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SACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) – Democrats spent $ 50 million trying to gain control of state legislatures in 2020, but the effort mostly failed, cementing regional power in their more conservative Republican opponents on issues like abortion, education and criminal justice.
The losses also mean that in most of the 29 states with Republican-controlled legislatures, Democrats will have no say in how congressional districts will be drawn when the decade-long process begins in 2021. That will make it more difficult for congressional districts. voters. in more liberal areas of those states to elect his party’s candidates to both the House of Representatives and the state chambers for another 10 years.
“There must be a reckoning for the Democrats, because we are losing this election against,” said a Democratic strategist from Texas who requested anonymity so that he could speak frankly.
The stagnation of Democrats at the state level came despite massive turnout that shifted the presidential options of at least two states, from Republican Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden, as vote counting continued in several states before that a presidential winner could be declared.
In Texas, party officials are planning an autopsy to determine what went wrong, said the strategist, who is familiar with the thinking of party leaders.
“The Biden brand didn’t help us vote against it,” he said.
Biden lost to Trump in Texas, and the legislature remained firmly in Republican hands despite years of demographic change that benefited Democrats.
OBJECTIVE EIGHT STADIUMS
Democrats had targeted eight governorates across the country. But with the possible exception of Arizona, where ballots were still being counted Thursday, they failed to advance.
In Georgia, where a very thin margin separated Biden and Trump, Democrats were poised for a couple of seats, but not enough to win a majority. In North Carolina, Democrats lost some seats and Republicans maintained their majority.
Dave Abrams, who helped manage Republican efforts at the state level, said the mistake Democrats made was getting candidates to run on national issues, including health care, the coronavirus and President Donald Trump.
“The reality is that people vote on local issues, especially at the state level,” said Abrams, who is deputy executive director of the Republican State Leadership Committee.
The 2020 election is unlikely to alter the balance of party representation in the US state chambers, where Republicans started with 52% of 7,383 state legislative seats, said Ben Williams, a policy specialist at the National Conference. of State Legislatures.
Since the 2010 Republican sweep, when the party won 20 legislative chambers, Democrats have regained control of 17 of them, including some, like the New Hampshire State House, that have moved around, he said.
One of the main reasons for the Democrats’ struggle to make progress is the partisan manipulation that has cemented Republican majorities in states like Texas and Georgia, where demographic change appears to favor Democrats but districts favor Republicans, he said. Eric McGhee, principal investigator for the Public Policy Institute of California.
He cited Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin as states where most districts are so favorably attracted to Republicans that it would take a particularly large shift in local sentiment or demographics to elect Democrats.
In Texas, he said, districts are generally drawn in a way that favors the incumbent, whether Democrat or Republican, which has the effect of cementing Republican control.
‘TRUMP ONLY REPUBLICANS’
Jessica Post, who spearheaded the Democrats’ statewide coordination efforts, said the influx of Trump loyalists at the polls and Republican-drawn district maps in many states make it difficult for the party to gain ground.
“They were really crafted with strategic data to make sure we couldn’t change these state legislatures,” said Post, chair of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC).
While post-election data is still incomplete, Post also suspects that the high turnout brought on by the presidential election sparked a wave of “Trump-only Republicans” whose party-line votes helped Republicans near the bottom of the ballot.
In addition to participation and favorable district boundaries, many local representatives were re-elected due to the very nature of local politics: voters tend to like and keep their representatives even when voting for someone from a different party at the presidential level, he said. the politician. scientist Charles Bullock, a professor at the University of Georgia.
Additionally, he said, Republicans in Georgia in 2020 had a better ground game than Democrats, encouraging supporters to go to the polls for local candidates as well as Trump.
“They were knocking on the door and doing the traditional things where Democrats were hesitant to do so because of the coronavirus,” Bullock said.
Republican attacks on Democrats as “socialist” or anti-police may also have had an impact on some voters, particularly in rural areas, although such messages were likely less effective in urban and suburban neighborhoods, he said.
(Report by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, California, and Peter Szekely in New York; edited by Bill Tarrant and Richard Pullin)
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