 to 18-15 in the Senate, where only half of the seats were in play, and from 64-35 to 54-45 in the House. 

This will immediately affect governance in Wisconsin: Republicans last year had floated the idea of removing the new state supreme court justice who had secured liberals’ majority on the bench last year, but November’s legislative swings will make similar threats obsolete going forward since the party will no longer have the votes to back it up. 

In Montana, there was no judicial showdown that forced new maps. This was simply the first cycle of state legislative races since the state’s decennial redistricting. Still, the redistricting process last year saw a high-stakes decision: Over the objections of the GOP commissioners, the only nonpartisan member of Montana’s redistricting panel sided with the Democratic commissioners who wanted the new maps to better mirror the state’s overall partisan breakdown. 

Montana Democrats this fall gained 12 legislative seats, breaking GOP supermajorities in both legislative chambers. 

Montana conservatives had also hoped to end the liberal majority on the state supreme court that had struck down their legislative priorities, but they failed to meaningfully alter the court’s balance. And GOP lawmakers will no longer be able to advance constitutional amendments overriding the court rulings they disagree with: Such measures need a two-thirds majority in the legislature.

4. Even in states with little partisan change, the primaries may have changed the game

November settled the balance of power between the two major parties, but that’s only part of the story of 2024. In some states, this year’s legislative elections spell major changes within the ruling party, often due to primaries resolved months ago. 

In Texas, far-right Republicans gained ground during this spring’s primary elections. In total, 13 state representatives were defeated in GOP primaries or runoffs by challengers endorsed by Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of Trump who sought retribution against those lawmakers for voting in 2023 to impeach him over an avalanche of scandals. Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, who forcefully defended his vote to impeach Paxton during his reelection campaign, barely escaped the AG’s revenge in a May runoff, however it’s unclear whether Phelan can survive a challenge for speaker in a state House that has moved further to the right.

The ultraconservative faction of the Wyoming Republican Party also increased its influence in the state’s primaries this summer. The state’s far-right Freedom Caucus won majorities in both legislative chambers for the first time, and won the leadership elections in late November.

No Democratic-run chamber underwent as big an upheaval. Still, a pair of progressive incumbents lost their reelection bids in Colorado in June, including Elisabeth Epps, an abolitionist activist who was elected to the state House in 2022; the results will cost criminal justice reformers key allies in a chamber where they’ve already struggled. 

Progressives gained ground in Delaware and New Mexico, though, by defeating a slew of centrist Democrats. The ousted incumbents include New Mexico Senator Daniel Ivey-Soto; Bolts reported in 2023 that voting rights advocates faulted Ivey-Soto for the failure of a legislation they’d championed. 

5. What lies ahead?

The Nov. 5 results could trigger further changes in early 2025. Three state senators won congressional races in Michigan and Virginia, and must now vacate their seats in tight chambers. 

In Michigan, Democrat Kristen McDonald Rivet’s resignation will spark a special election in the competitive 35th Senate District. The chamber is currently split 20 to 18 seats for Democrats, so the GOP would gain an even tie if they flip the district. (Still, the Democratic lieutenant governor would be able to break any tied votes in the chamber.)

Similarly, in Virginia, Democrat Suhas Subramanyan and Republican John McGuire are moving to the U.S. House from the state Senate, which is currently split 21 to 19 in Democrats’ favor. The race to replace Subramanyan in District 32nd is more likely to be competitive, according to The Downballot, giving the GOP a chance to tie the chamber in a Jan. 7 special election; a tie would effectively hand Republicans the majority since the GOP lieutenant governor would have the power to break ties.

In mid-November, Democrats chose state Delegate Kannan Srinivasan to run in this race. This triggered another Jan. 7 special election, this time in District 26, Srinivasan’s blue-leaning House seat. Democrats’ control of the lower chamber is just as narrow—51 to 49—so the GOP will have an outside shot at tying the House as well.

Next year will only speed up from there. Other specials are already scheduled, though in chambers that aren’t as tight as in Michigan and Virginia. And in the fall, the entirety of the New Jersey Assembly and Virginia House will be on the ballot alongside the state’s governorships.

The piece has been corrected to reflect the latest results in Oregon, where Democrats ended up flipping a seat in the state House by flipping the 22nd District with late votes.

The post The GOP Came Out Ahead in Legislative Races, But Their Gains Were Modest and Uneven appeared first on Bolts.

I answered six of your questions in the first part of our mailbag two weeks ago, from the role of state auditors to the most pivotal referendums. Today, I tackle six more. 

Navigate to the question that most interests you here, or scroll down to explore them all at your leisure:

Which legislative chambers may flip in November?
Jump to our answer.

What happens in elections where no one is running?
Jump to our answer.

Which party will win more congressional delegations, in case that matters for the presidential election?
Jump to our answer.

What happens if you walk into the wrong polling place by mistake?
Jump to our answer.

I spent hours trying to research our local candidates’ platforms and it was fruitless. Shouldn’t every candidate have a website with their platform?!
Jump to our answer.

I can’t seem to get people to care about boards of canvassers. Can you explain the significance of the offices that play a role in elections?
Jump to our answer.

The election is now just days away—so explore our cheat sheet of more than 500 critical races, and our election guides to supreme court races and to local criminal justice races. Before you know it, we’ll have plenty more on the results in November.

What is the [state legislative] chamber with the best chance of switching to blue? (Arizona I assume, but is there another?) — @sidewalkslam, on BlueSky

You’re right that Democrats’ biggest target is Arizona: If they pick up two seats each in the Senate and House, they would secure full control of the state government—a first since 1966.

But that’s not all. 

There’s Wisconsin, most notably. The victory of a liberal justice in 2023 paved the way for a ruling that struck down GOP gerrymanders. Now, the legislative elections are taking place under radically different maps that give Democrats a chance to flip the chambers; that’s especially true in the Assembly, since only half of the state Senate is up this year.

The New Hampshire House ended in a near-draw two years ago; if Democrats flip it this year, they would end GOP control over the state no matter what happens in the governor’s race. This chamber often comes down to tiny margins: It has 400 seats—that’s a national high, by far—and 30 races went to a recount two years ago; six were decided by a margin under 10 votes. 

But the GOP is also looking for gains. In 2022, Democrats unexpectedly flipped four chambers, which sparked major policy swings. This fall, control of three of them hangs by a thread. In Pennsylvania’s House, Michigan’s House, and Minnesota’s Senate, losing a single seat would cost Democrats the majority. (Democrats’ fourth 2022 gain, Michigan’s Senate, is not on the ballot this fall.)  The GOP is also eying other chambers, most notably Alaska’s House and Minnesota’s House.

And don’t just look at which party wins more seats. Many states are on supermajority watch. Nevada Democrats might gain a two-thirds majority in the state Senate, to go along with the one they already have in the Assembly; this would allow them to override vetoes by the Republican governor. The GOP, meanwhile, hopes to keep new supermajorities in Nebraska and North Carolina: The defection of a single Democrat in each state handed Republicans that edge, and now they can’t afford to lose any seat.

North Carolina Democrats, in fact, want to avenge that defection directly: Tricia Cotham, the lawmaker who switched parties, paving the way for major conservative wins like new abortion restrictions, is running for reelection in the Charlotte suburbs. The GOP redrew legislative maps to help her, but this is one of the most expensive races of the year.

Hoping to go even more granular and learn about which specific districts will determine the majority in these chambers? Our Bolts cheat sheet provides you information, state by state.

What happens in elections where no one is running? In my county in South Carolina, we have no one running for Soil and Water District Commission, but there is an ability to write-in a candidate. — Noah, from South Carolina

It’s extremely common for elections to feature one candidate running unopposed. Prosecutor races are often elections in name only, with incumbents waltzing into office with no opponent. This fall, all five of Oregon’s supreme court races feature a sitting justice with no challenger. Democrats are already sure to run the Massachusetts legislature next year, and Republicans the Oklahoma legislature, because most seats in each state have been left uncontested. 

But what about elections where no one files at all? That’s far less common, but it’s by no means unheard of. They’re more likely to pop up for local offices that are under the radar, like municipal treasurers, school board members, or neighborhood councils. 

Elections for soil and water commissions, which are local bodies that are meant to protect natural resources, are a prime spot for this. You just asked about one South Carolina county, but there are actually a handful in your state where no one filed to run for these bodies. It’s a similar story in North Carolina and Oregon, two other states with soil and water districts. 

If no one files to run by the deadline for candidates to appear on the ballot, it’s still possible for someone to mount a write-in bid. But that’s not as simple as just getting a few friends to jot down your name. Many states require that someone come forward and formally register as a write-in contender, though what that means varies greatly. In South Carolina, where you live, there’s no form to file, though the state asks candidates to notify local authorities. In Wisconsin, you need to file a form at least a few days prior. In North Carolina, depending on the office, you may need to collect signatures and file a petition months before an election. 

For instance, in Dare County, North Carolina, no one filed to appear on the ballot for the soil and water commission job, but a resident is currently mounting a write-in campaign.

What if an election really has no winner? Say no one ran, and no write-in materialized. The next step, once again, depends on your local laws. In many cases, this gets treated like a regular vacancy that the governor, county board, or city council would fill via an appointment. Here, too, some states have idiosyncratic rules: If such a situation occurs in North Carolina, the incumbent office-holder may hold the seat for the entire term even if they didn’t run for reelection.

