Republicans legislatures out number Democrats 27 to 17,
while Republican Governments (both governor and legislature) outnumber Democrats by 24 to 12.
This is a land slide victory for Republicans. Given that the state legislatures decide redistricting, and voter laws, these discrepancies in the state houses can also affect the national elections. The surest way for the Democrats to take back the house is to win the house is to win the state fight and then unskew* the voting system.
So the question becomes why is there so much of an imbalance at the state level and what can we do about it.
Note: I recognize that the actual result of the Democrats taking over would probably be to reskew in the opposite direction, which I don’t condone even if it would produce a result that I approve of.
It appears that in 2008 there were 27 states with Democrat Legislatures versus 16 with Republican legislatures in both with 7 mixed (one party controlling the senate and the other controlling the house) or non-partisan (Nebraska).
In 2010 this switched to 16 Democrat and 26 Republican with 8 mixed or non partisan
So it looks like Marley is right. It was just unfortunate that this happened on a census year. Hopefully it is just a matter of waiting out the remnants of the tea party. Given that the the Republican party is facing a growing Latino population and the only thing that is keeping it afloat it right now is gerrymandering and voter suppression, it sure looks like if these reverse come 2020 they are going to hit bottom hard.
Governorships tend to vaguely follow the trends for the US Congress. The Dems had a large majority of Governor mansions till 1994, then gained ground but didn’t surpass the GOP till 2006, and then dropped back to where they were before in 2010.
A huge chunk (38) of Governorships are up for election in 2014, so I imagine that the trend will continue, and the Dems will only win back the majority of Governorships if they also win back the house, and vice-versa.
In 2008 about 70 million democrats voted and about 60 million republicans voted
In 2010 about 40 million democrats voted and about 50 million republicans voted
In 2012 about 66 million democrats voted and about 61 million republicans voted
It is just due to turnout in the 2010 midterm election. In 2010 about 30 million democrats stayed home but only about 10 million republicans did the same.
Of course not everyone votes straight ticket so someone voting X way in a federal election doesn’t tell you how they voted in state elections. But the jist is still htat 2010 was a turnout election.
One word- Obamacare. There was about a year and a half of unchallenged propaganda against it, all the lies about death panels and socialism, etc. This rallied the Republican base so much that they came out in droves in 2010. Then, once they controlled statehouses, they gerrymandered the state and federal districts so that they could maximize their power for a decade.
Better idea: Don’t let the state legislatures draw the district lines. In Canada, that job is done by an independent commission of civil servants with public input. Let’s do it that way.
There will always be swings from side to side. MA voted in Scott Brown, and routinely votes in Republican governors despite Democrats outnumbering Republicans by about four to one in the state.
People in MA realize that if you let one party have complete control you get corruption, cronyism and waste.
One should also note that not all Republicans and Democrats are created equally, particularly at the state level.
MA may have GOP governors relatively often (and CA just had a long term with one) - but they aren’t anything like your typical US House Republican. And Scott Brown is hardly the same ideologically as Marco Rubio.
Conversely, Missouri has a Democratic governor, but he could easily be a Republican in a lot of other states.
Your preaching to the choir here as far as I’m concerned. I want the whole thing done by computer.
I agree. I don’t want the Republicans totally eliminated I just want them made sane. Any time I feel like I want a purely Democratic government I think of the DC mayor and city council and suddenly appreciate the existence of an opposition party. That still won’t stop me from voting for Democrats in Maryland though.
OK, just as long as I’m the one programming the computer.
This republican control also has to do with the influence of money on politics.
State level races are about the right size to be heavily influenced by money. They are big enough that TV ads can reach and influence a lot of the voters.
Smaller districts (like State Legislature seats) are small enough that the candidate & campaign workers can personally knock on doors and speak to a majority of the voters, and influence them directly. So TV ads & junk mail ads have less influence. (Or the small districts are so skewed by gerrymandering as to be non-competitive, and thus not worth fighting over.)
Larger races (nationwide) are roughly equally financed, so the influence of TV ads is roughly equal. The over-abundance of them leads to many voters largely ignoring them, at least up until the last 10 days of the campaign.
The Democratic Party is responding to this by getting ever tighter on identifying & targeting likely democratic voters, and hitting them with phone calls, emails, and doorknocking visits from volunteers. Also a heavy emphasis on Get-Out-The=Vote drives, computerized to reach the voters identified as leaning to their candidate. (The Obama campaign ran a very effective GOTV effort, while Romney’s was marred by technical problems.)
The Republican Party has responded by going back to their base for ever more money, to run even more ad campaigns for their candidates – not too successful. They are also trying to organize statewide campaign ‘themes’, with all their candidates across the state sticking to pre-tested ‘talking points’, and supporting these with TV ads & direct mail pieces. When they organize this effectively, it converts local elections in small districts into state-wide campaigns, which can be influenced by money spent on mass-market politics.
We don’t have enough data yet to know whether the GOP has a systemic state and local advantage driven by “anger issues,” which they can then translate through gerrymandering to disproportionate national influence, or whether they just lucked into having their wave fall on a Census year.
This is not either/or, of course. Both parties are employing both tactics, and you can bet if one proves significantly more effective then within one cycle both parties will be doing it (as with primaries, PACs, and Super PACs previously).
Once upon a time the cliche was elections were about Democratic volunteers with no money vs Republican money with no volunteers. Each party has done a good job eroding the other’s advantage. The Dems through technical ingenuity and interest-targeting finally learned how to raise money and the GOP through talk radio, evangelical “churches”, and Fox finally learned how to turn out the hordes.
Not necessarily one or the other, since state legislatures are also subject to districting effects. So it is possible that they have a systemic state and local advantage driven by districting effects made possible by the 2010 election, which will hold up unless a firm supermajority of voters vote against them.