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.

The ruling is certain to deter voting rights litigation within the Eighth Circuit, and advocates worry that the U.S. Supreme Court could take the rule nationwide. Since the 1980s, outside organizations have pursued the vast majority of VRA cases since the DOJ doesn’t have the resources, and in many cases the political will, to pursue many lawsuits on its own.

But lawmakers in Minnesota looked for a remedy this year, and Minnesota has now become the first state within the Eighth Circuit to enshrine a private right of action into state law. Governor Tim Walz in May signed the Minnesota Voting Rights Act, which spells out protections for voters and allows private citizens and outside organizations to bring lawsuits in state courts.

For David McKinney, an attorney at the ACLU of Minnesota who supported the law, the reform “honors a tradition and sets a value under Minnesota law that individuals, when their rights are violated, they’re the ones that are best positioned to assert it.”

“They are the folks who, under the theory of their case, can’t vote, right? They’ve been unlawfully discriminated against, and so they’re in the best position to assert their rights,” McKinney continued.

The Minnesota Voting Rights Act was adopted as part of a package that contains other voter protections, like an end to prison gerrymandering. Voting rights advocates told Bolts that the Eighth Circuit’s ruling supercharged their push, and ensured that enshrining a private right of action would be part of the bill. Several other states have passed similar laws in recent years to shield voters from voting rights’ federal erosion.

“It was the Eighth Circuit decision that added the urgency by taking away the ability of Minnesotans who have been discriminated against to go to court and enforce their rights under federal law,” explains Emma Greenman, a state Representative who co-authored the bill, along with Minnesota Senate President Bobby Joe Champion. Greenman pointed to the fact that two thirds of Voting Rights Act cases are brought by private plaintiffs or organizations. “The U.S. Attorney General is a piece, but not a big piece, of the way that the federal rights are enforced.”

Often, individuals or groups that are being discriminated against are represented in court by organizations such as chapters of the ACLU or NAACP. “Litigation is expensive, and so you do require a fair amount of resources to successfully bring a case. And I think a lot of these organizations do have resources that individual citizens might not have,” said Justin Erickson, general counsel in  the Minnesota secretary of state’s office. “A lot of these organizations are doing this work throughout the country, so they have a really good grasp of the trends that are out there, the different work that’s being done, the best practices that different agencies have undertaken in order to protect voting rights.”

The Eighth Circuit, in a ruling authored by Judge David Stras, a former Minnesota justice who was nominated to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in 2017, has threatened to halt a lot of that work. 

Before the decision came down, the Minnesota bill’s crafters had been weighing whether to include language codifying a private right of action. While the federal VRA doesn’t include a provision saying explicitly that private citizens can sue for violating the law, Americans have for decades sued under Section 2 of the VRA; in 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this right for private individuals and organizations alike. Greenman says there are also many aspects of federal voting rights law that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the VRA but have been affirmed by courts, which can make legal proceedings complicated.

But given the current conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, Greenman and her allies wanted to be more proactive in protecting rights. “What was a simple and very eloquent bill has been made more and more complicated, especially since we’ve had a Supreme Court that has really been hostile to its protections,” said Greenman. 

They looked to these federal court precedents, as well as to VRAs that were popping up in other states, championed by well-known national organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Brennan Center for Justice. Greenman described the thought process as, “How do we provide strong protections in light of what’s happening to the federal Voting Rights Act?” 

Lilly Sasse worked on Greenman’s state House campaign, and now works for We Choose Us, a coalition of groups that support stronger voting rights protections in Minnesota. Sasse said that the coalition began in 2021, but the campaign became much stronger after the Eighth Circuit decision. “In order for people to have those protections from voter suppression, vote dilution, their day in court, we needed to have something in Minnesota that explicitly stated that.”

Eight other states have adopted their own Voting Rights Acts—California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington. Greenman said she and her colleagues looked to these existing laws and to other states still considering their own state-level VRAs, including Michigan and Maryland, as they drafted their own bill. “It’s always impossible to use a specific model, because all states are so different,” she said.

In part, these laws are a way for a state to go beyond the floor of federal voting protections, and enshrine more specific rights relevant to its particular communities. New York’s VRA, for example, guarantees ballot access in languages other than English.

But they’re also a reaction to worries that courts could further erode federal voter protections. “In recent years, federal courts have been spending some time stripping the VRA of critical components and creating a body of case law that can make it extremely difficult for plaintiffs to win their cases,” said Lata Nott, of the Campaign Legal Center. 

Last year’s Eighth Circuit decision came out of a dispute over a redistricting plan in Arkansas. Liberal groups in that state, including local branches of the ACLU and NAACP, announced in July that they won’t appeal the circuit court’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and will instead seek redress under other laws, even though they believe it was wrongly decided. An adverse ruling by the Supreme Court could end a private right of action nationwide. But in the meantime, the right to sue in federal courts has virtually ended across the Eighth Circuit, which besides Minnesota covers Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. 

“With the Eighth Circuit now having significantly curtailed private causes of action under the Voting Rights Act, and who knows what the Supreme Court’s gonna do on this one, what at least happens in Minnesota now is that voting rights are protected under state law, and individuals now have this ability to enforce their own voting rights,” said David Schultz, a professor of political science and law at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Another key protection of the federal VRA gutted by federal courts is Section 5, known as the preclearance requirement. Under it, jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination had to get federal approval before making changes to voting rules. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling struck down Section 5 in 2013, giving the issue greater significance at the state level. 

New York and Connecticut have both added preclearance provisions into their state VRAs, requiring that jurisdictions with a history of discrimination get approval, either from state officials or courts, for proposed voting changes before they can be implemented. Nott said her organization has pushed for preclearance requirements in state VRAs, but this didn’t make it into the Minnesota law. 

“We’re hoping, actually, that next session, that’s something that we can try to push forward,” she said. “With the Eighth Circuit decision, there was some emphasis on being able to pass a bill that could protect the rights of Minnesotans to assert their own rights in court.”

Experts also point to Minnesota’s particular racial disparities in voter turnout as a reason why the state law is necessary. Today, slightly more than a fifth of Minnesotans are people of color, roughly double the population of 30 years ago, according to Schultz. “Minnesota remains a state with enormous racial disparities in criminal justice, education housing, et cetera, but one of the other major racial disparities in the state of Minnesota,” Schultz said, “is voter registration and turnout.”

“A lot of people say the state of Minnesota is usually the north star when it comes to voter turnout. But I also think that we need to stop and ask, for who? For who is the state of Minnesota the number one in voter turnout?” said Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of Common Cause. Belladonna-Carrera and her organization helped campaign for the Minnesota VRA. “Most of the categories where the state of Minnesota does outshine the rest is in the disparities,” said Belladonna-Carrera. 

In part because of how recently the law was enacted, no lawsuits have yet been filed under the Minnesota Voting Rights Act. Belladonna-Carrera said that Common Cause Minnesota is “entertaining a couple of potential cases” but nothing is definite yet. Nott, of the Campaign Legal Center, said that even in the other states with their own VRAs, there’s “not a huge number” of cases yet. “People fear that passing one of these will lead to a torrent of litigation. That’s not the case,” she said.

“These cases are not easy,” acknowledges Greenman. “They have a very high burden of what you have to prove.” But that’s why she believes it’s important for voters to know it’s a right they may exercise. 

“Without a private right of action,” she continued, “what it would mean is you would have to wait for the discretion of a government official to decide whether to bring that case or not, and it would just depend on the resources that the attorney general had.”

Correction: This article has been updated to include a mention of New Mexico’s Voting Rights Act.

The post Minnesota’s Voting Rights Act Preserves This Key Protection A Federal Court Has Erased appeared first on Bolts.

The proposed reform would have ended what is known as prison gerrymandering, which distorts census counts by inflating population totals where prisons are located—typically rural, politically conservative areas—and lowering them in the places prisoners come from, disproportionately communities of color in urban centers. But Minnesota lawmakers rejected the change in 2010, which, as ever, gave extra political clout to prison communities. After that year’s redistricting cycle, the Prison Policy Initiative found that at least five county and municipal districts in the state had their populations inflated by at least 16 percent, by counting state prisoners, who cannot vote, as local residents.

Minnesota lawmakers again considered fixing this ahead of the 2020 redistricting cycle, and again failed to approve two different legislative proposals, leaving the skewed counts intact on its current political maps. By that cycle, prison gerrymandering bans had become more common, with more than a dozen states adopting reforms in time to affect maps redrawn after the 2020 census. (In addition to states that ended prison gerrymandering in time for the 2020 cycle, Maine and Illinois have also passed bans that will apply for the first time during the 2030 cycle.)

After 14 years of deliberation, Minnesota finally got on board last week: Democratic Governor Tim Walz signed into law a ban on prison gerrymandering in the state. The reform is part of an omnibus elections finance and policy bill that contains other provisions meant to protect voting rights and expand ballot access in general.