Is there a chance for Democrats to win more congressional *delegations* this cycle? I’m thinking about the situation where neither candidate gets 270 electoral votes. Can Democrats get the lead in 26 states? — @MeWritesGood on X

This question refers to a possible scenario in which neither Harris nor Trump reach a majority in the electoral college—whether because they tied at 269 each, or even because of a faithless elector. In such a case, the U.S. House would decide the election: Each state’s delegation gets one combined vote, and someone needs the support of 26 delegations to become president. The presidential election hasn’t been decided in this way since 1824.

The GOP currently controls 26 delegations and Democrats 22. Two are tied. But what matters is the next Congress, the one that’ll be elected on Nov. 5. So could things change?

To your question: It’s exceedingly difficult to come up with a plausible set of November results that get Democrats to 26. Even if they were to sweep all districts on Bolts’ cheat sheet of competitive U.S. House races, they would only get to 23 delegations. 

Democrats face many obstacles here. For one, the more sparsely populated states lean red, the same structural issue that skews the U.S. Senate to the GOP. Just like in the Senate, the blue bastion of D.C. has no congressional representation. Plus, while North Carolina’s delegation is currently tied, the GOP redrew the state map with an aggressive gerrymander that guarantees it will gain a clear edge. 

A more worthwhile question is: Could the GOP slip below 26? This would happen if delegations end up tied, effectively canceling out their votes entirely and preventing the House from choosing any winner. (In such a scenario, the Vice President-Elect, chosen by the U.S. Senate, becomes the acting president.) 

Even for this goal, Democrats need a lot to go right for them. Accounting for the GOP’s likely gain of North Carolina, they need to defend their vulnerable seats in Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and gain enough seats to erase the GOP’s majorities in two of these four state delegations: Arizona, Iowa, Montana, and Wisconsin. 

The basic issue here: You’d expect House Democrats to only pull off such a sweep if the election cycle is very favorable to them—if their base turns out much more, for instance, or if undecided voters swing their way. But if the presidential race is so tight that it’s been thrown to the House, that’s probably not what election night looks like down ballot.

What happens if you walk into the wrong polling place by mistake? — @sommersmurf on BlueSky

If you realize that you’re in the wrong polling place, poll workers may be able to identify where you should go, and you may still have time to head to the correct location. But things may not be so simple. Maybe poll workers say they don’t know where you’re supposed to vote, or you believe your name was removed from voter rolls incorrectly, or there’s just no more time. Some states are also prone to cut polling places at the last minute, creating confusion. 

At that point, you can ask to cast a provisional ballot. (This option exists in every state other than Idaho and Minnesota, both of which offer same-day registration, which mitigates this issue.) A provisional ballot is one that’s put aside pending verification of a voter’s eligibility. 

But what happens next varies greatly by state: If local officials end up confirming that you did cast a provisional ballot in the wrong polling place, there’s a big range in what they’ll do with it. 

Broadly speaking, they fall in two big categories. They could count your vote for all the races you were eligible for: If you went a neighborhood over, you may have cast a vote in the wrong city council race, but why should your vote for governor or president also be tossed? 

But some states don’t even allow such a partial count. They completely reject a provisional if a voter casts it in the wrong place. Nothing is salvaged. This approach of fully rejecting provisionals “makes no sense,” says Jon Sherman, an attorney with the Fair Election Center who has written on the issue. “It’s totally irrational to reject people’s federal and statewide choices when they would be eligible to vote in those races anywhere in the state.”

You can find a comprehensive breakdown on which side each state falls in on Ballotpedia.

To reduce these risks, many states have set up at-large voting centers: These are polling places that can accommodate people living anywhere in a county or a city. Chicago calls them “supersites.” Such centers are common during the early voting period; some places also set them up on Election Day. 

“(At-large) voting centers are a major boost for turnout, particularly for low-propensity voters,” says Sherman, pointing to the research into their effects. “They are more convenient locations, and bigger and more accessible.”

But like so much else about how we vote, these rules are caught up in restrictions and litigation that sometimes produce a strange mismash. 

Take Arizona. On Election Day, this state uses at-large county centers, and simultaneously it uses precincts, much smaller locations that each voter is assigned to. On Nov. 5, there will be 246 at-large locations dispersed across the sprawling Maricopa County where people can vote regardless of where they live in the county. But if they go to a precinct location, and get it wrong, the state shows no mercy: Republicans passed a law that requires officials to toss provisionals cast in the incorrect location in their entirety—no partial count. Democrats sued but lost in a landmark Supreme Court case in 2021. This year, the GOP tried to ban the at-large centers as well, blaming them with no evidence for voter fraud, but they fell short.

I live in a pretty rural town in Virginia. I spent almost 2 hours the other day trying to research our local candidates’ platforms and it was basically fruitless. By the end I was poring through their LinkedIn profiles and the Facebook accounts of their various relatives trying to learn ANYTHING. Shouldn’t every candidate have to have a website with their platform?! — @usetyourloafman on Threads

I’ve shared your experience as a voter—and also as a journalist covering races that touch the criminal legal system, like prosecutors and sheriffs. Many candidates running for these offices avoid sharing their policies. They also sometimes insist they shouldn’t have to answer policy questions because they’re just running to apply the law, a response that ignores the vast discretion they’ll inherit.

In a past election cycle, I reached out to dozens of candidates running for sheriff in Texas about whether they planned to assist ICE with immigration enforcement as part of the agency’s 278(g) program, which is a key policy question that sheriffs control. Few responded. One replied with, “I do not think it is appropriate for me to speak about specific program recommendations for the sheriff’s office until I am sheriff.” (This candidate lost, by the way.)

Journalists here play an important role in asking candidates about their views, and many newsrooms have created extensive guides to help people navigate their local ballots. 

Nonpartisan groups like the League of Women Voters also publish candidate questionnaires and organize forums—though candidates will often decline to participate. And advocacy organizations may also want to pin them down about their commitment.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that’s talking to candidates in a local sheriff’s race, talked to me recently about why it’s important to her to press local candidates for answers. “We’ll ask them to get their policies in writing,” she said. “That’s the only way you can hold a candidate accountable, is if they violated a policy. If you don’t have a policy, then there’s nothing to measure anything against.”

In my state, Michigan, commissioners choose boards of canvassers. When we almost refused to certify our 2020 elections, people were furious and asked, how did these canvassers get their jobs? Now, I can’t seem to get people to care. Can you explain the significance of this and other downballot offices that can have major effects on elections? Roles that may not be obvious for their importance but are very much so? — Stacey, from Michigan

“Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate,” Trump told Pennsylvania Republicans two years ago. His efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, from telling the Georgia secretary of state to “find” him thousands of votes, to his team’s hope that local officials would delay certification to create what they called a “cloud of confusion,” relied on the complicity of people sitting on local and state boards.

This is why Bolts created a resource, “Who Counts Our Elections,” that details who processes, counts, and certifies results in each state, and how they come to be in office. Here readers can learn, in their state, what offices play what role in this process.

In Michigan counties, for instance, local commissioners appoint the members of the canvassing board. In Pennsylvania, elected commissioners double as a board of elections. In Florida, three local officials come together to act as a certifying board. There are also separate statewide offices to finalize the results in each. To make matters more complicated, the officials who handle elections in the runup to election night may be different than those who handle the count; we have compiled state-by-state information on who runs elections in a separate resource.

And many of these election officials are elected themselves. 

In 2022, election deniers tried to take over elections offices but largely lost. Still, some sitting officials have signaled an openness to stretching their role and helping the GOP. If they act on it, it’d be up to state officials and courts to intervene and keep the count running smoothly. 

And this fall, there are still more downballot races that may hand election systems to election deniers. This includes the statewide races in Oregon and Missouri, and local races in Arizona’s all-important Maricopa County (Phoenix) and across the state of Florida. 

The post Downballot Stakes: Your Questions Answered appeared first on Bolts.

In February, as the Louisiana legislature debated Senate Bill 3, which would move all 17 year olds charged with a crime out of the juvenile justice system and back into the adult system, Will Harrell, an advisor to New Orleans Sheriff Susan Hutson, went to update the department’s Prison Rape Elimination Act coordinator on the proposed changes. He watched as tears came to her eyes. Teenagers are uniquely vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse in adult jails, and federal law requires they be separated from the adult population, which often translates to solitary confinement conditions. “She knows what that means for these kids,” Harrell told Bolts. 

The bill quickly passed and was signed into law by Louisiana’s new governor Jeff Landry on Wednesday. Now, Harrell is scrambling to figure out how to absorb dozens of 17 year olds into the already-overburdened Orleans Parish Justice Center once SB 3 takes effect in April. “We’re already at capacity. We’re under a consent decree,” he said. “I talked to deputies who were there seven years ago when they had kids. And they were like, ‘oh, this is just going to be a mess.’” 

“In conjunction with other legislation pending during this special session, we anticipate a massive, unmanageable population explosion at OJC,” Hutson wrote in a statement.

