This is the first in a four-part series examining possible outcomes of state legislative elections in 2022 and their potential impact on policy-making.
As Congress has become mired in gridlock, passing few meaningful bills each year, state governments have become home to most consequential legislative activity. And with the Supreme Court leaving abortion law to the states and considering whether to allow legislatures more power over elections, that trend is only continuing.
That makes the 2022 midterm elections critical for anyone concerned not only about reproductive rights and elections but also education policy, infrastructure, health care and a host of other issues.
With seats up for grabs across the country, The Fulcrum is kicking off a series examining which state legislatures are in play and what possible outcomes mean for policy-making in 2023.
Historically, the presidential party almost always loses state legislative seats in the midterm elections, the only recent exception being the 2002 midterm elections in which Republicans gained in state legislatures under George W. Bush’s presidency, soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that boosted his domestic popularity.
Still, several legislatures are close enough to fall on either side of the partisan line this November. The Fulcrum utilized ratings from Cnalysis and Sabato’s Crystal Ball to identify the most contentious legislative bodies, Ballotpedia data on midterm trends, and Campaign Legal Center redistricting data in order to examine likely outcomes in these states and what they mean for constituents and the country as a whole.
Both Cnalysis and Sabato use ratings systems that label races based on the likelihood of a particular outcome (tossup, solidly for Republicans, leaning towards Democrats, etc.). This series focuses mostly on states in the most competitive categories. This first installment examines the three states – Alaska, Connecticut and New Hampshire – where only one house of the bicameral legislature is within reach of the minority party this fall.
Alaska House of Representatives
With a total of 60 members, 40 in the House of Representatives and 20 in the Senate, Alaska has the smallest bicameral state legislature. Alaska currently has a divided government — while the Republican Party has firm control over the Senate and governor’s seat, the House is controlled by a bipartisan coalition, and has been since 2016.
Cnalysis gives the Alaska House of Representatives a rating of Lean R, predicting that 47 percent of districts will most likely go to Republicans, while 33 percent will most likely go to Democrats or Independents. In order for Democrats and their supporters to gain an outright majority, they would have to win four tossup districts, three Lean or Tilt D/I districts, as well as one Lean R district.
However, recent history shows that even with an outright Republican majority, the GOP can lose governing power: Republicans have lost control to bipartisan coalitions even when holding an admittedly slim majority on multiple occasions, as Independents and their own colleagues joined with Democrats. Still, Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the House Lean R, citing retirements and the strengthening conservative wing as reasons why the coalition may fail, returning Alaska to a GOP trifecta.
Additionally, according to data from Ballotpedia, the Alaska House of Representatives does not appear to follow election trends in the way that many other states do. Democrats gained seats in the 2014 midterms despite the presidency being in their control, as well as in 2016 despite Donald Trump’s White House triumph. Meanwhile, in 2018 Republicans gained seats though it was midterm year and their party held the presidency. Thus the expected backlash against President Biden’s Democratic Party may not necessarily be a factor in these legislative elections.
In terms of redistricting, Alaska has hit a few roadblocks. The new state legislative maps have been in effect since May 24, but are interim maps. They were created by the Alaska Redistricting Board (made up of three Republicans and two nonpartisan members who voted against the original maps) and are only being used because the original versions were invalidated by the Alaska Supreme Court on grounds of being illegal partisan gerrymanders. The board will continue to work on permanent maps per the Supreme Court’s guidelines in advance of the 2024 election cycle.
Alaska is the most likely of the three states to have a chamber transition to a new majority. Though Alaska’s Supreme Court continues to affirm the right to an abortion under the state’s constitutional protection of privacy, the state Republican Party takes an anti-abortion stance in its platform and may push back on this with greater legislative control.
The state has not enacted any laws changing election procedures in recent years, although that may change if Republicans regain the trifecta. Many bills that would restrict voter access or election administration have been introduced over the past two years, among them one which would end automatic voter registration, end mail ballot elections at the local and state levels, and criminalize most third-party ballot returns.
Voters, however, did push through a ballot initiative in 2020 that eliminated partisan primaries and instituted ranked-choice voting.