Unlike in the immediate leadup to the 2010 and 2020 censuses, when no party enjoyed full control of the state government in Minnesota, Democrats now have a legislative trifecta in the state thanks to their gains in the 2022 midterms, which they’ve already used to reverse the political exclusion of some Minnesotans with criminal convictions. They needed every bit of that power to get this new reform passed: The omnibus bill cleared the state Senate on a party-line 34-33 vote, and passed the state House by a vote of 69-62, with every Democratic member, plus one Republican, in support.  

“We wanted to pass it now, just to make sure that we could be ready for 2030,” Democratic state Representative Esther Agbaje, who championed the prison gerrymandering ban, told Bolts. “This gives time for our secretary of state office and for our counties to get ready to do that count.”

The secretary of state and top Minnesota elections official, Democrat Steve Simon, was appreciative that lawmakers gave the state a long runway to implement the change: “I really am glad this is under consideration now, in a year ending in four,” he told a state legislative committee in March. “When you start talking about redistricting issues in years that end in eight, nine, or zero, it tends to get more political.” 

In terms of raw numbers, the impact of this reform can appear marginal: Minnesota has a population of almost 6 million people, of which some 8,000, or 0.1 percent, are incarcerated in state prisons. Minnesota’s move will apply to local, state, and congressional redistricting, and, in that latter category, the shift in political power will be especially small; U.S. House districts each represent close to a million people.

At the state level, however, the change is easier to spot. The Prison Policy Initiative, which publishes research on and advocates against prison gerrymandering, reports that three different Minnesota state legislative districts count prisoners for at least 4 percent of their populations.

The distortion of prison gerrymandering can be particularly stark at the local level. PPI reported that in 2013, one district in Waseca, a small Minnesota town with a state prison, counted prisoners for 35 percent of its population. 

PPI spokesperson Mike Wessler told Bolts that elsewhere in the country, incarcerated people who cannot vote comprise up to 13 percent of the population in state legislative districts. In some local jurisdictions with prisons, he said, incarcerated people count for up to 80 percent of the population.

Skewing census counts in this way, Wessler argued, “creates a pretty twisted incentive for the people who represent prisons in the legislature to keep those prisons and prison communities full, and maybe even make them fuller. The fuller they are, the louder voice those communities have in government.”

In states with prison gerrymandering, this boosting of political power in prison communities dilutes representation in many of the places where higher portions of the population are incarcerated. Data show people rarely are incarcerated in their home communities, and that holds true for many Minnesotans: The Twin Cities metro is home to some 60 percent of Minnesotans, but several of the largest state prisons are located in small towns far from that area. 

The geographic skew most acutely affects Black Minnesotans, who comprise about 7 percent of the state population and 35 percent of its prison population. The vast majority of Minnesota’s Black population calls the Twin Cities area home.

“These prisons are often built way out in the rural communities, and the very communities where harm may have happened are harmed yet again,” Elizer Darris, an advocate for criminal justice reform, who previously served time in multiple Minnesota prisons, told Bolts. “You leave the pain here, but you put the dollars there. It’s very undemocratic and predatory.”

Darris was closely involved in a 2023 Democrat-led reform in Minnesota to restore voting rights to about 50,000 people serving terms of parole or probation. But imprisoned Minnesotans still cannot vote, and that reality, along with prison gerrymandering, has left politicians who represent prison communities with little reason to view incarcerated people as constituents, Darris says.

“It kind of has hallmarks back to the three-fifths Compromise,” he added. “Despite the fact that we weren’t able to vote, our bodies were being counted.”

He recalled his time incarcerated at the Stillwater prison on the outskirts of the Twin Cities area. It was punishingly hot inside that prison, he said, and so he reached out to local officials about the problem.

“The walls were sweating,” Darris said, “The representatives never represented us. There were plenty of times I wrote to the local state rep or the mayor, and absolutely none of them ever intervened. They did not see themselves as representing us despite the fact that the prison was inside their community, and the issues we were complaining about were in their community.”

Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, director of the Minnesota branch of the national advocacy organization Common Cause, told Bolts that previous efforts to end prison gerrymandering failed because politicians from both major parties were glad to keep counting prisoners in their districts, even if those politicians made little effort to represent prisoner interests.

“Power doesn’t like to give up power easily,” she said, reflecting on why this reform struggled for so long in Minnesota. “The resistance came from people who asked why we’d need to reform something that works. My question is: Who does it work for? It may work for the political parties, but not for constituents.” 

This argument is evidently an easier sell in states where Democrats hold power. Save for Montana, no red state has yet adopted a reform similar to Minnesota’s, which leaves prison gerrymandering intact in most of the country. 

Wessler told Bolts that the U.S. Census Bureau could end these state-level debates by changing its policy of counting people in prison as residents of the facilities in which they are held. The agency has so far declined to do that, though it has blessed the efforts of individual states that want to undo prison gerrymandering, and has even published data to help facilitate those changes. 

Absent federal action, the project of dismantling prison gerrymandering remains incremental.

Agbaje, the Minnesota lawmaker who sponsored this year’s reform, said she hopes the change her state has made will encourage government officials to rethink how they view people held in custody. 

“You shouldn’t be counted where you lay your head, as a prisoner. You’re there involuntarily,” she said. “I think this really with our efforts to make sure that people look at prisoners, and the formerly incarcerated, as whole people.”

The post Minnesota Just Became The Latest State to Eliminate Prison Gerrymandering appeared first on Bolts.

For more than 25 years, Mike Rose felt alone. After his son Jeremy was arrested at age 17 in 1994, sentenced to life in prison, Mike and his wife had no community with which to share the pain of losing a son to prison. “In the battle to help your loved ones, it feels like you’re by yourself, fighting this battle on your own,” he says. Jeremy was shipped to an out-of-state prison, as New Mexico does with many kids serving long sentences, deepening his parents’ isolation. 

Then, about four years ago, Mike says his world opened up after he stumbled upon a coalition that had assembled in New Mexico to fight extreme sentences imposed on children. 

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” he told Bolts. “I was able to join them and it’s like, I’m not by myself anymore. We’ve got resources, we’ve got people who are in the same situation, we can pull our knowledge and our strengths and start working on the passage of legislation. It was a godsend.” 

The coalition has for years pushed legislation to give every ‘juvenile lifer’ a meaningful chance at release, which faltered in repeated legislative sessions until they finally succeeded this spring: In March, lawmakers adopted Senate Bill 64, a law abolishing sentences of life without parole for children. 

The law also addresses other extreme sentences by making anyone convicted of a crime they committed under the age of 18 eligible for parole hearings—usually after 15 years in prison, though in some cases after 20 or 25 years behind bars. 

“In a moment of pretty extreme political polarization around crime and public safety, our community was able to pass one of the more progressive juvenile parole laws in the country, and we did it with bipartisan support,” said Denali Wilson, an attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who co-founded this coalition, though she also stresses that 15 years remains too long a time. “For people that went to prison when they were 15-16 years old, we’re talking about a lifetime to wait for just an opportunity—just an opportunity to come home.”

The law does not guarantee release for anyone. It only provides review by a parole board, a shot to showcase one’s rehabilitation inside and ask for a second chance that the governor-appointed board can still deny. Many people newly eligible for review will still likely remain in prison for decades. 

Still, Mike Rose calls himself “eternally optimistic” and says the law’s passage opens the door to having his son home by the end of the year. Jeremy, who was convicted of murder alongside two other minors for the stabbing deaths of two elderly people three decades ago, received a sentence that made him eligible for parole after 30 years in prison, and likely would have had a parole hearing next near even without the new law. But Mike, whose wife died of cancer two years ago without seeing her son have a hearing, is keenly aware of what shaving even just a few years off his sentence could have meant—and now he’s eager to help others besides his son get a second look. 

“He left a boy of 17 and hopefully I get the opportunity to have him here shortly as a man of 47,” Mike said of his son. “There’s a huge push across the country to recognize the fact that we as a society cannot sentence our juveniles to a life behind bars… You’re not doing things to solve the crime problem, what you’re doing is throwing the next generation away.”

So far in 2023, two other states besides New Mexico have adopted similar reforms, making people convicted as children eligible for release after some lengthy term of incarceration: Illinois with House Bill 1064 in February, and Minnesota, which included the reforms in a large public safety package, in May. 

They are just the latest states to adopt such laws over the last decade, ever since the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions in the late 2000s and early 2010s affirming that minors deserve “meaningful opportunities to obtain release.” The laws passed in New Mexico, Illinois and Minnesota mean there will now be 28 states that no longer sentence kids to life without parole.

“Every state that ends the practice of condemning children to die in prison creates pressure for the next state to do so,” said Preston Shipp, a policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, a national organization that is helping spread those reforms.

