Americans will see Democratic policies play out close to home in state governments, positions that affect how states fund their schools, build their roads, pay for Medicaid, appoint judges and set their electric bills.
The party moved dozens of state governments to the left, securing governor’s offices in previously Republican states, wresting control of state legislatures from conservatives, breaking up supermajorities and winning individual seats.
“We are about to have 30 Democratic governors in this country who will govern 75% of the population,” Meghan Meehan-Draper, the executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, told USA TODAY.
There were 24 Democratic governors going into Tuesday, and Democrats flipped five of the seats from Republicans in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada and Texas. A sixth flip could come in Alaska, where the race has not been called.
“There is sweeping power that governors have that people just don’t think about,” Meehan-Draper said. She pointed to the power governors wield over redrawing congressional maps, appointing judges to state courts, building up the Democratic bench for higher office and implementing federal policy.
Democrats also flipped 12 state legislative chambers and broke Republican supermajorities in another 12 chambers, according to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC). Democrats flipped more than 500 seats and are waiting for more than 300 more to be called, the committee said.
Heather Williams, the president of the DLCC, said legislatures have the power to decide how states spend money, which can shift how a state approaches education, health care, and other “things that we feel and experience every day.”
Taken together, Democrats took full control of the three main parts of state government in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and are waiting on results in Alaska and Arizona. Democrats also ended full Republican control in Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas.
Part of that success came from recruiting candidates. In 14 legislative chambers, Democrats were able to recruit candidates for every single race, the DLCC said. But Democrats didn’t need full recruitment to make historic gains Arizona.
“We won in districts that we didn’t know existed,” Sen. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona, said at a news conference Nov. 5. He predicted that Democrats would gain control of the Arizona House and the Arizona Senate for the first time in 60 years.
“We actually had to call up our friends that we put up as sacrificial lambs and tell them that they won,” Gallego said, referring to recruited candidates they didn’t expect to win. “And one of them remarked, ‘What are you talking about? That was not the plan.’ Well, it is now.'”
Jim Battista, a political science professor at the University at Buffalo, said Americans will see “bigger changes” in states that have full Democratic power, unlike in Congress, where Democrats will have to wrestle with a Republican president. “You can have real room for broadly more ‘big D’ Democratic policies to start taking place,” he said.
Chaz Nuttycomb, the executive director of State Navigate, which forecasts legislative races, said the results shocked him, too. “In Texas, we got our teeth knocked out,” Nuttycomb said. “We had the Democrats gaining 8 seats in the House.”
Instead, Democrats are positioned to flip 21 seats in the Texas House and took the majority, according to the Texas Tribune. Nuttycomb’s organization also predicted Republicans would win the Georgia House, but Democrats flipped it.
Democrats flipped 14 seats in the Indiana House, busting a Republican supermajority. Republicans are on track to lose more than a dozen seats in the Utah House, according to the Utah News Dispatch. Preliminary results in Wyoming, the most conservative state in the country, show a Democrat winning a toss-up state house district by 54 votes.
“When you think about some of the places that we won, Republican power had been unchecked there for so long,” said Williams, from the DLCC. “Those Republican elected officials had not seen real campaigns, maybe ever.”
Williams said the Democrats expected their legislative candidates to take a very basic approach: talk to voters and show that they were listening. She said that hustle was “hands down” why they won.
“That can change the dynamics quickly, and that momentum builds,” she said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Democrats grab sweeping power in governor’s offices, state houses
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