Connecticut Senate
The Constitution State’s General Assembly is composed of the 151-member House of Representatives and the 36-member Senate. Currently, Democrats control both chambers, and with a Democrat as governor, the party has the state government “trifecta.”
The contentious Senate is rated Lean D by Cnalysis, which determined that 41 percent of the districts will most likely go to Democrats while 22 percent will most likely go to Republicans, leaving 36 percent as tossups or slightly favorable to one party. In order to flip the House, Republicans would have to win the two Lean R districts, all 7 tossups and the two Tilt D districts, making a Republican majority possible but unlikely.
Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the Senate as a Likely D, but nonetheless expects the Democrat’s 24-seat margin to be reduced. That expectation matches historical midterm trends for this legislative body. The Democrats lost a seat in both the 2010 and 2014 midterms during Barack Obama’s presidency, and gained five seats in 2018 with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. They have remained in control of the Senate for the past 20 years, except when Democrats and Republicans had equal numbers following the 2016 election. It is likely that they will lose some seats in November, which analysts predict will feature a red wave.
The 2020 redistricting cycle will not have a large effect on the General Assembly elections this year. The new maps were created by a bipartisan commission and were agreed upon by both parties, with Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly calling it a “truly bipartisan effort.” According to the Campaign Legal Center, which does not yet have data on the new maps, the previous Senate map had a 5 percent partisan lean towards Republican candidates.
Overall, the mostly likely outcome for Connecticut is the continuation of their long held Democratic trifecta. However, if Republicans manage to beat the odds and win the Senate, the Constitution State will have a divided government. Republicans, even though more moderate than in some other states, would not get far in passing legislation to fit their agenda, but would have increased power to hinder the aspirations of Democrats.
That likely means recent legislative moves to make it easier to vote will stay on the books, but not be further expanded. In recent years, Connecticut has passed a law to restore felons’ voting rights upon their release, made it easier to vote by mail, allowed the use of ballot drop boxes and adopted automatic voter registration.
New Hampshire House of Representatives
The New Hampshire General Court is the fourth largest English-speaking legislative body in the world. The Granite State’s 24-member Senate is dwarfed by its 400-member House of Representatives, which is currently controlled by Republicans, 213–187.
The House of Representatives is rated Tilt R by Cnalysis. But New Hampshire’s unusual system, involving multimember districts, does not conform to Cnalysis’ method of reviewing individual races, according to Director Charles Nuttycombe. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates this legislative body Likely R, explaining that the firmer Republican Senate majority and Republican governor will aid House Republicans in maintaining and even widening their majority.
The House is historically vulnerable to partisan swings, particularly in midterm elections. From 2004 to 2018 the president’s party has won the House in every presidential election year and lost it in every midterm, according to data from Ballotpedia. Thus historical trends indicate that Republican gains are likely this November. Only in 2020 was this pattern broken, when Republicans won the New Hampshire House despite Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
The 2020 redistricting cycle may also affect results in these elections. While the Campaign Legal Center does not yet have any partisan data for New Hampshire’s state House maps, the previous Senate map was biased towards Republicans. As both legislative chambers and the governor’s seat have been held by Republicans since 2020, the new maps are also likely to be biased towards Republican candidates. (Republican Gov. Chris Sununu has twice vetoed bills intended to reform the redistricting process and form an independent redistricting commission or advisory board.)
Ultimately, though Democrats have a possibility of flipping the House, they face an uphill battle against midterm trends, redistricting and the substantial majority already held by New Hampshire Republicans. Like Connecticut, New Hampshire is currently a trifecta, although one controlled by Republicans. If Democrats manage to flip the House, they will have little power to pass their legislative agenda, but could hinder that of the Republicans.
For example, while abortion is protected up to 24 weeks in New Hampshire and Sununu has said he would not support any further related bills, the New Hampshire House GOP platform states the party supports the “pre-born child’s fundamental right to life,” indicating Republicans may attempt to pass legislation restricting abortion now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, legislation that a Democrat controlled House could stop.
Additionally, though state Republicans have enacted election-related laws over the past two years that have both expanded and restricted voting rights according to the Voting Rights Lab, the New Hampshire Democrats have highlighted voting rights and fair redistricting processes as priorities. With control of the House, they would likely push those issues but would have to convince Senate Republicans and a GOP governor to go along.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.