Shipp traveled to Santa Fe and St. Paul this year to lobby lawmakers and share information about the many similar reforms that have already been implemented elsewhere, pointing to the low recidivism rate for people who have been released on parole in other states. He also tries to talk to lawmakers about research in neuroscience and psychology showing developmental differences between adults and youth.

“We know from the science of adolescent brain development that [kids] don’t appreciate all the consequences of their conduct; peer pressure hits differently,” Shipp said. ”In a flash point, this person does something that’s tragic, and it changes people’s lives, but it doesn’t mean that they cannot experience rehabilitation. It doesn’t mean that they’re beyond the hope of redemption.”

More states could soon make reforms. Shipp has traveled to Lansing three times this year to help bills that would end juvenile life without parole in Michigan. Connecticut already adopted similar reforms in 2015 for kids under age 18, but in June lawmakers passed a bill that extends parole eligibility to people with long sentences who were convicted before age 21. (The new Illinois law also applies to people up to age 21.) That measure now goes to Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat who has blocked other efforts to curtail long sentences for juveniles. 

Despite the similarities, the youth sentencing reforms that three states have passed so far this year will vary widely in actual impact. In Illinois, people already serving extreme sentences for juvenile convictions are still set to spend their lives behind bars without review: The bill that passed this year—just like the 2019 law it builds on—isn’t retroactive. 

In New Mexico and Minnesota, by contrast, dozens of people incarcerated for decades are now suddenly poised to receive parole hearings very soon because of the new laws. “There are just a lot of people who have spent a lot of time in prison being introspective and growing and developing into adults,” State Representative Sandra Feist, a Democrat who helped shape Minnesota’s legislation, told Bolts. “And I’m just excited for them to get a second chance.”

For advocates like Wilson who hope to reduce the prison population and spent years guiding these bills through the state legislatures, that effort was just about setting up the difficult parole processes that are only now starting.  

“It’s the moment that our community has been preparing for,” Wilson said. “We knew that passing the law was only the first step. Making the law mean something, making it mean real opportunity for people to come home, is the next chapter.”

The states that adopted new juvenile sentencing reforms this year significantly limited if not eliminated discretionary parole in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period during which many states toughened sentencing and gutted paths to release throughout the country. That gives advocates a chance to start fresh—after all, established parole boards are typically dysfunctional and punitive—but creating a new process out of virtually nothing is also a daunting task. 

Wilson warns that legal services in New Mexico aren’t trained to counsel the people who are newly eligible for parole, even as their hearings are coming up soon. “The work ahead is happening outside of existing institutions in the state because this is new work,” she said. “This reform was passed without any kind of budget allocation from the state, and so much of the work is around shoring up resources to make sure that people are supported in the way that they deserve.” Wilson has set up an organization, Deserving Life, that’s crowdfunding to help provide people with this support. 

Wilson says she knows of at least 75 people incarcerated in New Mexico who were given decades-long sentences for crimes they committed as minors and will be affected by SB 64. More than half are already eligible for a hearing under the new law because they’ve served more than the minimum period (15 to 25 years, depending on the crime). The actual number is likely higher: ProPublica exposed in March how the state lost track of nearly two dozen people locked up since they were sentenced to life in prison as kids. 

Meanwhile, close to 100 people will be affected by Minnesota’s new law, according to Perry Moriearty, who helps run a law clinic at the University of Minnesota that represents “juvenile lifers” and played a central role in crafting and championing the reforms over the last decade. In Minnesota, like in New Mexico, most people will be eligible after 15 years in prison, though it will be longer for some categories of crimes. Moriearty says nearly half have been in prison long enough that they are already eligible for a hearing.

But the panel that will review these cases doesn’t even exist yet. Minnesota lawmakers this spring created a brand new review board that must still be staffed. For cases that involve people who were sentenced as minors, that five-member board will be supplemented by two additional members who must be experts in neurodevelopmental science.  

Advocates for the law say these two additional members will be critical to remind the rest of the board of what makes youth different. “One of the things that neurodevelopmental experts may be able to speak to is why, with a lot of kids who are incarcerated, the first few years look bumpy,” said Moriearty, the University of Minnesota professor.  “For kids who are told that they’re entering prison and they’re gonna die there, there tend to be more infractions in those early years.”

Avra Anagnostis was 14 when her 16-year-old best friend, Roberto Lopez-Rios, was arrested and sentenced to life in Minnesota in 2001. “Life in prison, obviously, as kids, we couldn’t really comprehend what that meant,” she told Bolts. “It sounded so scary and overwhelming.” 

For more than two decades, Anagnostis has advocated for her friend to get a second look. She and Lopez-Rios co-founded an organization called Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN, paired up with Moriearty to advocate for reform, and reached out to people who have been incarcerated since they were kids. “Some of these guys are really alone,” she said. “Several have never had anyone reach out to them.” 

“For them to know that this group of people was coming together, people that they’ve never met, and advocating for them and saying, you are more than the worst thing you did as a child, that was huge,” she added.

From prison, Lopez-Rios has developed his painting, working with a group called Art from the Inside to have his art sold and shown at exhibitions. In April, this Minnesota-based organization hosted an art workshop in St. Paul alongside Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN that featured Moriearty and other coalition members talking about their bill.

Moriearty says that most kids sentenced to spend their life in prison in Minnesota come from Hennepin and Ramsey counties, which include the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the most diverse area in the state—and that the vast majority, 81 percent, are also Black and Latinx. The prosecutors who represent these population centers—Ramsey County’s John Choi, who has long backed this issue, and Hennepin County’s Mary Moriarty, who was elected in November in a victory for progressives—both supported the reform this year. 

Nevertheless, the statewide association of county attorneys opposed Minnesota’s bill this year. Robert Small, its executive director, told Bolts that the organization agreed with the principle of ending juvenile life without parole but thought that people should wait for longer periods before being eligible, and that the decision should be made by a judge and not by a parole board. Feist says the support her bill received from Choi and Moriarty helped counter the idea that local law enforcement was uniformly hostile to it.

New Mexico’s prosecutors association, which has a long history of torpedoing criminal justice reforms and opposed prior iterations of this bill, remained neutral on the 2023 version after extracting concessions that extended how long kids have to wait before becoming eligible for parole. (An earlier version of the bill made most minors eligible for parole after 10 years.)

Advocates in both New Mexico and Minnesota say they insisted the bills be retroactive, bringing hope to the very people who were championing them. They also pressed lawmakers to cover anyone who was convicted of a crime as a kid, no matter how serious. 

“The reason why we are so adamant that there should not be carve outs is because this whole policy is all about the difference between kids and adults,” Shipp said. “It’s not about the nature of the offense.”

All three bills adopted this year passed Democratic-led legislatures and were then signed by Democratic governors. In each case, the opposition largely came from GOP ranks, even though the bills in Illinois and New Mexico each received Republican support. (Minnesota’s package, which incorporated many other reforms, passed on strict party lines.) Some GOP-run states have adopted similar legislation—most recently, Ohio in 2021. 

In Illinois, a Republican state senator even played a lead role this year in pushing lawmakers to fix the fact that HB 1064 does not apply to past cases. In the same week Governor J.B. Pritzker signed it into law in February, Senator Seth Lewis filed new legislation, SB 2073, to make it retroactive. Lewis’ bill would also apply to an earlier sentencing reform that Illinois adopted in 2019, which curtailed juvenile life without parole but did not eliminate it. If it passes, it would make hundreds of people incarcerated since they were kids eligible for parole, according to Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Chicago-based Restore Justice. 

SB 2073 drew numerous Democratic co-sponsors but it received no vote by the end of the legislative session in May. Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat, did not respond to a request for comment on her plans for next year.

While the sentencing reforms in Illinois are limited to only new convictions, the state has still gone further than most others (including New Mexico and Minnesota) in another dimension: age. 

Reforms that take a more rehabilitative approach to youth are traditionally written to apply to people who committed a crime before age 18, but the laws Illinois passed in 2019 and 2023 instead both draw the line at 21. Hammond says the usual arguments for treating kids differently apply to young adults too. “Eighteen isn’t a line that you magically become an adult,” she told Bolts. “The emerging brain science shows that our brains continue to develop till the mid-20s.” 

Hammond says there was interest in the Illinois legislature to set the age of eligibility at 25: “Why are we stopping?”

Back in 2021, Washington, D.C., became the first jurisdiction to eliminate life without the possibility of parole for anyone convicted of a crime committed under age 25. Bolts reported last year that the reform sparked releases but at a slower pace than its proponents hoped for because of pandemic delays and recalcitrant prosecutors. Other states, like Massachusetts and Vermont, have also raised the age until which someone can be treated as a juvenile past 18. Connecticut could join that roster if its governor, Lamont, signs SB 952, the bill that ends life without parole for youth under 21. 

