It's actually amazing thinking about it. It also doesn't make much sense since Democrats did better than 2018. Since Congress is now going to be completely hopeless rather than just mostly hopeless, it will be exciting to see the progress that states make. And it also means that Democrats have a strong bench for future elections, Gretchen Whitmer is the obvious example but far from the only one.
It is also another example of how this is such a weird midterm, this was in some ways a Democratic wave election and in other ways like the House popular vote a strong result for Republicans.
For the first time in years, more Americans will live in a state fully controlled by Democrats than in one fully controlled by Republicans. Thanks to their wins in gubernatorial or state-legislative elections, Democrats took complete control of three new state governments in the 2022 elections: Michigan, Minnesota and Vermont. They broke the GOP monopoly on power in Arizona and, potentially, New Hampshire. They also kept full control of state government in four of the five states where they were in danger of losing it. And they prevented Republicans from taking full control of North Carolina, Wisconsin and maybe even Alaska.
Republicans, on the other hand, didn’t flip a single legislative chamber from blue to red. This is the first midterm election since at least 1934 that the president’s party hasn’t lost a state-legislative chamber, according to Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee President Jessica Post. And though it didn’t affect who controlled state government, Democrats flipped the Maryland and Massachusetts governorships and maybe the Pennsylvania state House.
538: The midterms made state governments bluer