Landry sailed into the governor’s office last November after a campaign filled with crime-and-punishment rhetoric. Despite the fact that Louisiana already has the nation’s highest rate of incarceration, he made one of his first acts as governor convening a special legislative session on crime. In an extraordinarily fast nine-day session which ended last Friday, Republican lawmakers passed all 37 bills under consideration, a grab bag of tough-on-crime proposals that included restricting post-conviction relief, increasing law enforcement immunity, and legalizing execution methods such as nitrogen gas and the electric chair. 

Sarah Omojola, the director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office, called it a “one hundred percent” rollback of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, the raft of bipartisan criminal legal reforms passed under former Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards in 2017. “In some instances, this isn’t just a rollback,” she added. “This is taking us back to the early 2000s, late ‘90s.”

Observers are just starting to take stock of what this flurry of new legislation will mean for crime deterrence, and for the state budget. But Omojola, Harrell, and others are already certain that several different measures will work together to significantly grow the state’s pretrial populations, as well as the number of people sentenced and serving time. Other bills effectively eliminate parole, vastly restrict “good time” credits, and mandate prison time for technical violations of parole and probation. 

“Of course it’s going to balloon the prison population. Every single time these kinds of laws go into play, the incarceration rate jumps,” said Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, a University of Kentucky geography professor whose 2023 book, Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana, examines incarceration in the state. “That’s just basic math.” 

And in Louisiana, that means, once again, a profound and reverberating impact on parish jails and sheriffs. Owing to a unique arrangement designed to address overcrowding and bad conditions at Angola prison back in the 1970s, Louisiana’s local lock-ups house more than half of its state prisoner population. 

Jails operate as sort of a carceral shadow system: deadlier than the state prison system, lacking many of its resources and offerings, and run by sheriffs, who are comparatively unaccountable to state officials. East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, a dangerous jail that has for 15 years running been presided over by the same notorious sheriff, for instance, does not allow in-person visits, even though some of the people held there have been incarcerated for years on end. If someone dies in custody in a Louisiana jail, officials have no responsibility to notify their loved ones.

The Louisiana Sheriff’s Association, which lobbies on behalf of the state’s 64 sheriffs, testified in favor of SB 3, despite Hutson’s opposition. “It’s not just a bill that we are supporting, this is a bill that is part of our plan,” spokesperson Mike Ranatza told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This is what we asked the governor to entertain for us in the special crime session…this is what the overwhelming majority of our sheriffs have asked for.” 

The jail system runs on “per diem” payments that the state grants local law enforcement in exchange for jailing people who have been sentenced to state prison, payments which this year will total $177 million. More prisoners means more money for sheriffs across the state—and likely future efforts to expand jails, according to Pelot-Hobbs. 

“Louisiana law enforcement agencies are uniquely invested in incarceration” because of the per-diem system, Omojola told Bolts. “They financially benefit from people who are being held in their jails without providing any of those programs or resources.” 

The origins of today’s jail arrangement has its roots not in tough-on-crime policies, but in a lawsuit filed by four Black Angola prisoners challenging the conditions of their confinement. In 1975, in response to the lawsuit, a federal judge limited Angola’s population. Rather than build new prisons, it was cheaper and easier for the state to transfer some prisoners to local jails to serve the remainder of their sentences. At first, Pelot-Hobbs writes in Prison Capital, sheriffs protested. But after the per diem system was instituted, they began to consider their new prisoners a boon, even asking Angola to send them more people.

By the 1990s, Pelot-Hobbs argues, jails had gone from being a “temporary spatial fix” to “the long-term geographic solution for the Louisiana carceral state.” Sheriffs, now reliant on the per-diem money, organized for jail expansion to hold more state prisoners. Between 1999 and 2019, the state added some 14,000 jail beds. “Other parishes built out huge jails that they’ll never need for their local population,” said Harrell. “It’s like a hotel. You open up the hotel, DOC sends you some kid from New Orleans, they pay you for the hotel rooms. And that literally is why you have the jail.”

This system may financially benefit local sheriffs and the state department of corrections, but it comes at the expense of the people locked up in their jails. “There’s nothing on the inside,” said Amelia Herrera, an organizer with Voice of the Experienced’s Baton Rouge chapter who spent time in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison in 2015 and has a loved one currently incarcerated there. Officials, she said, “will say the reason there’s no type of programs inside of this facility is because it’s a pre-trial facility…But when we have people in there for six and seven years?” 

“You can’t visit,” she added. “They make it almost impossible to keep a connection with the outside.”

As it stands, providing no programming or visits even for people locked up for years on end is legal. Louisiana’s regulations governing how people should be treated while incarcerated in its jails are notably minimal and vague. While the state has a set of “basic jail guidelines” that apply to facilities that house state prisoners, a 2023 report by the University of Texas at Austin’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab found that they fell short compared to regional counterparts like Texas and Florida. The report determined that the state’s jails have little to no requirements regarding transparency around in-custody deaths, adequate heating and cooling systems, or in-person visiting rights, and that their regulations around discipline are the least comprehensive of anything they reviewed. It also noted that the family members of incarcerated Louisianans contend that the regulations that do exist are routinely flouted. 

The state legislature had commissioned the report, which concluded with a set of recommendations for jails to adopt guidelines prohibiting corporal punishment and the denial of basic needs like water or sleep. But when the lab’s director, Michele Deitch, and her team submitted their work last fall, the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association immediately sent a letter expressing appreciation for the work but signaling they would not follow the bulk of their recommendations, citing concerns over security plus limited capacity. 

The report was completed several months before Landry took office. Now the new raft of bills passed during the special crime session threatens to turbocharge Louisiana’s cycle of jail expansion, exacerbating the problems already on display in the report’s pages before the state does much to try to remedy them. 

Omojola highlighted three bills proposed by Republican Senator Debbie Villio, HB 9, 10, and 11, which, taken together, “essentially work to make sentences much much longer—and therefore fill our prisons and our jails,” she said. HB 9 aims to abolish discretionary parole in most cases, HB 10 limits the accumulation of “good time” credits meaning that an individual would be required to serve at least 85 percent of his sentence without exception, and HB 11 increases the penalties for even technical violations of parole or probation. 

Harrell noted that HB 9 and 10 may have an indirect impact on the pretrial population as well, because they take away people’s incentive to accept a plea offer. With vastly reduced prospects of getting out on parole or getting a sentence reduced with “good time” credits, people may be less keen to accept a conviction and start getting their time over with, and more likely to wait out a trial date in jail. “When that’s taken away from them, they are like, ‘Well, then why should I leave? I’m just gonna stay here in jail and roll my dice and hopefully somebody on a jury will decide that I’m not guilty,’” he said. 

Villio, the bills’ sponsor and an ally of Landry’s, contends that these laws won’t increase prison populations as long as judges adjust their sentencing decisions accordingly. In a text message to Nola.com, she said, “It requires a mind-reset on sentencing that in the end should result in a wash. We, of course, will be monitoring that.” When Bolts asked how this sort of paradigm shift for judges would work in practice, Villio said, “I have the utmost confidence in our judiciary,” noting she believes that trainings have already been scheduled. 

The Crime and Justice Institute, a policy analysis group, has studied other states’ implementation of similar determinate sentencing laws; Leonard Engel, the group’s director of policy and campaigns, told Bolts their research shows that judges do not ultimately adjust their sentences anywhere enough to make up the difference in years served.

HB 11, the bill dealing with technical violations of probation and parole, is also alarming to reform advocates like Bruce Reilly of Voice of the Experienced. Under the terms of the bill, people on parole or probation who are merely re-arrested, not even convicted, could get sent to prison. “That’s really where the sheriff and jails are gonna get their bread and butter,” Reilly said.

The special session also passed a law requiring 20 year mandatory minimums for carjacking cases that involve bodily injury and established financing to establish a state trooper force for New Orleans. “That’s gonna rack up a whole bunch of new arrests,” Harell said of the state trooper force. “Where do you think those people are gonna be housed?”

Overcrowding is likely to lead to an expansion of the footprint of local jails in what Pelot-Hobbs predicted could be a repeat of the same patterns of the 1980s and 1990s. The Crime and Justice Institute estimates that the additional prison time people in a given year serve under HB 9 and 10, instead of getting out on “good time” credits or parole, will cost the state upwards of a billion dollars over time. And that’s before any budget increases sheriffs could ask for—and they are likely to ask, Pelot-Hobbs said. “We’re going to see sheriffs organizing and pushing to expand their jails for this moment,” she said. “We are going to see sheriffs mobilizing and organizing to get either property taxes or millages or sales taxes to get more jail space to incarcerate the state prisoners. I also think we’re likely going to see them lobbying the state legislature for higher per diem rates.” 

Advocates worry that the growth of local budgets and contracts, combined with Landry’s efforts to reduce accountability for law enforcement, will add to the state’s problems with cronyism. “It’s going to fuel the corruption, the closed circle of sheriffs and the folks who contract with them, who will know that there’s more money to be had if they can land the contracts for this jail expansion and for the increased services needed for a larger population,” says Julien Burns, the communications lead for Sheriffs for Trusting Communities. Along with Common Cause, the group has documented how sheriffs receive millions in campaign contributions from guard uniform makers, telecoms and bail bonds companies, and contractors that may hope to secure lucrative contracts with the department. 

