State Elections Watch: A Primer on What I’m Watching (Part 2/2)
5. State senate and house elections in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Maine — the states with high numbers of Obama-Obama-Trump swing counties.
If there will be a blue wave this coming Election Day, the shift will appear in states with the highest absolute numbers of counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but voted for Donald Trump in 2016: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Maine. Three of these states (Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin) are currently under the control of GOP ‘trifectas’ — state governments in which the governor and both state legislative chambers are held by the same party.
Michigan
All of Michigan’s 110 state House of Representatives seats are up for grabs in 2018, including 21 that are identified as battleground races by Ballotpedia. While Donald Trump (5) was the favored 2016 presidential candidate in more of these House districts than Hillary Clinton (4), Democrats have a chance to chip away at Republicans’ trifecta via this chamber; they would need to flip nine seats to regain control of the Michigan House.
The Dems’ hopes of regaining control of the State Senate in the Wolverine State are probably even slimmer, though still not nonexistent. While the GOP holds 27 of 37 seats, all 15 battleground races are currently held by Republicans. At least, Democrats stand a decent chance of nabbing a few Senate seats and nullifying the GOP’s veto-proof majority in the chamber — important when considering that Democratic candidate Gretchen Whitmer is currently polling more than 10 points ahead of Republican Bill Schuette.
Minnesota
Unlike Michigan, Minnesotans will mostly be voting on candidates in the state’s House; save for one election, Minnesota State Senate contests will take place in 2020. Minnesota Democrats are also looking at a considerably more favorable scenario: the party needs to flip 11 seats for a House majority in the House, and will have 22 battleground races in which to do so (you guessed it — ‘battleground’ as rated by Ballotpedia). Additionally, Hillary Clinton was the favored presidential candidate in seven of the battleground districts compared to Donald Trump’s four. And with Democrat Tim Walz’s nearly 10-point lead in the governor’s race, Dems look to be moving towards capturing their own trifecta in a state that Clinton won by fewer than 2 percentage points in 2016.
Wisconsin
Wisconsin is one of the GOP’s 26 trifecta governments, meaning Republicans hold the Badger State’s Assembly, State Senate, and the governorship. Still, two of these are currently true toss-ups: Scott Walker is in one of just four races not rated as leaning towards a party by FiveThirtyEight and six of the State Senate’s 33 seats are rated by Ballotpedia as battleground races, creating an opportunity for Democrats who are out of power by just three seats. Like Michigan and Minnesota, Wisconsin has a large number of Obama-Obama-Trump swing or ‘pivot‘ ’counties and, along with Michigan, has seen a fairly rapid rightward shift in labor rights and other policy arenas in the last several years.
Indeed, the 2018 contests in all three Great Lakes states as well as Iowa and Maine could be helpful glimpses into the prospects of a Democratic presidential challenger in 2020 and the policies this individual might support, potentially including M4A, a jobs guarantee, and other policies supported by decent margins of voters in most of these states.
6. The other state legislative races.
Democrats suffered sustained and historic state legislative losses under President Barack Obama. During his presidency, 968 state legislative seats flipped to the GOP. (For context, George W. Bush’s tenure saw a net loss of 324 seats for Republicans and Democrats lost a net of 524 seats under Bill Clinton.) The incumbent president’s party is typically hit hard in both federal and state elections, though typically not on the scale of 2008–2016. (There are a number of reasons for this trend, some of which were strategic and organizational oversights by Democrats themselves.)
The sustained shellacking produced the 26 GOP trifectas faced by the Democrats in 2018, accelerating anti-abortion legislation and partisan redistricting as Republicans gained control in legislative chambers, took control of governorships, and seized veto-proof majorities. In addition to setting back the Democrats’ political priorities, losses on this scale make the voter suppression and election administration chicanery described in part one of this piece that much more viable. Significant portions of the worst gerrymandering, voter purges, and software-enabled election meddling would not have been possible with greater pressure in legislative chambers.
Still, the Democrats can look ahead to the midterms with considerable optimism. There are 22 battleground chambers as identified by Ballotpedia’s analysis of the 2018 elections, and the majority of them are held by Republicans. Perhaps more interestingly, both the lower and upper chambers in Michigan and New Hampshire are under GOP control, indicating an opportunity for trifecta nullification as well as acquisition. (Conversely, the GOP has an opportunity to obtain control over both legislative chambers in Maine and Colorado, which currently see each party controlling a single chamber.)
