This Is Why You Don’t Recognize Your State Government

The most underappreciated story this election year is happening everywhere and yet is completely overshadowed by the race for the White House.

No matter who wins the presidency, the nation is going in two different directions. That’s because more states have fallen under one-party control — either Republican or Democrat — than at any time in modern US history. The shifting dynamic is suppressing competition in elections, discouraging voter engagement and, in too many places, enabling the party in power to ignore perspectives outside of their base. In short, political choice is vanishing.

In 40 “trifecta” states — where both chambers of the legislature and governor’s office are controlled by a single party — compromise has lost its luster, and large groups of voters are being sidelined with little influence over the decisions that affect their lives.¹

The result is representative democracy’s steady erosion, in which geography determines destiny for 82% of the American population — 41% live under Democratic control in 17 states and 41% under Republicans in 23 states. This divide is clear in a trove of state-level data on elections and legislation that reveals a nation not only splitting along party lines but also over the importance of democratic representation itself.

The impact on policy has been asymmetrical. For the past quarter-century, the public has become more progressive on many social issues, according to Gallup. Blue trifecta states have moved with it, namely on abortion, gender identity, climate change, guns, immigration and voting rights. Red trifectas, meanwhile, have hewed to their base and to policies that receive majority support only half the time — rejecting Medicaid expansion, relaxing gun laws and cutting unemployment insurance. To many voters in the 23 Republican trifecta states, representative government is not representing them.

The data shows that blue monopolies channel the goals of their voters, while red monopolies channel the agendas of their legislators (often at the expense of voters). Both types of trifectas, however, have contributed to our nation’s increasing political polarization. Democrats in trifecta states are legislating without having to heed the needs of Republican legislators or their voters. Republicans are legislating in their trifecta states without incorporating Democrats into the process.

The result is that we increasingly have two kinds of states — each careening unchecked in very different directions, at different speeds, and with different consequences. It’s a painful and dangerous trend for participatory democracy.

Nothing explains single-party states’ disconnect with the public better than America’s geographical divide on abortion policy.

In 45 states, the majority of residents say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 80% of Americans nationwide say that decisions about abortions should be made by women in consultation with their health care providers, not lawmakers. But in 21 of 23 Republican-controlled states, legislators have passed abortion laws that tend to be more restrictive than the public prefers. By contrast, 10 of 17 states with Democratic majorities strengthened their abortion-access laws after the Dobbs ruling threw the issue to the states.

But there’s a path forward. A bipartisan approach is the most likely form of government to lead a polarized nation back to moderation.

Unfortunately, divided government is the rarest form of state government today. About 17% of Americans live in one of the nine states that qualify, though only 8.8% live in states that split control in a way that requires bipartisanship: Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.² In the other states, a legislative supermajority can override a governor’s veto.

Well-formed, enduring policy ideas rarely spring from a single party. After many years of covering government and legislatures, we’ve learned that the friction of dissent and dialogue refines policies, just as steel sharpens steel. We also know Americans expect more bipartisanship than they are seeing in government today. When Pew Research Center asked in May for the top problems facing the nation, 60% of Americans cited “the ability of Democrats and Republicans to work together.”

The Party Decides, Then Divides

Precisely how big is the gulf between voters and trifecta governments? Political scientists Chris Warshaw and Devin Caughey gathered a century of public opinion polls, election results and state policies to measure the difference between mass policy preferences and state government policies across all 50 states. In their book Dynamic Democracy, they find that party control “matters much more now than it once did.” Across 72 major issues, the average state policy “matches majority opinion only 59% of the time.”

There is a stark difference between how Republicans and Democrats handle trifecta power. There is also a dynamic and diverse range of outcomes depending on the state, Warshaw and Caughey found. Each state tells a different story of democratic change over time — some more promising than others.

Among the 19 states with at least two-thirds of policies aligning with majority opinion in 2020, all were under Democratic or split control for most of the preceding two decades. New York saw the largest increase in policy responsiveness, going from 46% alignment in 2000 to 83% by 2020. States that spent more years under Republican control ranked lowest, and several of those — including South Dakota, Wyoming, Tennessee and Idaho — became even less aligned with their constituents over the 20-year period. More heavily gerrymandered states — such as Wisconsin and Arkansas — also proved less responsive than their counterparts with better democratic representation.

States play an enormous role in influencing the lives of people, even those outside their borders. Their election laws will influence the certification of November’s presidential election. Their health care laws determine how much federal Medicaid money flows into their states. Their education and environmental laws shape the welfare of citizens for generations. And their redistricting maps influence who will serve in Congress.

Divisive forces may become even more powerful in 2025. If Trump is elected, the power of state governments may reach new heights with his plans to give them authority over issues like education funding and the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. In this scenario, policy differences between “red” and “blue” states would inevitably grow, stranding more moderate voters (those who prefer a middle ground between the partisan extremes).

Voters Have Fewer Choices

So how did we get here and why does it matter? The primary drivers of this unprecedented rise in one-party rule, scholars say, has been three decades of partisan gerrymandering, the nationalization of politics, the demise of local journalism and a decline in competitive elections.