In the waning days of the special crime session, a discussion finally arose about the collective impact of these bills on Louisiana’s jails, with even conservative lawmakers such as Villio, the sponsor of HB 9, 10, and 11, expressing an awareness of the need for greater programming and services in the jails. “Everybody’s on record, saying the right thing—like if we’re gonna do this, we can’t just warehouse [people]. We’re gonna have to address the issues,” said Harrell. The legislature now moves to its regular session, where some of these issues could be hammered out. 

Dramatically expanding jail programming, of course, would mean an even greater expansion of the carceral budget in Louisiana. Pelot-Hobbs said that she doubts that substantive programming will actually materialize in the jails. “I just think it’s a false promise,” she told Bolts. “And even if the promise came true, it’s still just acquiescing to the general kind of commitment to incarceration as the solution.” 

Still, in Harrell’s view, allocating such resources is crucial given the vastly restricted terrain for criminal legal transformation in the state as long as Landry is in office. “These tough on crime Republicans are running the show,” he said. “There’s no going back right now, at least for the next four years. And so to the extent people are concerned about the health and safety of people who are currently incarcerated, who will soon be incarcerated under these legislations, they need to understand that programming resources matter.”

Nola.com reported this week that the exact costs of the laws that have already passed in February are uncertain because lawmakers rushed them through, suspending usual rules that would have entailed more attention to the budget. 

The state’s decision to double down on incarceration, Pelot-Hobbs added, will affect public spending in other areas, too. “As money gets more and more directed towards these kinds of expenditure projects, less funds are going to be available for road construction, levy construction, schools,” she said. “The criminal legal system never operates in a silo.” 

The post “We’re Going to Be Overwhelmed”: How Louisiana Just Ballooned Its Jail Population appeared first on Bolts.

The final result: Democrats won five additional legislative seats this year, Bolts calculated in its second annual review of all legislative elections. 

That’s a small change, since there were more than 600 seats in play this year. But it goes against the expectation that the party that holds the White House faces trouble in such races. In 2021, the first off-year with President Biden in the White House, the GOP gained 18 new seats out of the roughly 450 seats that were in play, according to Bolts’ calculations. (Three special elections will still be held in December, but none is expected to be competitive.)

It also mirrors Republicans’ disappointment in 2022, a midterm cycle that saw Democrats defy recent history by flipping four legislative chambers without losing any. They pulled off a similar feat this year: Democrats held off GOP hopes of securing new chambers in New Jersey and Virginia and instead gained one themselves in Virginia, the fifth legislative chamber they’ve flipped in two years.

Still, these aggregate results mask regional differences, with Democratic candidates continuing their descent in much of the South. That too is an echo of 2022, when the GOP’s poor night was somewhat masked by their surge in a few red states like West Virginia, where Democrats still haven’t hit rock bottom; this year, Republicans surged in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Districts are not all created equal, with vast differences in the populations they cover in different states; the seats Democrats gained correspond on average to twice as many residents than those Republicans gained. 

The results of the 2023 cycle have been dissected at length for any hints as to who will fare well in the far-higher profile races in 2024.

The encouraging case for the GOP, as laid out last week by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, is that Republicans overperformed in Virginia compared to the last presidential race, even as they failed in their bid to win the legislature. But they also came close to suffering much greater losses in the state, the Center for Politics notes: Virginia’s seven tightest legislative elections this fall were all won by the GOP, all by less than two percentage points.

The encouraging case for Democrats is the national view: They’ve overperformed in special elections throughout the year—as documented by Daily Kos Elections, their nominee improved on President Biden by an average of 6 percentage points across 34 special elections—a measure that has had predictive value in the past. They also did very well this fall in Pennsylvania, the only presidential battleground that hosted a significant number of elections. 

But the results of the 2023 legislative races matter first and foremost for themselves—not for what they signal for other, future elections. Just as the Democratic gains last year in Michigan and Minnesota opened the floodgates to major progressive reforms in both states, the newly-decided composition of legislative chambers will shape power and policy within Virginia, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Below are four takeaways from the elections.

1. The GOP’s state goals flail, with one major exception

These legislative races, alongside three governor’s elections, decided who will control state governments over the next two years.

Democrats denied the GOP’s bids to grab control of Virginia and Kentucky by winning the House and Senate in the former, and the governorship in the latter. In addition, Republicans hoped to break Democrats’ trifecta in New Jersey, pointing to supposed voter backlash against liberal school policies and trans students to fuel talk that they may flip the Assembly or Senate; instead, they lost ground and now find themselves down a 24-seat hole in the lower chamber.

The GOP’s best results came in Louisiana, where the party flipped the governorship to grab the reins of the state government, a result that will likely open the floodgates of staunchly conservative policy. Republicans also retained their trifecta in Mississippi by holding onto the governor’s office.

2. Abortion mattered, again 

Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, tried to win the legislature for his party by selling his constituents on new abortion restrictions. His failure has been widely held up since Nov. 7 as the latest evidence of voter alarm about the bans that have multiplied since the Dobbs decision. But abortion also mattered in New Jersey’s campaigns this fall, with Democratic candidates arguing that their continued majority would protect abortion rights and funding.

The question, Rebecca Traister writes in NY Mag, is what Democrats do next after winning on the issue and what affirmative policies they adopt. Earlier this year, Democrats who run the Virginia Senate adopted a constitutional amendment to codify abortion rights; the measure died in the state House, which was run by the GOP but just flipped to Democrats. Scott Surovell, Senate Democrats’ incoming leader, confirmed this month that he plans to advance the amendment again now that his party controls the full legislature. 

Virginia Democrats can advance the amendment while circumventing Youngkin but it would be at least a three-year process. The legislature would need to adopt it in two separate sessions separated by an election to send it straight to voters—so they’d have to do it now, then defend their legislative majorities in the 2025 elections, then pass it again in 2026, and then win a referendum that fall. 

3. GOP attacks on crime fell flat, again

The GOP in both New Jersey and Virginia banked that it would make inroads by attacking Democratic lawmakers on crime, repeating a strategy that already did poorly in the 2022 midterms. Democrats won swing districts in both states in which Republicans assailed their opponents for endangering public safety.

Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey, stresses that these elections took place in the wake of New Jersey adopting major criminal justice reforms, which the GOP tried and failed to turn against the party electorally. “New Jersey is the nation’s leading decarcerator, reducing state prison populations by more than 50 percent since 2011, and we’ve shown that decarceration is possible and crime rates across all major categories continue to decline,” he told Bolts. 

Still, he wishes the lawmakers who passed the reforms would have been bolder in defending them on the trail given recent evidence they’re not politically harmful. “The lesson for candidates running in 2024 and 2025 is that reforming unjust systems and promoting public safety are not at odds with one another.”

Since their wins on Nov. 7, Virginia Democrats have chosen two new legislative leaders with a history of supporting criminal justice reforms. Incoming Speaker Don Scott is an attorney who spent years in federal prison, a fact that GOP strategists have tried using against Democrats, and he has championed issues like ending solitary confinement. Surovell, Democrats’ new Majority Leader, was a force behind the criminal legal reforms Democrats passed while they controlled the state government in 2019 and 2020. He played the lead role within his party this year in calling out Youngkin’s administration for making it harder for people with felony convictions to vote, Bolts reported this spring.

4. Competition evaporates in Louisiana and Mississippi

Just six years ago, the GOP held 86 legislative seats in Louisiana (out of 144) and 106 in Mississippi (out of 174). After the 2023 elections, they’ll hold 101 in Louisiana and 115 in Mississippi, a surge born not just from election results in recent cycles but also party switches. 

Both legislatures are also disproportionately white, and both drew attention this year for targeting underrepresented Black communities. (Black voters in both states vote overwhelmingly Democratic.) 

Gerrymandering is contributing to these dynamics, even if white Republicans also dominate statewide races in both states. A coalition of civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against Mississippi’s current legislative maps for diluting the voting power of Black residents, saying that both House and Senate maps lacked enough Black opportunity seats; the lawsuit argues that the state should have drawn seven more Black-majority districts across Mississippi’s two chambers. In Louisiana, the legal battles have revolved around the congressional map, which a federal appeals court recently struck down for violating the Voting Rights Act; Democrats raised similar concerns about Louisiana’s legislative maps.

“When you gerrymander people’s power away, you can’t elect candidates of choice,” says Ashley Shelton, executive director of Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a Louisiana organization that focuses on voter outreach. “We understand the power of gerrymandering: It’s not that Black people don’t care or don’t want to vote, it’s that the power of their vote has been lessened.”

Gerrymandering this fall contributed to a startling dearth of competition: Not a single legislative race in either state was decided by less than 10 percentage points between candidates of different parties. (That’s out of 318 districts!)

In fact, many districts didn’t feature any contest at all. No Democrats were even on the ballot in the majority of districts in each of Louisiana and Mississippi’s four chambers, mathematically ensuring that the party couldn’t win majorities before any vote was cast. 

In Louisiana, some critics of the state Democratic establishment also faulted the party for neglecting to mount a proper campaign this fall. “I didn’t see any get out of the vote effort,” one progressive lawmaker told Bolts after the October primary, which saw the Democratic Party spend very little money. 

Shelton told Bolts last week that the state’s traditional establishment similarly didn’t work to turn voters out in the lead-up to Saturday’s runoffs, which featured statewide elections for attorney general and secretary of state as well as a scattering of legislative runoffs; she saw little noise and outreach outside of nonprofit groups like hers and their partners. 