People in other states are watching these developments closely. In Minnesota, Moriearty says they didn’t press raising the age of adult criminal liability in this year’s session but hopes to revisit it in the future. “We didn’t necessarily feel like we had time,” she says.

Some advocates also hope to build on these new laws to make a broader case: They wonder if re-opening the door to parole for juveniles may make people more receptive to the idea that we shouldn’t throw anyone away for life. They’re pushing for reforms to cap prison terms, expand parole hearings for the elderly, or guarantee everyone some form of “second look.”

“If we allow ourselves to believe or to entertain the possibility that a child is more than the worst thing that they’ve ever done,” Wilson says, “it’s really not that far of a leap for people to wonder if that may be true for everybody.”

The post “Just an Opportunity to Come Home” appeared first on Bolts.

In Minnesota, a disagreement on how to prosecute two teenagers suspected of killing a 23-year-old has put two of the state’s leading criminal justice reformers into a high-profile political dispute, testing how much change even progressive politicians are willing to embrace.

Last Friday, Governor Tim Walz assigned State Attorney General Keith Ellison–a former six-term congressman and Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee–to handle the prosecution of the murder, taking the case away from Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty. Walz decided to give Ellison the case after Ellison criticized Moriarty as too lenient and requested it be transferred to him. His move is a direct rebuke of the newly elected Moriarty, whose win in November had marked a major triumph for criminal justice reformers. 

Moriarty is one of many progressives who believe there is a false choice between public safety and a punitive carceral system. She ran last year for prosecutor because after the murder of George Floyd she saw “an opportunity for racial reckoning” in Minneapolis, and the possibility of it slipping away as racialized fears of crime took hold. Moriarty promised to change the criminal legal system in Hennepin County by using more rehabilitative options and diversion programs to reduce incarceration as opposed to imposing harsh sentences. 

A central plank of that vision, as she explained to Mother Jones and Bolts last October, was changing how the criminal legal system treats kids, including moving away from trying minors as adults. “It’s really important to focus many more resources on our youth. And also to look at it from a science perspective,” she said. “We know kids are very susceptible to impulsive behavior….And with so many guns out there, we’re ending up with a lot of tragic consequences.”

A recent memo from Sarah Davis, Moriarty’s Director of the Children and Families division, translated that campaign rhetoric into office policy. Citing youth brain development as “the foundation of our approach,” Moriarty’s prosecutors would “make every effort to keep children out of the court system when possible” to reduce youth recidivism. 

Ellison and Moriarty have long worked together in Minnesota to push reform. A Democrat who endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for president, Ellison gained nationwide acclaim for leading the successful prosecution of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. At the time, Moriarty had recently been controversially dismissed from her position as chief public defender. During the Chauvin trial, she worked as a local television analyst, translating Ellison’s prosecution for a lay audience. Ellison called for an investigation of her dismissal and publicly raised the possibility that it was punishment for her racial justice advocacy. In 2022, when Moriarty began to campaign for County Attorney, Ellison endorsed her. The political nonprofit TakeAction hosted canvassing events supporting Moriarty’s election and Ellison’s reelection. 

This case radically changes their relationship. After narrowly winning his election for attorney general against an opponent who called him “soft” on crime, Ellison has swooped in to prosecute the murder despite Moriarty’s insistence he should not. 

She harshly criticized the move by Walz and Ellison as an “undemocratic” overreach, likening the decision to those made by Republican politicians nationwide who have attempted to usurp the authority of local prosecutors. 

The case shows the immense difficulties that progressive prosecutors face as they attempt to carry out the mandate of reform on which they were elected, and guide the public away from a tough-on-crime approach. “One of the reasons being a prosecutor is so difficult is because you have to look at a case where there’s an unimaginable harm and then decide what accountability, justice and punishment are appropriate to request,” Moriarty said in a press conference Friday.

On November 8, 2022, just days after Moriarty and Ellison won their elections, Zaria McKeever, 23, was killed in a home invasion in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. Prosecutors claim two brothers, ages 15 and 17 years old at the time, killed McKeever on behalf of Erick Haynes–McKeever’s ex-boyfriend and the father of her one-year-old child. Initially, Michael Freeman—the long-serving county attorney who embodied the traditional carceral approach Moriarty ran against and came under immense criticism for his handling of police killings—planned to try the brothers in adult court. 

After Hennepin County elected Moriarty, prosecutors changed course. Instead of a trial, her office offered plea deals that sentenced the brothers to two years in a juvenile facility with extended probation in exchange for testimony against Haynes. If they violated their probation, the brothers would be subject to an adult sentence under a doctrine called Extended Juvenile Jurisdiction (EJJ)– a hybrid approach reserved for young people over the age of 14 who are accused of committing certain serious crimes, the adult sentence can be imposed up to the age of 21. The elder brother accepted the deal.

The announcement of the change in prosecution deeply angered McKeever’s family. “It was choked down our throat without any concern about how we felt,” her stepfather Paul Greer told the Star Tribune. “We will not stand for it.”At a community meeting that McKeever’s family attended at Shiloh Temple, a prominent Black church in Minneapolis, Ellison voiced his disapproval of the plea deals. Ellison then sent a letter to Walz last Thursday asking to take over the case before the Friday hearing for the young brother. In the letter, he noted that Moriarty had “refused” his initial request to take over the prosecution. Walz granted the request, saying that “this authority is rarely used, and it should remain an option of last resort.” According to the Star Tribune, a Minnesota governor has stepped in only one other time in the state’s modern history to reassign a case against the will of a county attorney. 

“While I share the belief that too many juveniles are involved in the adult criminal-justice system, accountability for the seriousness of this crime has been missing in this case,” Ellison said in a statement on Friday. “I respect that county attorneys are duly elected by their constituents to exercise their discretion; however, the disposition of the juvenile shooter that Hennepin County has proposed in this case is disproportionate to the seriousness of the crime committed and falls far short of the family’s and community’s expectations for justice and safety.”

In a tense press conference on the same day, Moriarty defended the plea deals as her following through on campaign promises–changing how the county attorney’s office would deal with young people involved in gun violence. In 2021, when homicides approached a near record high, two thirds of shooting victims in Minneapolis were under the age of 31, according to a city report. “I am keeping a promise,” Moriarty said “[Ellison and Walz] are not.”

Moriarty said Ellison and Walz “are entitled to their opinion, but their actions here show that they also don’t really believe fully in democracy–because they are stopping me from doing the job voters elected me to do. That is unacceptable. They have set a very dangerous precedent.” 

In fact, Ellison is doing what his recent Republican opponent Jim Schultz warned of throughout the campaign last fall. “In a scenario in which we have somebody like a Mary Moriarty in the Hennepin County Attorney’s office,” Schultz told MinnPost when asked about the possibility of taking over prosecution, “I think we have to take a look at something along those lines.” Ellison denounced this overreach at the time. (When Mother Jones and Bolts asked about using a technique Ellison criticized, his office said they “don’t have anything to add” beyond the initial statement.) 

The Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild sent a letter to Walz and Ellison expressing their “vigorous objection” to the decision, warning that it joins a national trend. 

In Florida, Ron DeSantis removed twice-elected Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren after Warren pledged not to prosecute those who seek or provide abortions. In Pennsylvania, the state legislature attempted to impeach Larry Krasner, one of the most well-known reform prosecutors in the country. In Missouri, the attorney general is in the process of trying to remove St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner from office. A new bill in the Georgia state senate would create a “Prosecuting Attorneys Oversight Commission” with the power to remove prosecutors from office, just as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis ramps up an investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. 

“You have tragically become part of a disturbing reactionary national trend and placed yourselves in the company of the likes of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Missouri Governor Mike Parson by preventing a local progressive prosecutor from exercising her prosecutorial discretion in acting consistently with her principles–and the principles that she was elected to carry out,” the Guild wrote. “Your decision to play to the crowd does grave damage toward making reform a reality.”

The Minnesota County Attorneys Association voted unanimously to oppose Walz’s decision to hand the case to Ellison, despite the attorney general asking for their support. The MCAA is made up of prosecutors across the state, showing a rejection of this kind of jurisdictional encroachment that transcends traditional political lines. “To so-called left wing prosecutors and so-called right wing prosecutors there seemed to be general agreement that this was a problem,” said Friedman.

During the 2022 campaign, Ellison was hammered by Schultz as being “soft on crime,” before narrowly defeating him in the closest statewide race of the year. “To what extent is this about the perception of him politically across the state versus what he thinks is justice in this situation?” asked Michael Friedman, the former Executive Director of the Minneapolis based Legal Rights Center. “I’m not saying that with a specific accusation. I just think those are the kinds of questions that would need to be asked of him.”

At the press conference Friday, Moriarty said that in offering the two teenagers a plea deal she was trying to “make sure that there is accountability” without incarcerating someone for an extended period of time, after which it is likely they would “come out more dangerous to the community.” 