Nearly half of all state legislators running for reelection in recent decades faced challengers only in the general election, and 35% of all legislators were elected with no opposition at all, according to Steven Rogers, professor of political science at Saint Louis University.

If there were a tipping point toward one-party rule in America, it took place in the past 24 years, when gerrymandering entered an unprecedented level of intensity, Jake Grumbach explains in his book, Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics. A major part of the swing was due to Republicans rigging the political landscape one state at a time by creating favorable maps in the 2010 redistricting process. Their undeniable success expanded trifecta control from 10 to 22 states in just two years.

No state demonstrates the impact of partisan gerrymandering better than Wisconsin. Going into the 2010 elections, Democrats controlled both chambers of the state legislature — as they had in sixteen of the preceding thirty years. But Republicans captured trifecta control from 2011 to 2018, largely due to maps so skewed that Republicans managed to fill 59% of legislative seats up for election in 2012, despite winning only 46% of votes. They enacted an aggressively conservative agenda that included abortion restrictions, weakened collective bargaining for state workers and rejected Medicaid expansion. All of those policies were out of step with popular opinion at the time.

Gerrymandered districts also sap competition in state elections — even as parties canceled out each other’s advantages at the national level. According to a Bloomberg analysis of state legislative election data, minority parties increasingly sit out races, reinforcing the majority party’s control. Republicans, in particular, face less competition than they did in prior decades.

One of those Republicans was state Representative Will Weatherford of Florida. As a freshman legislator, he was reelected without opposition in 2008, faced nominal opposition in 2010, and then took charge of the state’s redistricting committee in 2011. A year later, he won in a redrawn district without opposition again and rose to speaker of the Florida House, the pinnacle of legislative power in one of America’s most populous states.

Across the country this year, 38% of all state legislative seats will be filled without a challenge from the opposing party. That’s thousands of seats — 2,217 to be exact. And states with the largest supermajorities have the fewest contested races.

Taken together, it’s no wonder one-party states have more apathetic voters. A Bloomberg analysis of voting data found that since 1980, trifecta states had lower turnout on average than divided states in all but two midterm elections. In 2022, voters were less likely to cast ballots in states that spent more of the past decade under single-party control.

Trifectas Nurture One-Sided Policy

Abortion bans weren’t the only policy that trifecta state legislatures chose to steamroll past citizens. The path to victory for many partisans is winning the backing of a party’s most engaged supporters, as opposed to compromising with the opposition party or getting the support of the average voter in their districts. Michigan and North Carolina offer stark examples of how one party comes to dominate the legislative agenda.

In 2011, the median voter in Michigan did not change much, but the party in power did. And the freshly elected Republicans took their policy visions to the extreme by passing three-quarters of the legislation that year with no buy-in from the minority party. The result was a conservative agenda that raised taxes on pensions, lowered taxes on corporations and enacted the state’s first right-to-work laws, forbidding contracts that require workers to pay union dues.

After a voter-approved redistricting commission led the state to a period of divided government from 2019 to 2022, moderation returned to Michigan and more than 50% of the legislation passed came from bipartisan-sponsored bills in 2022. But when Democrats took control in 2023, they also pushed through their progressive priorities, often without bipartisan support, expanding clean energy and voting rights, protecting LGBTQ+ rights and imposing gun reforms.

North Carolina’s flip on voting access is another cautionary tale of one-sided government. It went from leading on the issue to passing one of the most restrictive laws in the nation when it elected a Republican governor and legislature in 2012. Changes in its voter ID and early voting laws were later struck down in court for targeting areas with heavier concentrations of Black voters. In 2023, when Democrat Roy Cooper was serving as governor, the Republican legislature won a supermajority and promptly used its power to strip him of key powers.

The trend toward one-sided policy continued in trifecta states controlled by Republicans and Democrats alike. A Bloomberg analysis of state legislative data via LegiScan found that between January 2021 and July 2024, nearly 2,000 pieces of legislation were passed without a single vote from the opposing party.

Red and Blue Trifectas Disagree on Democracy Itself

Buoyed by these systemic advantages, trifecta governments use their power over how elections are handled in opposite ways, the data show. Republicans seek ways to strengthen their party’s control as they did in North Carolina; Democrats use their power to enable voters.

A Bloomberg analysis of data compiled by the non-partisan Voting Rights Lab found that more than 120 election law changes in Republican-led states over the last four years have had at least one component intended to restrict voter access or election administration — such as tightening voter ID requirements, restricting mail-in voting, limiting ballot drop-off locations and shortening the early voting period. By contrast, the analysis showed, Democrats’ legislation has focused on improving voter access by standardizing voter registration, ensuring a sufficient number of polling sites and expanding the early voting period.

Grumbach, of UC Berkeley, developed the State Democracy Index with 51 measures of electoral democracy — things like the ease of registering to vote, the fairness of legislative districting, the level of gerrymandering and the strictness of laws requiring identification to vote. In 2000, there was little difference among these measurements between the states. But by 2018, when partisan competition had declined significantly, states that Republicans had dominated over the previous two decades had become substantially less democratic.