“When I think about the political machines, there’s no money being spent to engage voters,” Shelton told Bolts. “We can certainly create the energy that we can, but there’s something to the bigger momentum and energy that comes from the machine actually working.” She added, “It’s very quiet in the state of Louisiana, and that’s crazy to me.” 

The post Democrats Held Off the GOP in Legislative Races This Year, Again Bucking Expectations appeared first on Bolts.

Jenny had been locked up for several years by the time Ujevich arrived at West Virginia’s all-women Lakin Correctional Center and Jail. There, Ujevich says, Jenny had complained of a persistent pain in one of her breasts, but struggled to get staff to take that problem seriously. In fact, Ujevich says, the staff hardly paid her any mind until Jenny’s condition sharply and visibly worsened. Only after that point did Jenny learn she had breast cancer. 

Ujevich still fumes over how long it took Jenny to obtain that diagnosis, and over what came next: “She couldn’t get her chemo on time,” Ujevich told Bolts.

Jenny was released in late 2016. She spent Christmas with her family, then died in January.

Ujevich is now free and heading a nonprofit project called West Virginia Family of Convicted People, where she advocates for changes to the state’s prison system, including improvements in health care. She’s nervous that a new state law, passed during a special session last month by West Virginia’s GOP-run legislature and signed by its Republican governor, could lead to more cases like Jenny’s.

Senate Bill 1009 bans the use of state funds for any health care for incarcerated people that isn’t deemed “medically necessary.” The policy leaves it to state Corrections and Rehabilitation Commissioner Billy Marshall—a career law enforcement agent who has said incarcerated people are lying when they allege inhumane treatment by the state—to define “medically necessary” and makes clear that this definition can supersede guidance from health professionals. “A provider of health care prescribing, ordering, recommending, or approving a health care service or product does not, by itself, make that health care service or product medically necessary,” the law reads.

West Virginia already routinely fails to provide basic, essential care in its jails and prisons, several formerly incarcerated people told Bolts. Kenneth Matthews, who was locked up for more than eight years and has been free since 2020, says he lived this firsthand, as a diabetic person with high blood pressure. 

In prison, he said “I didn’t get insulin, and they didn’t give me medication for my high blood pressure either. They said maybe if I lost some weight and worked out more, my blood pressure and diabetes would correct itself.”

And Zoey Hott, a trans woman who was incarcerated for about 18 months and released August 1, said people needing gender-affirming care feel this struggle acutely. She told Bolts she was promptly taken off hormone therapy when she arrived at jail and then denied this treatment as she was transferred to several different jails. The interruption, she said, caused physical discomfort and profound mental health issues. 

“It took me five months to even be evaluated,” Hott added. “They don’t really look at it as something of significant importance for anybody. I feel like they view it as an elective procedure.”

Stories like these abound, JoAnna Vance, an organizer with the West Virginia Economic Justice Project, told Bolts. “Health care in jails and prisons is not good. ‘Mental health services’ is just throwing people in solitary. We just had another death in one of our jails this morning. I know people who’ve been having seizures in jail and the correctional officers ignore them or tell the other inmates to deal with it. Lord, there’s so much.” 

West Virginia contracts with a private company, Wexford Health, for medical care in its jails, prisons, and juvenile detention centers. All over the country, from Arizona to Illinois to West Virginia, incarcerated people and their advocates have complained for years of medical dangers resulting from government partnerships with Wexford. Most recently, a lawsuit filed in July accused the company of denying thousands of incarcerated West Virginans medication for opioid use disorder. 

In the treatment of addiction and so much else, health care in U.S. carceral facilities is typically abysmal—even as the people locked in those facilities are, on average, much more medically vulnerable than the population at large. The situation grows even more dangerous where care is outsourced to private companies, like Wexford, a broad Reuters analysis found.

But even against this national backdrop, West Virginia stands out: it led the nation in prison deaths per capita in 2020, and, that same year, the Reuters analysis found that its jails had the highest death rate between 2009 and 2019, among dozens of regions around the country that the news agency surveyed.

And so it is alarming to those critical of this deadly system that the state has passed a new law that could soon curtail what little public funding the state currently allocates for health care in jails and prisons. Advocates worry now about what SB 1009 will mean for incarcerated people seeking gender-affirming care, contraception, disability accommodations, or anything else the state might try to argue is not “necessary.”

“I think this has the potential to be extremely abused. I really do,” Ujevich said. In West Virginia jails and prisons, she added, “They just do not give a shit about your medical care. Not one shit.”

It’s hard to know how, exactly, SB 1009 will change the status quo. The enrolled bill is less than 500 words long and leaves many blanks to be filled. Notably, it does not specify any forms of health care that are being provided today that might be eliminated under this policy and leaves broad authority to the state Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation to set new rules moving forward. 

And while the law does require the division head to consult with a “medical professional” before deciding whether a given instance of medical care is indeed “necessary,” it neither defines “medical professional” nor compels the division to accept professionals’ advice.

Delegate David Kelly, the Republican chair of West Virginia’s House Jails and Prisons Committee, told Bolts the point of the bill is to make carceral health care rules uniform across the state system—that is, he said, whether or not someone receives a certain type of medical care while locked up should not depend on their facility. But he was unable to say whether there is a lack of uniformity in the system today, and could not identify any particular procedures or benefits the state funds today that he believes should not be covered in the future.

With few specifics written into the law and such broad powers granted to prison officials, a dozen different lawyers, lawmakers, advocates, and formerly incarcerated people interviewed for this story told Bolts the best they can hope for is that the policy change won’t much affect West Virginia’s standard of care in jails and prisons. But, “worst-case scenario, it will prevent even more medical care for incarcerated people,” said state Delegate Mike Pushkin, a Democrat who voted against SB 1009.

Pushkin and several others said they believe this law could open West Virginia to lawsuits. Recent successful litigation accused Corrections officials of inadequate medical and mental health care, and a new suit filed this month in federal court alleges 10,000 people in the state’s custody live in inhumane conditions.

“The United States constitution sets the minimum floor as to what the state has to provide to people who are incarcerated, and there’s no statute that the West Virginia legislature could pass that would somehow remove that obligation,” said Lydia Milnes, deputy director at Mountain State Justice, which has sued the state over health care for incarcerated people. If SB 1009 leads West Virginia officials to deny even more basic health care in jails and prisons, Milnes said, “There can and will be more litigation.”

SB 1009 could also be a cost-saving measure for a state jail and prison system dealing with critical staffing issues—Commissioner Marshall said over 1,000 positions are vacant in West Virginia jails and prisons, twice as many as before the COVID-19 pandemic—that advocates say contribute to the state’s deadly carceral conditions. But the special legislative session last month resulted in much more discussion of pay raises for jail and prison staff than of ways to ensure safety and wellbeing for incarcerated people.

“I think they’ve barely chiseled away at the edges,” said Pushkin, one of just 11 Democrats in the 100-member state House. “You need safe places for people who are incarcerated. And we don’t have that here in West Virginia.”

Republican Governor Jim Justice called the special session, which began on the same afternoon he announced it. SB 1009 was one of the 44 bills that Justice included on his call, directing the legislature to take it up.

He requested for the session to begin at 4 p.m. on a Sunday, and some state lawmakers told Bolts they didn’t get a peek at the legislation being proposed until about 3:30 p.m. The process left many people directly concerned with or affected by the slew of legislation no time to assess it, much less to testify on it. 

“The lack of transparency during the special session was completely appalling, and it’s not the way democracy is supposed to work,” Pushkin said.

Kelly, the Republican delegate, pushed back, telling Bolts that SB 1009 had been brainstormed for “several months.” If so, that’s news to many people who work closely on and are directly affected by the issue of health care in jails and prisons in West Virginia.

This policy change concerning “medically necessary” care received only one public hearing before it became law, in a 35-minute discussion of the House Judiciary Committee. The Republicans backing the bill made little effort to identify the need for this change, and Brad Douglas, the executive officer of the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, offered little information when he testified under oath. 

In a private meeting the day the special session began, the Republican legislative leadership said this reform was needed “because of nose jobs and knee replacements” for incarcerated people, Democratic state Delegate Evan Hansen told Bolts. “They did not present any backup data or evidence.”

Among the few substantive public remarks any elected West Virginia Republican has made on this policy, state Delegate Brandon Steele voiced support during the committee hearing for state funds being used on voluntary sterilization of incarcerated people.

“If one of these individuals wanted to get a vasectomy or hysterectomy or something like that, I think that it’s good public policy to allow them to do that,” Steele said, in a remark that went unchallenged at the hearing. (Steele isn’t the first to advocate along these lines: GOP state Senator Randy Smith recently suggested West Virginia should shorten jail and prison sentences for anyone who agrees to be sterilized, so that those people “don’t bring any more drug babies into the system.”)

At one point in the hearing, Democratic Delegate Joey Garcia, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, pressed Douglas to identify any procedure or medical benefit that the state is funding today, but may not fund under SB 1009.

“So, you don’t have any examples?” Garcia asked.

“I do not,” responded Douglas.

Only when asked directly about West Virginia’s extreme rate of jail and prison deaths did Douglas even acknowledge them. “It would be accurate to say we’ve had inmates die in jails, yes,” he said. When asked if that is a “problem,” Douglas said only, “It’s never good if any inmate passes away.” 