There is research to back up this idea. “If you can keep children out of the adult justice system until they’re in their mid-twenties, they’re extremely unlikely to enter it,” said Chris Uggen, the Distinguished McKnight Professor in Sociology, Law, and Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. “So in that sense, much of the science is on [Moriarty’s] side.” (However, Uggen added that “blended sentences” like the EJJ offered to the two teenagers is itself a “compromise” that has mixed results.)

But at the event, Moriarty was shouted down by McKeever’s loved ones for these ideas.

“What do you get for executing someone and shooting somebody five times? What’s the law for that? asked McKeever’s cousin Shontell Bishop and her sister Tiffynnie Epps.” “The law, not the science.”

“We could send this 15-year-old to prison and he’d get out in his early 30s,” Moriarty explained. 

“Wonderful,” a supporter of McKeever shouted back. “Zaria didn’t make it to her early 30s.”

This confrontation highlights the complex racial dynamics of the case. Ellison is the most powerful Black political figure in the state coming to the aid of a Black family who believe their calls for justice have gone unheard in a place where Black people are “overpoliced and underprotected.” In 2021, there was one Black shooting victim for every 150 Black residents in Minneapolis. For white people, there was one shooting victim for every 3,768 residents. According to a data analysis by the Minnesota Reformer, police fail to solve nearly eight in ten shootings in Minneapolis. 

Moriarty is a white prosecutor with a track record of calling out racist practices in the office she now leads. Her 30-plus year career on the other side of the courtroom has enshrined a steadfast belief that punitive policies disproportionately harm Black people, and don’t produce public safety in the long term. “There was no bait and switch here,” said Uggen. “This is exactly what she ran on.” 

Her opponent last year, a Black former judge and prosecutor who argued for a more punitive approach, framed Moriarty’s policies as putting criminals first, saying she was insensitive to the dilemma that Black people who live in high-crime neighborhoods face. Moriarty went on to win every single one of those neighborhoods. But this episode reveals the hurdles that await reform prosecutors as they seek to go about the job differently, especially among the populations experiencing violence most acutely.

“I don’t want to imply that Moriarty is on the wrong side of the racial justice issues at all, because she has been a true champion,” said Uggen. “[But] race is very much front and center in this issue, as it is in everything regarding justice in Minnesota.”

The post Minnesota’s Keith Ellison Thwarts a Reform Prosecutor He Endorsed appeared first on Bolts.

Elizer Darris has thought many times about how it must feel to hold one of the red “I VOTED” stickers Minnesota gives out at polling places.

He was sentenced to prison as a child, too young to have ever voted. He was released in 2016, but he has remained on probation ever since, in a state with exceptionally long probation terms. Minnesota strips people of their voting rights when they are convicted of a felony and only restores them upon completion of all parts of a sentence, which means that Darris still can’t vote.

That’s poised to change now. Minnesota’s legislature on Tuesday adopted House File 28, a bill termed Restore The Vote. It would grant ballot access to Minnesotans on parole or on probation, currently estimated to be roughly 50,000 people—though not to the more than 8,000 people in state prisons over a felony.

“That’s going to allow me to feel my humanity so much more,” Darris, who is now co-executive director of the Minnesota Freedom Fund, told Bolts. “Society has basically told me I’m locked away from having the most basic engagement with democracy. Well, now I will be engaged in the democratic experience.”

The legislature’s move on Tuesday sent the bill to Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat who has long supported this change. The bill’s lead sponsor, Bobby Joe Champion, the Democratic president of the Minnesota Senate, told Bolts he is certain Walz will sign it. 

If and when he does, Minnesota would become the 25th state, plus Washington, D.C., to grant voting rights to anyone who is not presently incarcerated. (Maine, Vermont, and D.C., also allow anyone to vote from prison.) That milestone is the result of a rapid shift in blue-run states, with seven making this same move since 2018; North Carolina joined them last year due a court ruling that the GOP-held state supreme court may soon reverse.

Minnesota advocates, plus many state lawmakers, have fought for years for this change but fallen short amid the opposition of Republican lawmakers. The change, along with a slew of other liberal priorities, such as protections for abortion rights and cannabis legalization, is now possible because Democrats gained full control of the statehouse when they flipped the state Senate in November.

Champion, who became Senate leader and prioritized this legislation, has made the case that people caught up in the criminal legal system should feel and maintain ties to their communities, including by voting. 

Minnesota has among the nation’s highest rates of people on probation, with people serving unusually long terms. 

“There are folks in Minnesota who are out on long probationary periods—10, 15, 20 years,” Champion told Bolts. “They’re out in our communities paying taxes, raising families, being productive citizens, but not being given a chance for their voice to count. They are treated like second-class citizens who are not a part of our democracy.” 

Black Minnesotans are disproportionately affected by this system. Roughly 18 percent of people who were barred from voting in the 2022 midterms because they were on probation or parole were Black, according to a study by the Sentencing Project, while only about 5 percent of Minnesota’s voting-age population is Black. Racial inequality, in the criminal legal system and otherwise, is a fixture in Minnesota—the state is sometimes referred to as “Mississippi of the north”—and has inspired major protests in recent years.  

The bill passed the Senate on Tuesday by a margin of 35-30, with one Republican senator—Jim Abeler—joining all Democrats in the majority. 

It cleared the House earlier this month on a near-party-line vote, with two Republicans crossing over in support.

Republican senators opposed to the bill on Tuesday brought a slew of unsuccessful amendments that would have carved out people who are on probation or parole after being convicted of a violent crimes—murder, manslaughter, assault, and kidnapping, among others.

“We need to think about the victims here,” Senator Glenn Gruenhagen said on the Senate floor Tuesday.

Followed Senator Andrew Mathews, “People who commit a crime of murder or manslaughter have permanently taken away their victims’ right to vote.”

Consistently, Champion responded on the Senate floor with a message centered on the public-safety benefit of reducing recidivism by giving people on parole and probation one more way to feel connected to and invested in their home state. He noted repeatedly that many advocates for crime victims support the bill.

Several states are considering legislation this year to also enable people with felony convictions to vote from prison, a move Washington, D.C., took in 2020.

Champion told Bolts that he believes all people in Minnesota should be able to vote—including those in prison. He said he held off on proposing that within the Restore The Vote legislation in order to not “confuse the narrative.”

“I will continue to see if there’s a pathway for those who are incarcerated to vote,” he said, but added that he feels it is necessary in this case to take one step at a time. 

Darris argued that many of the same points commonly offered in favor of allowing people to vote upon release from prison should apply to the case for total re-enfranchisement. For one, he said, people in prisons are taxpayers, too.

“There’s not an item besides clothing that a person in state prison purchases that’s not taxed,” he said. “This nation has gone to war over taxation without representation. We don’t have a democracy if every last vote doesn’t count.”

Zeke Caligiuri, another Minnesotan who is now poised to vote for the first time, said he hopes Minnesota grants imprisoned people voting rights soon. He was released in April after spending 24 years in prison and is now on parole.

“Every election year what would happen is [incarcerated] people, you know, watch the news, watch television. They’re aware of things and current events, and they do care,” he told Bolts. “If you’re willing to extend that to us, a lot of people would love to take advantage of that.”

When House File 28 becomes law, Champion said, it will be important to ensure that all those it affects are made aware of their rights. The legislation requires correctional facility staff to provide people exiting incarceration with a notice that reads, in part, “your right to vote in Minnesota has been restored,” and provides information about how to register. Champion said public defenders, re-entry programs, faith institutions, and local elections officials have all also agreed to help spread the word.

Darris said he plans to help out in that work—starting with registering himself for the first time.

“I’m going to get a red sticker,” he said.

The post Minnesota Is Restoring the Voting Rights of Tens of Thousands appeared first on Bolts.

That flow of money isn’t transparent, says Olivia Zink, executive director of Open Democracy, a nonpartisan group that advocates for public campaign funding in New Hampshire. “You can drive a Mack Truck through the loopholes in our current campaign finance system,” she says. 

Political action committees can make unlimited contributions in the state, an individual can donate up to $15,000 to a candidate in state elections every cycle, and companies can evade contribution limits by funneling the money through different LLCs, she says. Meanwhile, a significant portion of campaign contributions come from outside of New Hampshire, though it’s difficult to know exactly how much because of weak reporting. 

With a bill recently introduced in New Hampshire’s House of Representatives, reformers like Zink hope to flip the current system on its head. The bill creates a “voter-owned certificate” program (a system also known as “democracy vouchers”) intended to encourage small donations, disempower wealthy donors, and limit the influence of out-of-state contributors. 

The program would mail every eligible voter four $25 vouchers during each two-year election cycle. Recipients could then donate any or all of those vouchers to candidates who have opted into the system and agreed to abide by certain restrictions. 

