The GOP Came Out Ahead in Legislative Races, But Their Gains Were Modest and Uneven

In the presidential election, the GOP fared better than in 2020 in every state. But in thousands of legislative races across the country, the results were more complicated. The GOP unquestionably had a better night than Democrats in state legislatures, but their gains were also modest and uneven. 

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.

	Heading into the elections	Heading out of the elections	Gain or loss for the GOP
Alabama House	76 R, 29 D	no elections held	0
Alabama Senate	27 R, 8 D	no elections held	0
Alaska House	21 R, 6 I, 13 D	21 R, 5 I, 14 D	0
Alaska Senate	11 R, 9 D	11 R, 9 D	0
Arizona House	31 R, 29 D	33 R, 27 D	+2
Arizona Senate	16 R, 14 D	17 R, 13 D	+1
Arkansas House	82 R, 18 D	81 R, 19 D	-1
Arkansas Senate	29 R, 6 D	29 R, 6 D	0
California House	62 D, 18 R	60 D, 20 R	+2
California Senate	31 D, 9 R	30 D, 10 R	+1
Colorado House	46 D, 19 R	43 D, 22 R	+3
Colorado Senate	23 D, 12 R	23 D, 12 R	0
Connecticut House	98 D, 53 R	102 D, 49 R	-4
Connecticut Senate	24 D, 12 R	25 D, 11 R	-1
Delaware House	26 D, 15 R	27 D, 14 R	-1
Delaware Senate	15 D, 6 R	15 D, 6 R	0
Florida House	84 R, 36 D	85 R, 35 D	+1
Florida Senate	28 R, 12 D	28 R, 12 D	0
Georgia House	102 R, 78 D	100 R, 80 D	-2
Georgia Senate	33 R, 23 D	33 R, 23 D	0
Hawaii House	45 D, 6 R	42 D, 9 R	+3
Hawaii Senate	23 D, 2 R	22 D, 3 R	+1
Idaho House	59 R, 11 D	61 R, 9 D	+2
Idaho Senate	28 R, 7 D	29 R, 6 D	+1
Illinois House	78 D, 40 R	78 D, 40 R	0
Illinois Senate	40 D, 19 R	40 D, 19 R	0
Indiana House	70 R, 30 D	70 R, 30 D	0
Indiana Senate	40 R, 10 D	40 R, 10 D	0
Iowa House	64 R, 36 D	67 R, 33 D	+3
Iowa Senate	34 R, 16 D	35 R, 15 D	+1
Kansas House	85 R, 40 D	88 R, 37 D	+3
Kansas Senate	29 R, 11 D	31 R, 9 D	+2
Kentucky House	80 R, 20 D	80 R, 20 D	0
Kentucky Senate	31 R, 7 D	31 R, 7 D	0
Louisiana House	73 R, 32 D	no elections held	0
Louisiana Senate	28 R, 11 D	no elections held	0
Maine House	81 D, 2 I, 68 R	76 D, 2 I, 73 R	+5
Maine Senate	22 D, 13 R	20 D, 15 R	+2
Maryland House	102 D, 39 R	no elections held	0
Maryland Senate	34 D, 13 R	no elections held	0
Massachusetts House	134 D, 1 I, 25 R	134 D, 1 I, 25 R	0
Massachusetts Senate	36 D, 4 R	35 D, 5 R	+1
Michigan House	56 D, 54 R	58 R, 52 D	+4
Michigan Senate	20 D, 18 R	no elections held	0
Minnesota House	70 D, 64 R	67 R, 67 D	+3
Minnesota Senate	34 D, 33 R	34 D, 33 R	0
Mississippi House	79 R, 2 I, 41 D	no elections held	0
Mississippi Senate	36 R, 16 D	no elections held	0
Missouri House	111 R, 52 D	111 R, 52 D	0
Missouri Senate	24 R, 10 D	24 R, 10 D	0
Montana House	68 R, 32 D	58 R, 42 D	-10
Montana Senate	34 R, 16 D	32 R, 18 D	-2
Nebraska Senate	33 R, 1 I, 15 D	33 R, 1 I, 15 D	0
Nevada House	28 D, 14 R	27 D, 15 R	+1
Nevada Senate	13 D, 8 R	13 D, 8 R	0
New Hampshire House	202 R, 198 D	222 R, 178 D	+20
New Hampshire Senate	14 R, 10 D	16 R, 8 D	+2
New Jersey Assembly	52 D, 28 R	no elections held	0
New Jersey Senate	25 D, 15 R	no elections held	0
New Mexico House	45 D, 25 R	44 D, 26 R	+1
New Mexico Senate	27 D, 15 R	26 D, 16 R	+1
New York Assembly	102 D, 48 R	103 D, 47 R	-1
New York Senate	42 D, 21 R	41 D, 22 R	+1
North Carolina House	72 R, 48 D	71 R, 49 D	-1
North Carolina Senate	30 R, 20 D	30 R, 20 D	0
North Dakota House	82 R, 12 D	83 R, 11 D	+1
North Dakota Senate	43 R, 4 D	42 R, 5 D	-1
Ohio House	67 R, 32 D	65 R, 34 D	-2
Ohio Senate	26 R, 7 D	24 R, 9 D	-2
Oklahoma House	81 R, 20 D	81 R, 20 D	0
Oklahoma Senate	40 R, 8 D	40 R, 8 D	0
Oregon House	35 D, 25 R	36 D, 24 R	-1
Oregon Senate	17 D, 13 R	18 D, 12 R	-1
Pennsylvania House	102 D, 101 R	102 D, 101 R	0
Pennsylvania Senate	28 R, 22 D	28 R, 22 D	0
Rhode Island House	65 D, 1 I, 9 R	64 D, 1 I, 10 R	+1
Rhode Island Senate	33 D, 5 R	34 D, 4 R	-1
South Carolina House	88 R, 36 D	88 R, 36 D	0
South Carolina Senate	30 R, 16 D	34 R, 12 D	+4
South Dakota House	63 R, 7 D	64 R, 6 D	+1
South Dakota Senate	31 R, 4 D	32 R, 3 D	+1
Tennessee House	75 R, 24 D	75 R, 24 D	0
Tennessee Senate	27 R, 6 D	27 R, 6 D	0
Texas House	87 R, 63 D	88 R, 62 D	+1
Texas Senate	19 R, 12 D	20 R, 11 D	+1
Utah House	61 R, 14 D	61 R, 14 D	0
Utah Senate	23 R, 6 D	23 R, 6 D	0
Vermont House	105 D, 8 Other, 37 R	87 D, 7 Other, 56 R	+19
Vermont Senate	22 D, 1 Other, 7 R	16 D, 1 Other, 13 R	+6
Virginia House	51 D, 49 R	no elections held	0
Virginia Senate	21 D, 19 R	no elections held	0
Washington House	58 D, 40 R	59 D, 39 R	-1
Washington Senate	29 D, 20 R	30 D, 19 R	-1
Washington, D.C., council	11 D, 2 I	11 D, 2 I	0
West Virginia House	89 R, 11 D	91 R, 9 D	+2
West Virginia Senate	31 R, 3 D	32 R, 2 D	+1
Wisconsin House	64 R, 35 D	54 R, 45 D	-10
Wisconsin Senate	22 R, 11 D	18 R, 15 D	-4
Wyoming House	57 R, 5 D	56 R, 6 D	-1
Wyoming Senate	29 R, 2 D	29 R, 2 D	0

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.