SB 1009 passed the legislature the following day. It passed the Senate unanimously, including with support from Democratic members. The House passed it on a margin of 86 to 9, with eight Democrats and one Republican opposing. 

“The guy was playing dumb,” Hansen said of Douglas. “But that happens with a lot of bills in the legislature in West Virginia, now that the Republicans have a supermajority. They work things out in their caucus ahead of time, and it’s very rare for someone from the majority party to slow things down by asking questions.”

For the previously incarcerated people who spoke to Bolts, SB 1009 has reaffirmed their feeling of abandonment by the state and renewed their outrage with what they perceive to be indifference by state officials to the lives and livelihoods of those locked up in West Virginia. 

“It’s horrible, to say the least,” Matthews said. “I think they’re putting a lot of men and women’s lives at risk over the sake of potentially saving some money. Somebody’s life shouldn’t have a dollar amount attached to it.”

Soon after he was released, Matthews was hospitalized with diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition. “My endocrinologist told me I should have been on medication for a long time,” he said. “I asked, ‘What’s a long time?’ and he said at least the last five or 10 years. I said, ‘That’s interesting, because I was incarcerated for most of that time.’”

Matthews said that his own experience underscored for him that whether a particular procedure or treatment is considered elective or necessary can depend on the whims of whomever gets to make the call.

“It would have been very easy for them to get me on medication to control this early, but I guess they didn’t feel that it was ‘medically necessary,’” he said. “A lot of guys’ life expectancy is shortened because of this. I could’ve died in my sleep because they didn’t take my issues seriously.”

The post New Law Could Make It Even Harder to Get Health Care in Deadly West Virginia Lockups appeared first on Bolts.

“(T)here’s a time where we all have to make a little bit of sacrifice. Our president called us to D.C.,” he told local news at the time. “It was inspiring to be there and I hope he calls us back.”

His loyalty to election denialism has not appeared to harm his political career; he was re-elected last fall after a tight Republican primary and a blowout general election, and, earlier this year, he was named chair of the Senate panel tasked with reviewing election policy. 

Azinger is now one of several election deniers leading legislative committees on election law, including in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Arizona. Others have been elected to lead state Republican parties in recent weeks.

This takeover of GOP infrastructure by candidates who spread false conspiracies about the 2020 election has continued even since their high-profile losses in the fall of 2022. But in West Virginia, voting rights advocates say Azinger’s appointment to the chamber’s elections subcommittee has barely registered as scandalous. Bolts found this is neither being covered in local media nor inspiring any particular outcry among fellow lawmakers or the general public.

Senator Mike Caputo, a Democrat on the elections subcommittee and the longest-tenured member of his party’s tiny Senate caucus, told Bolts, “The voters in Senator Azinger’s district elected him. They knew what his actions were. That’s just the way it is around here.”

Azinger’s heightened influence over election policy in his state fits neatly within the status quo in GOP-dominated West Virginia, where voting access is relatively restrictive, turnout is among the worst in the nation, and election deniers abound in the halls of power—and specifically in offices with real influence over election policy. 

Republican Secretary of State Mac Warner, for example, appeared at a pro-“Stop the Steal” rally outside West Virginia’s capitol building in December 2020, and was quoted that day saying “it’s important” to keep Trump, who had already lost, in office. Warner is now running for governor.

Republican West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey signed on to a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn 2020 election results in key swing states won by President Joe Biden, and Warner endorsed the effort.

In January of 2021, both current West Virginia members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans Alex Mooney and Carol Miller, voted to overturn 2020 presidential election results. Miller now faces a challenge from former Delegate Derrick Evans, who was imprisoned for three months in connection with storming the U.S. Capitol and last month announced he is running for Congress.

Eli Baumwell, interim director of the ACLU of West Virginia, is one of those playing defense against the state’s increasingly overwhelming GOP majority. He said it helps obscure Azinger’s appointment to the elections subcommittee that the “fringe” keeps shifting further right in West Virginia on a number of other political fronts, which are taking attention away from elections policy. 

This session has brought a slew of anti-LGBTQ legislation, including House Bill 2007, which seeks to ban gender-affirming health care for West Virginia children. That policy passed the House by a vote of 84-10 and now sits in the Senate, which Republicans control. The House also passed a bill to give state funding to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” which discourage people from learning about or seeking abortion—something already near-totally banned in the state. Another bill, passed by the House this week, expands religious exemptions that critics worry will allow organizations to discriminate.

Amid that backdrop, it’s easy for a Senate subcommittee on election policy to go relatively unnoticed.

“We are continually dealing with more and more extreme politicians,” Baumwell told Bolts. “Mere attendance at January 6 isn’t even enough to understand how extreme some of these people are.” 

Asked by Bolts about the reception to Azinger’s subcommittee chairmanship, Julie Archer, of West Virginia Citizens for Clean Elections, said, “I think people care, but also, when I think about some of the issues that some of our partners and allies are dealing with, … there’s just so much bad stuff, and people only have so much headspace for outrage.”

Azinger declined to be interviewed for this story.

Despite his participation in federal election subversion, plus newfound control of the subcommittee gavel, Azinger this year did not champion much in the way of legislation on elections, the state’s log shows. 

The most controversial bill he has sponsored on this front, Senate Bill 516, would make it easier for dark-money political donors to donate in even higher amounts. The bill passed the Senate earlier this month, and currently sits in the House.

Other Republican lawmakers filed a pile of legislation that worried voting rights advocates, including bills to refer voter fraud cases to the (pro-election subversion) attorney general instead of to local prosecutors; to make state voter ID laws stricter; and to repeal the state’s automatic voter registration programs. 

The package is all but dead—it would take an unexpected suspension of legislative rules by GOP leaders to revive it—with West Virginia’s legislature set to adjourn its session in less than two weeks. That’s in keeping with Republicans’ recent approach on elections policy: one nonpartisan evaluation of West Virginia’s 2022 session found the legislature was “restrained” on that front. 

That Azinger and his party aren’t doing more to restrict the vote may be explained by the fact that Republicans are more likely to pass legislation in this area in states with closely contested general elections. West Virginia is hardly competitive; Trump beat Biden there by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020, and Republicans won nearly 90 percent of legislative seats in November.

Analyzing voting-access legislation around the country, researchers out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Spelman College found last year that, “among Republican-dominated states, the most active legislatures were those in which the 2020 presidential election was close.” They add, “legislative activity to expand or contract the electorate has often been motivated by electoral threat.”

Still, West Virginia generally ranks among the worst states for voting access, according to several nonpartisan groups. It does not provide no-excuse mail voting, ballot drop boxes or same-day registration. While it was an early adopter of automatic voter registration, implementation was repeatedly delayed, which Azinger supported, and voting rights advocates say the existing program is hardly effective.

According to the U.S. Elections Project, West Virginia voter turnout was fourth-lowest among states in 2020. Last November, West Virginia turnout was second-lowest in the country, at under 36 percent.

Azinger, in fact, may be more open to certain measures that might expand the state’s paltry electorate. Kenneth Matthews, a formerly incarcerated West Virginian working to restore voting rights for people released from state prisons on parole or probation, said Azinger at one time indicated he might support that policy, Senate Bill 38. Still, the Senate subcommittee on elections did not hold a vote on the bill, despite holding a hearing, before a legislative deadline.

“He applauded me for the efforts I’ve put in for my re-entry,” Matthews told Bolts, “and he said he’s glad I’m up here advocating and letting my voice be heard.”

Azinger has also not questioned the legitimacy of results within West Virginia. Around the country, election-denying Republicans are often more trusting of election systems, and open to liberalizing them, in their own jurisdictions. In rural Nevada, for example, a county elections chief this month told Bolts she is routinely hounded in her own community about election security—but that those questioning her usually are upset about other counties. And in Cochise County, Arizona—a hotbed of election-denier activity—Votebeat reported this month that the local elections chief “defended his own county’s election but couldn’t defend elections elsewhere in the state.”

Regarding the disconnect between Azinger’s more muted approach to elections in West Virginia and his proudly conspiratorial views on federal elections, Matthews notes that “it’s easier to see the weeds in your neighbor’s yard than your own, sometimes.”

The post West Virginia Adds to Election Deniers’ Ongoing Takeover of State Politics  appeared first on Bolts.

Felix would lie by omission on applications, declining to mention to employers she’d been previously convicted and jailed over a drug-related felony she says stemmed from a toxic romantic relationship. It was worth lying, she says now, because by the time her managers would find out, “at least I’d have had one paycheck.”

She worked hard to improve her station; as she struggled to find housing and income, she put herself through college, then law school. Two years ago, she ran for and won a seat in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, knocking off an incumbent who defended status-quo policing and sentencing laws, in a Democratic primary.

When the Rhode Island legislature convenes its next session on January 4, Felix will no longer be the only lawmaker in Providence who has experienced the criminal legal system from the inside. Cherie Cruz, who like Felix is from Pawtucket, and was also dogged for years by a conviction for a drug felony, won a House seat alongside Felix this fall. Prior to her election, Cruz co-founded the Formerly Incarcerated Union of Rhode Island to support people seeking to move beyond their criminal records.

Cruz and Felix, who have teamed up and supported each other’s campaigns, talked with Bolts in a joint interview shortly after their wins last month. They spoke about what drove them to seek public office, and why people who have navigated the criminal legal system should be seen and heard in policymaking spaces.