7. State and local ballot measures in Alabama, Massachusetts, and Florida.
An often overlooked aspect of elections in general, and midterms in particular, are the myriad ballot initiatives/propositions/measures — that is, laws proposed directly to the public to be voted in and enacted by the electorate. (That is, unless you live in Washington, D.C.)
This coming November 6th, 37 states will present a total of 155 statewide ballot measures, including several that are worth highlighting due to their timeliness and broad implications. Additionally, there are presumably hundreds more local-level ballot measures that will be voted on in cities and counties across the United States — I was not immediately able to find an exact tally of such legislation, though Ballotpedia has a partial repository.
Alabama Amendment 2: State Abortion Policy
In an effort to enshrine Alabama’s current abortion policies, Representative Matt Fridy of Alabama’s 72nd district and other supporters of Amendment 2 are proposing to “recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life” and to ensure that Alabama’s constitution explicitly states that the state has no obligation to provide a right to or funding for abortion. The move, which can be seen as just the most recent iteration in the state’s attempts to limit access to abortion within its borders, is coming immediately on the heels of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the US Supreme Court and reports of potential future decisions that might undermine Roe or Casey.
Indeed, despite suggestions from the Amendment’s supporters that the proposal simply introduces popular opinion into the text of the Alabama constitution, both the legislation’s vagueness and regional historical context cast doubts on the sincerity of those arguments. Just a few years ago, voters in Tennessee approved a slightly moderated version of Amendment 2 in a reaction to court rulings that sought to hold Tennessee abortion providers to higher standards than those set in Roe and Casey. By all external indicators, Amendment 2 seems to be an attempt to beef up Alabama’s ability to enhance its anti-abortion efforts.
Massachusetts Question 1: Nurse-Patient Assignment Limits Initiative
This one comes with a bit of personal and professional bias — my former boss and Associate Director of Research at Healthforce Center (UC San Francisco), Joanne Spetz, recently spent some time speaking on Massachusetts’s Q1:
Generally, Spetz said, the literature shows there is a relationship between higher levels of nurse staffing and better patient outcomes — including shorter hospital stays and fewer cases when hospital staff fail to rescue a patient suffering from a complication. (“How Nurse Assignments Are Made And Would Change With Ballot Question 1,” WBUR.org. Published October 22, 2018.)
“I interpret the literature as a little bit of a wash,” Spetz said. Spetz said there may be differences between hospitals that choose to have higher staffing ratios, which have better outcomes, and hospitals that are forced to increase staffing ratios. (“Takeaways from Massachusetts Health Policy Commission’s Question 1 nurse staffing analysis: 3,000 more nurses and $950 million,” MassLive.com. Published October 4, 2018.)
To avoid a thesis-length discussion of the pros and cons of a healthcare policy that is still being tested and has only been preliminarily evaluated in California, I’ll simply state that nurse staffing ratios are a complicated question which probably have positive outcomes for the nurses providing care or the patients who receive care. It will be up to the voters of Massachusetts to decide whether the significant estimated costs assessed to Q1 are justified by the presumed benefits.
Florida Amendment 4: Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative
Through an executive order, former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe undid that state’s felon disenfranchisement in 2017 — a policy that, according to some analysts, played a role in the election of his Democratic successor, Ralph Northam. Now, Florida stands to undergo a similar change but on a distinctly larger scale: While Virginia saw the re-enfranchisement of approximately 168,000 formerly incarcerated residents (of which approximately 42,000 registered to vote in time to cast ballots in the gubernatorial election), there are currently approximately 1.4 million felons who are unable to vote in Florida. The ramifications extend past the red-blue political considerations of Democrats and Republicans: Described as modern-day Jim Crow and broadly painted as the intentional disenfranchisement of people of color (especially Black people), felony voter disenfranchisement has been shown to produce vastly disproportionate impacts on the electoral voice of POC.
8. The absolutely bonkers amounts being spent on ballot initiatives nationwide.
Last but not least, I’ll just quickly note that nearly one billion dollars has been donated to ballot-specific electoral campaigns in 2018, of which more than $670 million has already been spent. Literally just going to submit that nugget without comment.
To be sure, there are tons upon tons of electoral contests not highlighted here. With competitions up and down the ballot determining everything from corporate taxes to fund housing security to school board elections and raising the minimum wage, the 2018 general election will be instrumental in deciding many practical nuances of life at the state and local levels. Indeed, the accessibility and immediacy of local politics is what makes them so engaging — devoid of Washington’s swampiness, the business of state capitols and city halls can serve as the beginning of broader political projects.