“In every election, there’s a primary before the primary, it’s called the donor primary,” Russell Muirhead, the Democratic lawmaker who introduced House Bill 324, said on Tuesday during a hearing of the state House Election Law Committee. “This bill tries to eradicate that donor primary and give the power back to New Hampshire voters.”

The proposal mirrors a campaign financing system implemented by Seattle in 2017. There, democracy vouchers have diversified and grown the pool of people giving money to political campaigns, and made city races more competitive in the process. 

Seattle’s program won its first convert in late 2022, when Oakland voters approved a local ballot measure that will create a “democracy vouchers” program in future city elections.  

Now, proponents are dreaming bigger and hope to set up such an initiative at the state level. In addition to New Hampshire, Minnesota Democrats have proposed creating “democracy vouchers” as part of a broad voting rights package they introduced this year, shortly after taking control of the state government.

For a state to adopt this campaign funding model would be a huge boost for the democracy vouchers movement, according to Adam Eichen, executive director of Equal Citizens, a national nonprofit that advocates for election reform.

“The significance of winning the first statewide democracy voucher program cannot be overstated,” he says. “We see again and again that all it takes is one state to be a leader on an empowering, novel democracy policy and the idea will quickly spread across the country.” 

HB 324 would bring democracy vouchers to New Hampshire’s highest-profile elections. At least at the beginning, the only eligible races would be for governor and executive council, the five-member body that has veto power over pardons, gubernatorial nominations, and contracts with a value greater than $10,000. Zink says these council races used to be sleepy affairs but have become much more contentious recently, especially after the group voted against multiple rounds of contracts with Planned Parenthood. 

Participating in New Hampshire’s program would be voluntary for candidates, and gubernatorial candidates would become eligible only after collecting 2,500 small-dollar donations (500 for executive council candidates). Those who qualified could get up to $420,000 in vouchers for the governor’s race ($84,000 for executive council), and they’d also be eligible for a $1 million grant for a contested general election ($60,000 for executive counselors) in addition to any money raised with voter vouchers. 

In exchange, candidates would have to heed certain restrictions, like a cap on personal donations to the campaign, a limit of no more than 10 percent out-of-state contributions, and a ban on soliciting independent expenditures. 

In Seattle, where the requirements are similar, the program applies to a wide swath of municipal elections, and has been enormously popular. The current mayor, city attorney, and seven of the nine city councilors used the program in their last election. Meanwhile, the number of donors per race has gone up by 350 percent, and candidates reported hundreds of thousands more in donations of under $200, reducing their reliance on a small batch of wealthy donors, according to a study of Seattle conducted by Alan Griffith, a scholar at the University of Washington. 

The same study also found an 86 percent increase in the number of candidates and a large decrease in incumbent electoral success, suggesting that races have become more competitive. Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence suggests that the program is attracting new kinds of candidates as well. Teresa Mosqueda, a labor organizer who launched her 2017 campaign for city council while working full time, renting a one-bedroom apartment, and still paying off student loans, said the program’s existence pushed her to run. 

Compared to traditional cash donors of the kind who regularly participate in elections, the voucher users were also more likely to be young and lower-income contributors, according to a 2020 study conducted by researchers at Stony Brook and Georgetown Universities. 

Activists in Oakland were eager to realize these outcomes, especially amid a torrent of outside funding in their elections. In 2020, wealthy donors poured more than $1.2 million into pro-charter groups supporting school board candidates, most of whom ended up winning. In fact, between 2014 and 2020, 77 percent of all the city’s contested races were won by the candidate who raised the most money.  

After Oakland’s city council agreed to refer the measure to the ballot, voters approved it by a nearly three-to-one margin last November, and the program is scheduled to begin next year.

Muirhead, the lead sponsor for the New Hampshire bill, is excited that a person might feel more invested in the electoral process after they donate to a candidate. 

“That ties them to a person, to a campaign, maybe even to a movement or a party, and that’s a really cool thing,” Muirhead told Bolts. Besides sitting in the House, Muirhead is a Dartmouth University professor who researches the theory and practice of democracy; he is teaching a course this year on the phenomenon of “democratic erosion.”

Should his proposal pass and succeed, the commission responsible for its administration could recommend that it be expanded to candidates for the state legislature, and then again those for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. 

However, the bill is facing a number of obstacles. Its main two sponsors are Democrats, but Republicans control both chambers of the state legislature—even though Democratic candidates made major gains in and nearly tied the state House in November. 

On Tuesday, the House Election Law Committee, which is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, deadlocked 10 to 10 on the legislation. This means that the bill moves to the House floor without a recommendation of the committee.

The vice chair of the committee, Republican Ross Berry, was among those who voted against it. 

“I am opposed to these sort of taxpayer funded schemes because they violate the freedom of association and speech by forcing taxpayers to finance political campaigns that they may disagree with,” Berry told Bolts in an email. 

Still, Zink believes that the legislation has enough bipartisan support to pass the state House floor but that supporters need to persuade another Republican to lend in the Senate. They must also convince Republican Governor Chris Sununu, who has raised over $2 million from industry groups over the 13 years he’s been in office, especially real estate ($364,000), lawyers and lobbyists ($282,718), and automotive entities ($181,210), according to FollowTheMoney.org. 

“We will have to do a lot of lobbying, and calls, and bipartisan support to get our Republican governor to sign it,” says Zink.  

Muirhead expects other legislators to object to the bill’s costs. First are the administration fees: mailing out the certificates to every registered voter, determining candidates’ eligibility and enforcing the rules, maintaining the public database of every contribution, and publicizing and explaining the program to the public. Seattle spent about $1.3 million on these services in 2021, though Zink estimates that it would cost New Hampshire $500,000 annually. 

Then there’s the campaign funding itself. 

Assuming a field of a dozen candidates for executive council and two candidates for governor, Zink says the program will cost $6.2 million a year, or $12.4 million every election cycle. The bill includes four sources of funding: voluntary contributions, fines from campaign finance violations, interests that the fund accrues, and an earmark from the governor. Still, the exact funding mechanisms remain to be settled by lawmakers, Muirhead says. 

Zink says that the current system costs taxpayers even more than the voter-owned alternative would. “Allowing private companies to finance our elections means we’re actually paying for policies that benefit those big donors.” 

That argument may not be enough to persuade Republican politicians in New Hampshire to embrace an idea that’s only been tested in one of America’s most liberal cities.

But the idea may catch on in state governments elsewhere. If Minnesota passes the recently introduced Democracy for the People Act, its existing public financing system would shift from retroactively refunding campaign contributors, which few people know about or participate in, to proactively mailing two, $25 vouchers to all registered voters. These vouchers could then go to participating candidates in races for governor, state house and senate, secretary of state, and attorney general. 

In Minnesota, unlike in New Hampshire, Democrats control the governorship and both chambers of the legislature. Even so, elected lawmakers may be reluctant to change the status quo. 

Tellingly, in both Oakland and Seattle, voters were ultimately the ones who approved the program via ballot initiatives, not politicians. In that sense, these new  bills are the most ambitious yet. 

“I think it’s possible but not likely,” says Muirhead about his bill’s potential to pass the legislature. Muirhead sponsored a similar bill last year, which failed. 

“We are taking the long view. We believe that we can renovate American democracy, but we have to do it the old fashioned way, by persuading people one-by-one,” he says. “That takes time.” 

The post Campaign Finance Reformers Hope to Convert Their First State to Democracy Vouchers appeared first on Bolts.

Minnesota’s Democratic lawmakers, newly in control of the state legislature, plan to legalize the recreational use and sale of cannabis this year. And they insist that in doing so they must account for past harm—namely, harm done by wildly uneven enforcement practices that made their state one of the most dangerous places in the country to be a Black person in possession of marijuana. 

“For me, it’s a racial justice issue. I wouldn’t support this without it,” state Senator Clare Oumou Verbeten, a lead sponsor of the legalization effort and one of just three Black women ever elected to the Minnesota Senate, told Bolts. “There’s the argument that people are already using cannabis, so let’s not criminalize them for it. Well, yes, but the people who have to live in fear are Black people. They’re impacted the most. We’re trying to right these wrongs.”

A recent nationwide report by the ACLU found that Black Minnesotans were more than five times more likely than white Minnesotans to be arrested for marijuana possession between 2010 and 2018, one of the highest racial disparities across all states. That’s but one example of longstanding systemic inequality that has earned Minnesota the nickname “Mississippi of the North.”

“We’re constantly at the top of these lists in terms of quality of life, best places to live,” Oumou Verbeten said. “It’s not true for people who look like me.”

This is why she and many other backers of Minnesota’s legalization effort want the state’s program to be as dedicated to racial and class justice as any in the country. While early adopters like Colorado waited years after legalization to adopt policy confronting the damage done by the war on drugs, Minnesota lawmakers seek to do that work upfront. 

