Here’s A Map of Every State Legislator in 2021
Here’s a map of every state legislator in the U.S. as of March 2021, with districts and elected official data from the Cicero database.
In 2020, Democrats maintained their slim lead in the U.S. House but lost hundreds of state legislative seats.
After the 2020 election, Republicans increased their margin of state, national and local elected officials. At the state level, Republicans gained 153 seats and Democrats lost 142 state legislative seats. There are gaps in those two sets of numbers because of previously vacant seats that were filled with new legislators.
As of March 2021, after the general election, special elections, and many vacant seats being filled, Republicans now have 3,823 and Democrats have 3,253 elected officials in the U.S. at the national, state, and local level for the 350 largest U.S. cities. Before the 2020 election, Republicans had 3,657 officials and Democrats had 3,400. In the 2020 election, 1,799 officials were elected for the first time.
Milestones for Increasingly Diverse Representation
There were many notable milestones for increasing diversity in political representation amidst the thousands of state legislative races contested in 2020.
LGBTQ representation
In Delaware, Sarah McBride became the first transgender person to be elected to any state senate in the United States. McBride was previously the first openly transgender person to address a major party convention after speaking at the 2016 DNC. In Kansas, Stephanie Byers, a former teacher from Witchita, won a state house seat and became the first transgender legislator to be elected in that state and the entire midwest. In Tennessee, Republican Eddie Mannis and Democrat Torrey Harris became the first openly LGBTQ politicians elected to the Tennessee General Assembly. Previously Tennessee was one of only 5 states to have not elected an openly LGBTQ politician to its state legislature.
First-generation, racial, and ethnic representation
State legislatures saw an increasing representation of immigrants, children of immigrants, and a growing pool of racial and ethnic constituencies in the 2020 elections. In the Colorado House of Representatives, Iman Jodeh became Colorado’s first elected Muslim state lawmaker and Naquetta Ricks, a native of Liberia, became Colorado’s first elected state lawmaker who is an immigrant from Africa. They now represent adjacent districts in the area consisting of Aurora, CO.
In New York, Jenifer Rajkumar and Zohran Mamdani became the first South Asian lawmakers elected to the state assembly. They will represent nearby districts in the Queens borough of New York City, with a South Asian population of over 300,000 at the time of the 2010 U.S. Census. In the Wisconsin General Assembly, Samba Baldeh, a native of Gambia, became the first Muslim elected to state office in Wisconsin. He will represent District 48 in the area of Madison.
In the U.S. Congress, the decade-long upward trend of increasing representation of immigrants and children of immigrants also continued at the 2020 elections. Immigrants and children of immigrants make up 14% of the newly sworn-in 117th Congress (76 individual members), up from 13% for the 116th Congress, according to tracking by the Pew Research Center.
Female representation
Women now make up 30.9% of state legislatures across the country following the 2020 elections, according to data compiled by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. This figure equates to 2,279 women of 7,383 total elected state lawmakers and includes 552 women of color or 25.5% of women lawmakers. The cumulative share of women in state elected positions has increased by roughly 5% since 2018, after increasing by only 3% the previous 20 years from 1999–2018. Nevada features the largest share of state lawmakers who are women with 60.3%, and West Virginia has the smallest share, with 11.9%.
A record number of women are also serving in the U.S. Congress after the 2020 elections, according to the Pew Research Center. The newly sworn-in 117th U.S. Congress has 27% women members, or 144 total members. That includes 120 members of the U.S House and 24 members of the U.S. Senate. The share of women in the U.S. Congress is a 50% increase from the 112th U.S. Congress a decade ago.
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