By Julia Harte
Nov 4 (Reuters) – Democrats’ takeover of the US Congress on Tuesday was replicated at the state level, with the party flipping Republican-held governors’ offices in at least five states and poised to seize full control of state government in at least six more.
Democratic victories mean the party, for the first time in years, will control a majority of the governorships, including traditional conservative strongholds such as Texas, where Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated well-financed Republican Governor Greg Abbott to become the first Latina governor in the state’s history.
The wins extended beyond governors’ mansions. Democratic candidates seized control of both state legislative chambers in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, giving the party “trifecta” control of the legislature and governor’s office in those states. They also broke Republican trifectas in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Texas.
On top of giving Democrats more control over state laws on minimum wage, data centers, abortion access, and other hot-button issues, the wins could affect future national elections by changing how US congressional districts are drawn, how elections are administered, and how results are certified, according to policy experts.
Some of the biggest and most surprising wins came in battleground states that have been key to President Donald Trump’s election victories, and where Republican-led legislatures in recent years redrew congressional district boundaries to favor their party.
In at least three states — Georgia, Indiana and Ohio — Democrats also ousted incumbent Republican secretaries of state: the office that typically oversees election administration and certification of results.
All those outcomes are “very significant” for future US elections, according to Michael Berkman, a political science professor and director of Penn State University’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy.
He said Republicans won a similar sweep of state-level offices during former President Barack Obama’s first midterm election in 2010, which allowed them to pass election laws, redraw congressional districts, and give their party more control over how elections were administered in some states.
“So this gives Democrats an opportunity to really start to claw that back,” Berkman said.
The new Democratic leaders and legislators will likely try to undo some conservative policies that have recently dominated the national discourse, such as abortion restrictions and data center incentives, experts said.
But the incoming Democrats will also take office with “a huge backlog of liberal legislation that they want to do,” said Chris Warshaw, a professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
Their top priorities will likely address voters’ concerns about affordability, such as raising the minimum wage, expanding the federal Medicaid health insurance program and protecting labor rights, Warshaw said.
In Texas and Georgia, Republicans looked likely to lose control of the state legislatures for the first time in more than 20 years, yielding control over one chamber in each state to Democrats.
“The voters have delivered a mandate for change, and it is change they will get,” Hinojosa said in a victory speech on Tuesday night.
Texas and Georgia voters also elected Democratic attorneys general for the first time in more than a decade, replacing Republican incumbents who had frequently sued past Democratic presidents over federal policies with which they disagreed.
As a result, “those places will stop being fountains for initial lawsuits, and start being fountains for lawsuits that are challenging things that Trump is doing,” said Jim Battista, associate professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
(Reporting by Julia Harte; editing by Paul Thomasch and Aurora Ellis)