Their legalization bill, House File 100, proposes to help marginalized communities gain footholds in the regulated recreational cannabis industry by giving them preferential access to business licenses. These licenses would be awarded based on a points system weighted in favor of the poor and those who can demonstrate personal or familial harm from cannabis prohibition.

The bill would also automatically expunge records of low-level cannabis convictions, including for petty misdemeanor and misdemeanor charges over the sale or possession of up to 42.5 grams of marijuana. These convictions can acutely inhibit social mobility by blocking people from stable housing and employment, and can, in some cases, plunge people into a prolonged morass of criminalization and poverty. 

Jon Geffen, a law professor and attorney with The Legal Revolution, a Minnesota nonprofit law firm, explained that prior conviction records are currently public in Minnesota. As a result, “you can use that data for anything you want: hiring, renting—hell, even dating if you want it. Whether or not it was weed it comes up as ‘drugs,’ and people rarely hire people with drug convictions. People lose jobs and apartments. Families separate because of these things.”

For some advocates, though, these equity provisions may be too little, too late for those affected by the war on drugs.

Many political leaders now cast equity as core to their legalization efforts, rather than a footnote to be addressed years after state industries ramp up. In New York, people with past marijuana convictions are being given a first crack at business licenses. In Maryland, new Governor Wes Moore, sworn in this week, has insisted the state’s soon-to-launch legal cannabis industry must prize social justice and “economic parity.” Like the regulated cannabis industry itself, this concept of licensing equity is a rather new one; Oakland pioneered it in 2017.

But these equity projects have rarely gone smoothly, or delivered their stated impacts. Some Oakland licensees feel that the city’s program has done them more harm than good. Lawsuits challenging cannabis equity provisions in places like Detroit, Maine and Missouri have slowed or thwarted progress. 

Also, even the most equity-minded cannabis legalization policies do little to repair certain harms. Giving people from overpoliced communities special access to cannabis dispensary or cultivation licenses, for instance, won’t change the fact that those people are less likely to have business ownership experience, professional mentorship, and investor networks—intangible assets that help sustain an operation. 

Angela Dawson, a northern Minnesota hemp farmer and a champion for agricultural opportunities for Black people, said the expungement plan laid out in Minnesota’s pending bill would do very little for people like her younger brother, whose marijuana conviction two decades ago threw him for a prolonged tailspin.

“He lost time in school, never graduated. He met up with some pretty bad people while he was in jail. He didn’t have an opportunity to do anything else,” Dawson told Bolts. “He just got out of prison in November.”

Clearing marijuana charges like his will be relatively easy for the state, policy experts in Minnesota say. But that can’t undo twenty-plus years of compounding challenges and lost time that stemmed from his first drug charge. 

“It shouldn’t cost you your whole entire future,” she said.

Oumou Verbeten acknowledged that this bill alone won’t unwind these longstanding harms. She said she hopes to pair the cannabis legislation with complementary bills to seal eviction records and to ban public employers from asking job applicants about their criminal histories. She is also sponsoring legislation that would restore voting rights to Minnesotans on parole and probation—a population that skews disproportionately Black, Native American, and Latino.

These and other bills are viable in large part because Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party flipped the state Senate in November, claiming full control of the state government for the first time since 2014. 

The state House passed legislation in 2021 to legalize cannabis but the bill fizzled in the state Senate, which was then under control of Republicans. (One GOP leader at the time said there was “zero chance” his party would go along.)  Minnesota politicos believe it’s nearly assured to pass this time around, though its final form may be several months and about a dozen more committee hearings away.

But now that they have a trifecta, Democrats see marijuana legalization as a headlining bill in a legislative session that is also poised to see Minnesota lawmakers codify abortion rights, advance paid family and medical leave, and seek to expand voting access.

A recent poll, conducted by Mason-Dixon, shows a slim majority of overall Minnesotans—and a wide majority of non-white Minnesotans—back cannabis legalization. The country at large favors it, too, and strongly supports expungement of cannabis convictions.  

The specific design of the major equity portions of this year’s legalization bill in Minnesota are getting mixed reviews from criminal justice reform and racial justice advocates.

On expungements, “the framework of it is pretty darn good,” Geffen said. He noted that the bill would make expungements automatic and free, a measure that MinnPost estimates would affect some 50,000 people with criminal records.

The state already accepts petitions for expungement, in a process that is anything but user-friendly. He described it as a winding road with all sorts of obstacles over which even his law students regularly trip. Any mistake along the way can lead a court to toss a petition, with no way for the applicant to recoup the $305 the state requires for every charge one seeks to expunge.

“So the populations that don’t use it are poor populations. It’s a double whammy, where poor people are over-prosecuted, over-charged, and then they don’t get expunged, even when they’re eligible, because they don’t have the money to pay an attorney,” Geffen told Bolts.

Tom Gallagher, a Hennepin County (Minneapolis) criminal defense attorney and libertarian advocate for legalized cannabis, wishes the bill went further by categorically granting gun ownership rights back to people who lost those rights because of felony drug convictions. He doesn’t expect liberal lawmakers to restore gun rights through this bill, but he argues they should, in order to thwart the cycle of criminality that drug prohibition can catalyze. 

“Let’s say you’re 19 years old and you get convicted of possessing two ounces of marijuana. Now, 10 years later, you get caught with a gun in your house, but now you’re an ineligible person in possession of a firearm, and you’re looking at a minimum of 3 years in prison in Minnesota,” Gallagher told Bolts. “It’s purely the status of the person in possession of the gun that makes the crime.”

The bill’s second core equity provision—licensing equity—also faces questions as to its scope and implementation.

The state has had a regulated medical marijuana industry for seven years, and, at present, that entire sector is controlled by one of two corporations,.

The new legislation contains provisions meant to chart a more equitable path for the recreational cannabis industry by requiring that the state substantially favor cannabis business license applications from so-called “social equity” applicants—that is, residents for at least five years in areas “that experienced a disproportionately large amount of cannabis enforcement,” as determined by a state report not yet produced. People could also qualify for “social equity” status in business licensing if they live in areas with poverty rates of 20 percent or more, or where the median family income does not exceed 80 percent of the statewide mark.

Oumou Verbeten said the idea, transparently, is to give a boost to Black and Latino would-be businesspeople, but that it’d be thorny, and possibly illegal, to legislate in explicit favor of one or more racial groups over others.

“If you look at concentrated places of poverty and overlay that with racial demographics, then, yes, a lot of those areas are where we’re going to see communities of color,” Oumou Verbeten said. “We want to make sure people who’ve been harmed get the priority. And those are people of color, and Black Minnesotans especially.”

This goal is easier stated than accomplished, Black leaders in Colorado’s cannabis industry told Bolts. Boosting an application is much easier and cheaper, after all, than providing sustained training and financial support needed to get a cannabis business up and running. 

And that’s leaving aside headwinds that these businesses face in the market; existing federal prohibition cuts off cannabis operators from the tools other industries enjoy, like basic inclusion in banking systems, or loans and guidance from the Small Business Administration.

“In trying to bend ourselves into equity and things that make right, basically the entire industry is failing top to bottom,” Denver entrepreneur Wanda James told Bolts. For years she was the only Black cannabis business owner in Colorado, among hundreds of businesses; now, she says, she’s one of a few.

“The really sad thing is we are setting up Black and brown entrepreneurs for a massive failure. And at that point of massive failure, they don’t even have bankruptcy protection,” because cannabis remains illegal federally, James added.

She said Colorado and other states can do much better in providing support to licensees and those harmed in the war on drugs, but she said she’s skeptical policymakers can ever truly legislate out the impediments to equity that she and others trace to federal prohibition.

Jeff Brinkman, a Minnesota hemp entrepreneur, is also concerned that the state will not adopt enough legal protections on how licenses can be transferred from one business to another. “I just feel that as the bill is developed and revamped, if they aren’t keeping their eye in the loopholes and on how to build this industry for small business, that’s when we’ll get the takeover” by wealthy interests. 

When “social equity” licensees fail to launch, policymakers are given cover to say, “See, we tried and it failed,” Hashim Coates, executive director of Black Brown and Red Badged, an organization representing Black and Latino business owners in the cannabis industry, told Bolts.

“Just creating an opportunity without the intention of success is not creating an opportunity,” he added. 

The post With Marijuana Bill, Minnesota Democrats Seek to Repair Harms of War on Drugs 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.

Pennsylvanians on Tuesday resoundingly rejected the man who had wanted to ignore their vote but now was asking for it. In this perennially tight state, Mastriano lost to Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro by fifteen percentage points.

He was joined in defeat by many other Republicans who echoed Trump’s Big Lie while trying to take over their states’ election administration. (Most states directly elect a secretary of state, unlike in Pennsylvania.) Voters around the country repudiated candidates who signaled they may override the will of the very electorate they were courting.