Both are bullish on providing more and better opportunities for people mired in the post-conviction slog. That fight is personal: Cruz and Felix say they each only attained stability once their records were sealed and expunged. But those were hardfought processes, and they now want to make things easier on those who come next. 

Cruz and Felix say they will work together at the statehouse to help people rebuild their lives from prior criminal-legal run-ins—starting next session with a plan to introduce a “clean slate” bill that would automatically seal many people’s criminal records, emulating reforms that other states have adopted since 2018. They also plan to build on Felix’s work last year making sure that legalized cannabis legislation included automatic record expungement.

When people who’ve been incarcerated enter office, “it makes a world of difference,” says Felix, who has also elevated efforts against solitary confinement and cash bail. She stresses the value of “educating colleagues” about the struggles people face when detained and upon re-entry. “It really does change the dynamics in those rooms.”  

Besides promoting climate legislation and gun safety, both also advocate for enabling people to vote from prison, and for better informing people on probation or parole, who, they find, often don’t realize they can vote. Cruz won her primary by only three-dozen votes—which reminded her of the power any one voter can wield. 

What will it mean to have a team of two at the statehouse, where previously there was only one of you?

Leonela Felix: The excitement that I feel is something I can’t put into words. It’s so goddamn exciting. It’s just going to be a powerhouse. We keep joking that they’re not going to sit us together because they know we’re going to start good trouble. It’s going to be so important, in terms of educating colleagues, in terms of tag-teaming. There are days with massive amounts of bills, where I can’t be in all places at once. So, we can organize within the legislature. I’m really excited to be able to see what ways we can maximize the resources that we have, and improve them, to better the lives of folks who have been impacted by the carceral system.

Why did you run for office?

Felix: I never wanted to run for office or be elected, because of my background, my criminal history. It wasn’t something I widely shared with people, or ever really owned, until I decided to run. I had done a lot of organizing and advocacy up at the statehouse, and what I’d noticed was that folks representing us really didn’t look like me. They never looked me in the eye or took me seriously. It was my first introduction into politics and to see the way us as regular folks were being treated really stuck with me. I just got mad enough and decided, let’s do it, let’s run for office. The Working Families Party really helped me connect with all the resources I needed to make it to where I am today.

Cherie Cruz: I grew up in the community where I ran for office, several generations there. Both my parents, growing up, didn’t have the right to vote because they were both formerly incarcerated. I also didn’t have the right to vote for many years of my life, because I had felony convictions, and it wasn’t restored until we passed the Right to Vote Act in 2006, which I was on the ground in advocating for. [Editor’s note: The reform enabled people to vote upon release; until then, people on probation or parole could not vote.] So, I’d never thought about politics, similar to Rep. Felix, because of my background. There were barriers for us. We were pushed out of that. 

I was at the courthouse one day and a mutual friend of Rep. Felix came up to me and said, ‘Hey, there’s someone running from Pawtucket and she’s got a similar background, and I think you need to reach out to her.’ I just called the [Felix] campaign and said I wanted to help. I started knocking doors and thinking that if she could win and get in, it really could pave the way for the rest of us. 

Continuing my advocacy at the statehouse, I was seeing a lot of things in the community not being addressed. We needed somebody who was going to truly be representative of this community—a background in the criminal-legal system, who grew up in poverty, who doesn’t have political ties, and who would really fight. To me, that was the calling.

How does it affect policy debates in the statehouse to have people there who can ground their ideas about sentencing reform or second chances in their lived experience?

Felix: It makes a world of difference. It really does change the dynamics in those rooms. A lot of folks just don’t have that experience and, quite frankly, many of them tend to say that if you got into legal issues, you deserved it. That you’re not deserving of our empathy or of us changing laws to benefit you or others in your position. We tend to blame the individual versus looking at the macro level, at the system that does impact particularly poor people and people of color.

Say, with record expungement—in the minds of many of my colleagues, it’s like it’s easy to get an expungement, where you can just walk in and just petition. So I’ve been giving them the raw experience. Like, have you ever had to get your record expunged? The answer for all of them was no. They don’t know that you have to do this extra step and this other extra step, and it’s still not complete. It was really important to make them see something more than the abstract. It was very powerful for me to be able to communicate to them in that way and to educate them in the realities of everyday life for someone who is formerly incarcerated.

Cruz: I think about when I used to testify at the statehouse, and no one would look at me. I mentioned in my testimony how I had my drug felony and another charge for over 25 years, with children—single mom, on welfare, in and out of homelessness, no employment—and the thing that lifted everyone’s head up was that I had two degrees from Brown University, one with honors. My advocacy, my community work, my policy work was pushed aside until I mentioned the degrees, and then they looked up for a minute.

The lived experience of people who’ve been involved with the criminal legal system—you can’t learn it in a book. You have to go through it to truly understand it. It’s a benefit to any legislature, or any agency, to have people with that type of education. The culture is starting to change a bit, where it’s seen as credibility. 

Whether through prison gerrymandering, or the fact that people cannot vote from prison, incarceration strips people of investment in their communities in Rhode Island. How could those in jail and prison be made to have more of a stake?

Felix: We talk about how voting is your voice. It’s the way that you literally can make change for the better for your community—we want folks to feel more connected to their communities and feel integrated. When we alienate people from these processes, what we’ve created is someone who’s isolated. By allowing them to cast ballots and use their voice for change, what we’re saying is, you are a part of this community.

Representative Felix, you’re a lawmaker now, but does the fact that you were incarcerated still impede you? 

Felix: I was barred from education after I got out. I couldn’t go to school. Housing, forget about it. Employment, forget about it. I had to live on couches or with friends. It impacted every area of my life. I am privileged and I recognize that for many folks it’s a lifelong struggle, a blacklist. Now, luckily, it doesn’t affect me. But it definitely did. That’s the reason I fought to get to where I am, because no one should go through that. How do you start your life over when they continue to shackle you in so many ways?

Lawmakers in Rhode Island make $17,000, and I wonder to what extent that’s a barrier to more people with your backgrounds running for office. What percentage of people coming out of jail and prison could even consider vying for a job that pays a poverty wage?

Felix: It’s not a place for working families, not a place we’re supposed to be a part of. It’s by design. It didn’t happen magically that we are in office; it takes so much effort and infrastructure. We’re really trying to figure out how we can make it work for everyday people. It just takes a little bit more planning, but it’s doable.

Cruz: I’m glad I’m hearing this. My employment now puts me with the most money I’ve ever had in my life, which is still lower-working class, where I can barely pay rent. I’m glad to hear Leo say it’s doable, because it may be I’m unemployed or let go if I can’t go down in hours to do this.

If we’re talking about someone who still has felonies on their record, I’m not sure how, if they still have those housing and employment barriers, they could do this. For me, if the legislature just gave enough to pay rent, it’d be fine. But it’s not enough.

How do your lenses affect your approaches to legislation that may have little, on paper, to do with a jail or a prison or a court system—climate justice issues in areas with poor air, or affordable housing?

Cruz: A family is an ecosystem and a community is an ecosystem. Growing up in poverty, my youngest son was lead-poisoned. What are we doing when children are getting poisoned? These are the kids who are going to start struggling in schools. These are the kids who aren’t going to have opportunities. These are the kids who are going to end up in cages. You have to worry about surviving versus thriving. I think environmental justice, housing justice are directly impacting whether people survive or thrive.

Felix: Having green spaces for adults and kids is better for your mental health, it’s better for your breathing. Slowly but surely, we’re taking away a lot of green spaces, things that benefit communities, and for what? To build luxury housing, or another parking lot?

What advice do you have for anyone who might see themselves in your stories and consider seeking elected office?

Felix: It’s critical that we have folks that are directly impacted by these inequalities we seek to change, and without their presence in the rooms that are deciding on them and their families and future generations, those voices aren’t going to be heard. Despite all the challenges we talk about, don’t let it be a barrier to wanting to be a public servant. And there are so many other ways you can help, in terms of volunteering, knocking doors, making calls. Don’t let your mistakes be an obstacle to that.

Cruz: I want to empower more people to be leaders, in whatever space. It could be in your home, your community, with the school community, with the school board, at the state legislature. It could be anywhere. 

I always joke that I’ve started my succession planning, because this was about giving people hope that you can do it, too. Who’s next? How can we tag-team someone else in, and help mentor them? I didn’t see this in myself at first, and sometimes you need others to point out that you’re incredible and that what you’re saying needs to be heard.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Rhode Island Pair, Once Dogged by Criminal Legal System, Elected to Statehouse appeared first on Bolts.

Republicans were confident that they would build up power in statehouses and inflict a “bloodbath” on Democrats. Instead, they failed to win any new legislative chamber, their seat gains are minuscule by recent standards, and their strongest showings are concentrated in places they already dominate.

Democrats, meanwhile, flipped four legislative chambers and allied with centrist Republicans to wrestle a fifth chamber away from the GOP.

The results have deflated conservative ambitions to channel backlash against the sitting president to leap ahead in states, like they did in 2010 and 2014. Two years into President Barack Obama’s term, in 2010, the GOP gained more than 600 legislative seats and unleashed a torrent of right-wing laws that undercut unions and restricted voting rights. In 2014, they gained roughly 250 seats, according to data compiled by Ballotpedia. Democrats returned the favor in 2018 by gaining more than 300 legislative seats, powered by President Donald Trump’s widespread unpopularity. 

