With midterm elections fast approaching, the national conversation has settled into a well-worn pattern: Forecasters and pundits are handicapping the battle for control of the House and Senate, and every new poll sparks another round of speculation.
Those stories grab most of the headlines. But after the polls close on Nov. 3 I’ll be looking down the ballot at state executive and particularly legislative races. The outcomes of these elections will shape policy on a host of issues, from taxes and education, where states set much of the agenda, to emerging questions like the construction of data centers, which is almost exclusively a state and local responsibility.
For some context, let’s look at a few recent midterms and the way legislative voting went: 2010, 2018 and 2022. Each was the first midterm for a newly elected president, and each tells a different story about what happens down the ballot when voters weigh in between presidential elections.
The 2010 midterms marked a near-record setback for Democrats at the state level. A Ballotpedia analysis found that in the midterm elections during President Barack Obama’s first term Democrats lost 702 state legislative seats nationwide — the most by either major party since the 1922 midterms, when Republicans lost 890 seats. Republicans also gained control of 20 state legislative chambers and netted six governorships.
All of those partisan changes at the state level added up to some interesting dynamics for congressional redistricting. Before the election, 131 U.S. House seats were in states with Democratic “trifectas,” where one party controls both chambers of a state’s legislature and its governorship, while 66 districts were in states with Republican trifectas. After the election, Republican trifectas controlled redistricting for 198 U.S. House seats, while Democratic trifectas controlled redistricting for 115.
Trifecta control may have helped Republicans in 2012. America re-elected Obama while maintaining GOP control of the House, even though Democrats garnered 1.4 million more votes for their House candidates nationwide. It was just the second time since World War II that such a split in the number of votes versus the number of seats won had happened.
In 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term, Republicans lost ground, but 2010’s results seem to have protected them from worse outcomes. Heading into the 2018 midterms, Republicans controlled 4,134 state legislative seats and 67 legislative chambers to Democrats’ 3,123 seats and 32 chambers. Republicans also held supermajorities in 17 legislatures, while Democrats held supermajorities in four. As a result of the 2018 elections, Democrats won control of six legislative chambers and gained legislative supermajorities in three additional state legislatures while Republicans lost one.
Certainly Democrats did well in that election — in all, the party gained 308 seats, while Republicans lost 294 — but they didn’t regain all the ground they lost in Obama’s first midterm. One possible reason? Blame it on the 2010 wave. As political analyst Louis Jacobson noted in Governing just before the 2018 midterms, “That election was held prior to the 2010 Census round of redistricting, which ultimately bolstered Republican legislative prospects in a number of previously competitive states. Those 2010-drawn lines now protect Republicans in many states, limiting Democratic options for flipping chambers this year.”
In 2022, midway through President Joe Biden’s term, there was a lot of chatter about a “wave election” that would reshape power at the national and state levels. Voters delivered something different: a historical oddity in which the president’s party lost some ground in Congress but more than held its own in the states.
Heading into that election, Democrats controlled 36 legislative chambers while Republicans controlled 62. When the votes were counted, Democrats had gained control of four more chambers, and Republicans had lost control of five (one of which was the Alaska House, which changed from GOP control to a bipartisan, Republican-Democrat coalition). Nationwide, Democrats lost a net of just four state legislative seats, while Republicans had a net gain of 27.
(2022 was also a good year for incumbent legislators, regardless of party. Just 179, or 3.9 percent, of incumbents seeking re-election were defeated. By comparison, 495 incumbents lost in 2010 and 318 lost in 2018.)
What does it all mean for 2026?
The prevailing lesson of these three midterms is that electoral success is fleeting. The second is that political history and trends are informative but not determinative. The 2010 results played out over several years and election cycles. The 2022 results raise a different question for this year: Is this the new normal, where months of talk about a wave for one party or the other turns out to be a mirage on election night?
We’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, pay attention to the races down the ballot. That’s where the long-term story gets written.
Leslie Graves is the founder and CEO of Ballotpedia, which provides nonpartisan, unbiased data and other information on politics and elections for voters, researchers, activists, students and journalists.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.