All election deniers who ran for secretary of state in battleground states—buoyed by endorsements from Trump—lost on Tuesday, blocking major avenues for the former president to manipulate the next election.

Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee in Nevada, came closest, losing to Democrat Francisco Aguilar by two percentage points. In Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, incumbent Democratic secretaries of state crushed their far-right challengers Kristina Karamo, Kim Crockett, and Audrey Trujillo by margins ranging from 9 to 14 percentage points—all far more than Joe Biden’s margins of victory two years ago.

Mark Finchem, an Arizona lawmaker who has since 2020 championed proposals to decertify his own state’s presidential results, repeated just this fall that the votes of Arizona’s two most populous counties should be “tossed out.” He lost his bid on Tuesday, trailing in both of these counties decisively.

Election deniers also failed to take over secretary of state offices in blue states like Massachusetts and Vermont, lost elections for governor in places where the winner can appoint a secretary of state, and fell short for other offices from which they may have exerted significant if indirect influence on elections, such as Michigan’s attorney general or New Mexico’s supreme court. 

“The Big Lie movement has its die hard acolytes, and they’ve captured a huge swath of the Republican Party, but it’s not a winning majority,” Ian Bassin, executive director of the organization Protect Democracy, told Bolts. “In fact, it’s politically toxic, and in competitive states is a lead anchor around the neck of anyone that embraces it.”

Still, Republicans who ran on the Big Lie did not end up empty handed.

A nationwide Bolts analysis in September found that 12 Republicans were running for secretary of state after denying the results of the 2020 election or refusing to affirm the outcome. Eight of them lost. But they won in four red states: Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

“What happened with the election results moved us from the precipice,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law who specializes in election law and has written about the threat of election subversion, told Bolts. “We won’t have many election deniers running elections, and probably none or few in swing states.”

“Still there are hundreds of Republican candidates who embraced election denialism and won their races,” he said. “Maybe it’s just cheap talk and it is less worrisome—but it is still antidemocratic and shows that denialism could easily surface again in 2024 or beyond.”

Election deniers won many offices, from Congress down to county commissions, that have important powers when it comes to deciding how to run elections. And two governors with the authority to select secretaries of state, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, won reelection; both have previously appointed secretaries who refused to affirm Biden’s election or helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 race.

Many states that did not feature outright election deniers still saw conflicts over new restrictions and rules to combat fraud. When the dust settled, incumbents did well: Democrats secured new terms in Colorado and Washington State, and Republicans did the same in Georgia, Iowa, and Ohio. In Connecticut and Vermont, Democrats prevailed in open seats who have signaled interest in expanding ballot access.

Some secretaries of state in recent years have stepped in against threats to election systems—and Tuesday’s results at least removed the threat that local election deniers will be bolstered by more sympathetic statewide officials, at least in blue and purple states. 

Trujillo, the New Mexico Republican, had stood in solidarity with a county commission that refused to certify its primary results this summer over bogus fraud claims. The local county clerk, a Republican who fought back against the commission, told Bolts in September that Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver had backed her and that an election denier taking over instead would make her job trickier.

Some secretaries of state are also tasked with certifying their state’s final results, and election observers worried that an official like Finchem or a Mastriano appointee could try to not certify legitimate outcomes they don’t like. In states where they are not involved in certification, secretaries of state have other significant powers. Michigan, for instance, has one of the most decentralized electoral systems in the country, loosely held together by a secretary of state’s authority. Karamo, the GOP nominee, campaigned on proposals to upend this system, some of which she would not have had the legal authority to order. 

Elections for secretaries of state typically happen away from the spotlight, but Trump’s Stop the Steal agitation morphed into an organized effort to recruit and run far-right candidates willing to follow his lead in disrupting U.S. elections. 

Marchant, the Nevada candidate, played a lead role in putting together a national slate called “America First” that brought together 14 secretary of state candidates, all Republicans who ran on introducing election changes in line with Trump’s Big Lie conspiracies, such as cracking down on mail-in voting or ballot drop boxes. 

In the lead-up to November, election deniers also partnered with far-right organizations and like-minded allies in law enforcement and sheriff’s offices to drum up policing and investigations into elections. Florida voted this year under the cloud of the arrests of formerly incarcerated people, who have been targeted by DeSantis’s administration amid shifting eligibility requirements for people with criminal records.

This national coordination among election deniers sparked a counter-mobilizing effort from Democrats who rushed to bring more voter attention to these races.

“Mr. and Mrs. Minnesota are not getting up every day saying, ‘Gee, I wonder what’s going on with the secretary of state’s office right now,’” Steve Simon, the Democratic incumbent in Minnesota, told Politico in October. “And so I do think that someone running for this office generically—me or anyone else—every four years, you’d have to treat it as an exercise of introducing or reintroducing yourself.”

The New York Times reports that Democrats sank nearly $50 million into TV ads for secretary of state races in the four tightest states featuring election deniers for secretary of state—Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada—and outspent Republicans 10 to 1. Mastriano was also significantly outspent. He was one of only two candidates for governor on the “America First,” alongside the GOP nominee in Arizona, Kari Lake. Both had lost their bids as of Monday night.

Of the 14 “America First” candidates who ran for secretary of state, nine lost in Republican primaries and four lost in last week’s general election.

Those defeated in primaries include Colorado’s Tina Peters, a county clerk under indictment for breaching the integrity of voting machines, and Idaho’s Dorothy Moon, who once defended voter restrictions on the floor of the legislature based on unfounded allegations that Canadians are coming to Idaho to vote illegally. Others lost to Republican incumbents in primaries in Georgia, Kansas, and Nebraska.

The slate’s only victorious candidate is Diego Morales, who is now poised to take over as secretary of state in Indiana.

Morales echoed Trump’s claims about fraud and called the 2020 election a “scam” to oust the incumbent at the Indiana Republican Party’s state convention. He later softened those statements, calling Biden the legitimate president, but he remains on the website of the “America First” organization as of publication. He beat Democrat Destiny Wells, who hit him for his ties with the far-right, by 14 percentage points.

Three other candidates who espoused aspects of the Big Lie prevailed last week, though they were not part of the “America First” slate. 

Much like Morales, Monae Johnson used conspiracist allegations about election systems to oust South Dakota’s incumbent at a party convention. Her general election was largely a formality in this staunchly conservative state.

In Alabama, winner Wes Allen has questioned the results of the 2020 election, and he has already signaled how that may affect his state. He said earlier this year that, should he win, he would withdraw Alabama from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an organization that helps 32 states, and Washington D.C., maintain voter rolls. He explained his position by naming George Soros, shortly after a far-right website published an article that falsely tied ERIC to Soros.

In Wyoming, finally, Chuck Gray secured Trump’s endorsement to win the Republican nod for secretary of state in August, and then ran unopposed in last week’s general election. Gray has called the 2020 election “clearly rigged,” and has focused his attacks on the use of ballot drop boxes, echoing the debunked claims about the “woke left” using drop boxes to steal elections. He has also traveled to other states to meet with election deniers and observe their efforts to sow doubts on results.

These four states are deeply Republican, and the next presidential race is unlikely to be contested in any of them. Still, Democrats are competitive in plenty of elections in those states. Last week, Democratic U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan’s re-election bid in Indiana was one of the nation’s closest watched. In 2017, Democrats gained a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, in a special election that Republican nominee Roy Moore tried to block in court in an eerie trial run of Trump’s efforts in late 2020. Republican primaries can be competitive and need to be certified as well.

“It’s a danger to American democracy for people detached from reality and in hock to a political cult to hold governing responsibilities no matter what state they’re in,” Bassin said. “That’s true just as a matter of principle and democratic health, but it’s also the case that even the most deep red states have had contentious elections in recent years and will again.”

“No one should have to rely on a delusional partisan to oversee their elections,” he added.

Since Tuesday’s clobbering, few election deniers have shown a willingness to accept the outcomes. Mastriano, perhaps chastened by the magnitude of his defeat, issued a concession on Sunday evening. “Difficult to accept as the results are, there is no right course but to concede, which I do,” he said in a statement on social media. 

But Finchem retweeted a message last week from a supporter who called the outcome a “Soros orchestrated psychological operation!” after the media called the race for Democrat Adrian Fontes, and he has since repeatedly insinuated that voter fraud was at play.

And those who won now have a platform from which add the imprimatur of a state agency onto baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud.

On Saturday, four days after becoming Wyoming’s Secretary of State-Elect, Gray posted a picture of himself at an event with a conservative activist, former Trump campaign adviser, and also president of the organization Citizens United, who most recently produced a movie that Trumpworld has embraced about the 2020 election. Gray tweeted, “Really enjoyed meeting David Bossie today and seeing his film Rigged.”

The article has been updated with the most up-to-date results as of the evening of Nov. 14.

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