No such wave occurred in 2022. Republicans gained only 20 legislative seats this fall out of more than 6,000 that were on the ballot, according to Bolts’s review of the results. (Editor’s note: The analysis was updated in January with final results in a dozen races that were pending recounts as of publication. One election in New Hampshire ended in an exact tie after a recount.) 

And it gets worse for Republicans. While they managed to net a few seats overall, their biggest gains came in chambers that they already massively control, such as the West Virginia or South Carolina houses, or else in New York, where they are deeply in the minority. 

By contrast, Democrats soared in closely-divided legislatures and seized four previously GOP-held chambers: Michigan’s House and Senate, Minnesota’s Senate, and Pennsylvania’s House. In addition, the GOP seems to have lost control of Alaska’s Senate; a group made up of centrist Republicans and Democratic senators announced on Friday that they would form a coalition to run the chamber. We may not know until 2023 if a similar coalition emerges in the Alaska House, or if the GOP can coalesce to win control of that chamber.

This table details the partisan make-up of each state chamber, plus the D.C. council, before and after the Nov. 8 elections.
 

I attributed vacant seats to the party that held them most recently. For the purpose of quantifying a swing and being consistent, I counted lawmakers who left their party since the last election but did not join or caucus with the other party as belonging to their original party. (This applied to one lawmaker in each of Arkansas, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Tennessee.) I counted lawmakers who outright switched parties, or who left their original party to caucus or ally with the other party, as belonging to their new party. In addition, I counted the Alaska and Washington lawmakers who remain in one party but caucus with another as belonging to the party they were elected with and have chosen to keep affiliating with.

Below are five takeaways from what transpired in state legislatures.

1. Democrats land new trifectas

Democrats may have lost a small number of seats this cycle—overall, they will have about a dozen fewer seats than before, if current results hold—but they hit the jackpot due to how their gains and losses were spread out.

In flipping the Michigan legislature and the Minnesota Senate, Democrats took full control of these states’ governments. This is a historic achievement for Michigan Democrats, who have not enjoyed a trifecta—one-party control of both legislative chambers and the governorship—in nearly 40 years.

Democrats also gained two trifectas in Maryland and Massachusetts, where they already controlled the legislature, when Democrats Wes Moore and Maura Healey won gubernatorial elections to replace outgoing GOP governors.

Democrats lost their trifecta in Nevada when Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak lost, even as they strengthened their legislative majorities there. Of course, they also lost their trifecta in the federal government. In addition, Democrats gained new supermajorities in the Vermont legislature, which will give them the ability to override vetoes by Republican Governor Phil Scott. 

Republicans, by contrast, gained no new trifecta. They also failed to gain new veto-proof legislatures in states where Democratic governors wield the veto pen. And they lost control of Arizona’s state government for the first time since 2009: Democrat Katie Hobbs will replace the outgoing Republican governor even as the GOP keeps bare legislative majorities.

In all, an additional 26 million Americans will live in states run by Democratic trifectas as a result of the 2022 midterms. Seven million fewer Americans will live in states run by GOP trifectas.

2. Legislative shifts bring big policy ramifications

Michigan and Minnesota may be the two most intriguing states heading into the 2023 legislative sessions given their new Democratic majorities. In 2018 and 2019, Colorado and Virginia Democrats similarly gained control of a legislature after long being locked out of power, and they rapidly adopted a flurry of progressive priorities such as abolishing the death penalty.

Democrats in Michigan and Minnesota have already signaled a desire to strengthen labor and environmental laws. The shifts will also have major repercussions for criminal justice policy and voting rights. Minnesota Democrats are pushing for legislation legalizing marijuana, while Michigan Democrats will now have authority to oversee the implementation of new voting protections that the electorate approved in November.

Pennsylvania Democrats won’t control the entire state government since the GOP retains the state Senate, but their new majority in the House has huge implications: It immediately kills a package of constitutional amendments that would have restricted abortion rights, among other drastic changes. Republicans in the legislature were looking to get around the governor’s veto power, but this required them to pass amendments they adopted this year in next year’s session again. “We stopped these constitutional amendments in their tracks,” a Pennsylvania Democrat told CBS.

In the 35 states where one of the parties defended their existing trifecta—including California, Illinois, and New York for Democrats, and Georgia, Florida, and Texas for Republicans—upcoming legislative sessions will see the heaviest activity, with measures strengthening or restricting access to abortion likely to be at the frontlines. 

Among many issues, Bolts will track the fate of abortion rights in GOP-run states—Florida Republicans have already signaled they will champion new restrictions—and keep an eye on whether New Mexico and Oregon Democrats return to landmark voting rights bills that stalled this year. In Rhode Island, a pair of lawmakers who have experienced the criminal legal system from the inside are now looking to bring more awareness to the burdens of re-entry for formerly incarcerated residents.

3. Republicans solidify power in red states

Eight years ago, Democrats still controlled both chambers of the West Virginia legislature. Now they can barely win elections in the state.

Republicans gained 17 legislative seats in West Virginia alone—by far their biggest jump anywhere—which accounts for much of their nationwide progress and gives them gigantic majorities of 30-4 and 88-12 in the state Senate and House.

Republicans similarly strengthened their dominance in Kentucky, another state where Democrats ran the legislature a decade ago but where the GOP will now enjoy majorities nearly as large as in West Virginia. The GOP also gained at least five seats in each of Arkansas, South Carolina, and Wyoming.

Republicans’ most dramatic gains came in Florida, where a combination of a strong GOP performance, dismal Democratic turnout, heavy conservative spending, voter intimidation, and newly-drawn gerrymanders gave the party supermajorities in both chambers. Still, Republicans already dominated state politics, though their new margins will further enable them to sideline Democrats and circumvent legislative rules, The Miami Herald reports.

Republicans also gained a supermajority in the heavily-gerrymandered Wisconsin Senate; they have already signaled they may use that margin to remove Democratic officials from office. But they failed to win a supermajority in the lower chamber, which will keep them from overriding Democratic Governor Tony Evers’s vetoes, and an early vacancy in a somewhat competitive Senate district gives Democrats a shot to erase the supermajority.

The GOP also fell just short of its goal to secure a supermajority in Nebraska’s ostensibly nonpartisan unicameral legislature, which will enable Democrats to continue blocking bills like tax cuts through the chamber’s generous filibuster rules; but pro-choice advocates are already warning that one Democratic senator’s opposition to abortion may allow Republicans to push through an abortion ban.

4. And Democrats solidify power in blue states

Mirroring Democrats’ growing struggles in the South, Republicans keep sinking further in Colorado. The state’s upper-chamber was under GOP control as recently as four years ago, but Democrats expanded their majority this fall to a large 23-12 edge; in the state House, they gained a new supermajority.

Other blue states also doubled down. Democrats gained seats and solidified supermajorities in Massachusetts, Maryland, and likely California, and gained new veto-proof majorities in Vermont. New York Democrats also appear to have retained the supermajorities they painstakingly gained in the 2020 cycle, despite losing ground. The exception is Oregon, where a three-seat loss means that Democrats will no longer enjoy the three-fifth majorities that are needed to pass tax bills.

What made a difference in the parties’ fortunes is that Democrats’ largest gains came in swing states: They will have 13 more seats in Pennsylvania and at least 10 more in New Hampshire; those are the only two states other than West Virginia that saw double-digit seat swings. (The GOP will have a bare majority in the New Hampshire House.) And while the shifts in Michigan and Minnesota were comparatively very small, Democrats got exactly what they needed: they flipped three chambers with no seats to spare.

5. Independent maps and gerrymanders made a difference

Throughout the 2010s, Michigan voted under maps gerrymandered by the GOP. This enabled Republicans to retain the legislature even when Democratic candidates won more votes. In 2018, voters approved a measure to impose an independent redistricting process, and 2022 was the first cycle held under maps freed of the Republican gerrymander. 

The outcome: Democrats once again won the popular vote; and this time, that secured them actual majorities. 

Other states used maps that were drawn by courts or independent redistricting panels, including Arizona, California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. But many other legislative battles were waged under heavily gerrymandered maps. That includes Illinois and Maryland on the Democratic side, and large red states—Florida, Tennessee, Texas—for the GOP. 

Georgia and Wisconsin stick out as rare states that are very competitive in federal elections but where a party—Republicans in each case—has effectively locked down legislative majorities through its control of the mapping process. In Wisconsin, Republicans will control 86 seats going forward, to Democrats’ 46, despite the state being evenly divided.

In red states, one effect of GOP gerrymanders was a large decline in the number of so-called majority-minority districts, seats where people of color make up a majority. An analysis by Pluribus News shows that the drop is most pronounced in Florida and Texas, where Republicans drew new maps.

State advocates were already denouncing this when the maps were drawn last year. “How do we face the challenges in the places of Texas we all call home if our voting power is taken from us?” Valerie Street, president of Our Vote Texas, told The Texas Tribune in 2021.

An earlier version of the article contained an incorrect spelling of the name of Massachusetts Governor-Elect Maura Healey.

The post In Legislative Elections, Democrats Defied Recent History appeared first on Bolts.