“In some states, voting is easier, safer, more accessible than ever before, and districts are about as fair as they’ve ever been,’’ Grumbach says. “And then in another set of states, mostly red, voting is harder than it was in the ‘90s. In terms of partisan gerrymandering, states have set true historical records.”

He argues that these heavily gerrymandered states paved the way for the ascendance of Trumpism and were the breeding ground for policies such as racial authoritarianism in policing, the role of wealthy interests in setting the policy agenda and the steady erosion of democratic institutions through voter suppression.

Unresponsive Legislators Rarely Pay a Price

In theory, if voters don’t like what their legislators do, they can vote them out of office. And given America’s strong desire for bipartisanship, one-sided legislatures responsible for unpopular policies should pay an electoral price. But that rarely happens. In the era of low-competition for legislative races and voter apathy, the reality is that few voters hold their lawmakers accountable for being out of sync with their views.

In his 2023 book, Accountability in State Legislatures, Rogers studied legislative elections, roll-call votes and public opinion and concluded that legislators who are out of step with the majority of their constituents are often reelected anyway, especially if they’re in “safe” partisan districts with little or no competition.

Part of the reason voters are quick to let state legislators off the hook is counterintuitive: Gallup polls show Americans trust state officials more than Congress by 27 percentage points, yet don’t know much about them. Only 11% of voters could recall their state representatives and less than 60% could say which party controlled their state House of Representatives, according to a 2018 survey by Rogers.

Fewer than 60% of Americans knew their state’s policies on background checks for guns, abortion before Roe v. Wade, or taxes, he found. Voters couldn’t identify their governor’s powers and didn’t know their governor could issue an executive order or pardons. By contrast, they knew that the president had those powers.

The collapse of local journalism plays a major role in the public’s lack of knowledge. One-third fewer newspaper reporters are now covering state governments than there were at the turn of the century, and data shows this trend is most pronounced in conservative-voting counties which have become virtual news deserts, forcing people to rely on less-reliable sources and social media for their news.

Rogers measured the number of full-time capital reporters and the degree to which legislators who are ideologically distant from their districts lose votes. His conclusions: Legislators are more likely to lose reelection for poor ideological representation in states with a robust number of reporters covering state government than in most states with only five full-time reporters. In competitive districts, especially, he found that when there is increased media attention legislators are held more accountable.

Ballot Initiatives Are Booming

Instead of voting their representatives out of office, voters are increasingly overruling their unresponsive legislatures by going directly to the ballot. Ballot initiatives in trifecta states have surged to an unprecedented level in recent years, according to a preliminary study released in September by Madison Schroder at the University of Oregon. And when presented with an organized campaign on a policy issue, voters show they will respond.

In studying direct democracy proposals, including constitutional amendments, from 2016 to 2022, Schroder found a surprising pattern. In Republican-controlled states — where policymaking has taken a rightward shift — there were nearly twice as many liberal-leaning ballot measures than there were conservative-leaning measures.

Even more revealing, however, is that those liberal-leaning policies were highly aligned with public opinion. Blue initiatives in red states had an average success rate of 67% — meaning that in 38 instances, a majority of voters in Republican states considered their government unresponsive enough to circumvent it and directly enact policies through ballot referenda. Conservative-leaning ballot measures fared much worse, with success rates of under 50% in both blue and red states.

The policy areas of the counter-partisan ballot initiatives reveal the issues where voters are particularly dissatisfied with their state governments. Schroder found that the “red policies” in Democrat-controlled states were primarily related to tax policy, while the “blue policies” in Republican-controlled states related to ensuring reproductive rights, legalizing marijuana, protecting workers rights and the environment, incentivizing clean energy and expanding Medicaid.

Escaping the Single-Party Trap

It seems as if we’re trapped in a political system of our own making. But Warshaw and Caughey say their research, which spans eight decades, also makes them optimistic.

They acknowledge that “state policy responsiveness is often disappointingly sluggish and piecemeal.” But, they argue, the public does influence state policy even if “it may take decades.”

For example, states used to ban alcohol sales and once outlawed all marijuana use and same sex marriage. None of those laws are still on the books. Health care access has been expanded under Obamacare in all but 10 Republican-controlled states, and abortion rights are now on the ballot in eight red states.

Still, ballot initiatives are less of a cure for too much single-party rule than an “escape valve,” as Warshaw puts it. “On the issues the public feels strongly about, the states eventually fall in line. It just takes much longer than many people would like.”

So how do we ensure that states wield power responsibly and legislate in a way that reflects the majority in all states and not a small hyper-partisan minority? It starts with restoring competitiveness to state elections and removing the intentional barriers to competition. Voters who feel powerless and disenfranchised are less likely to be engaged which can further fuel uncompetitive elections. Every statehouse member should feel the heat of being challenged every election. Legislators who aren’t held to account can ignore the public will, encouraging minority rule and, inevitably, disenchantment with the ideas that have held America together.

States should enact redistricting reforms that diminish partisan bias, such as enacting non-partisan and independent commissions with the power to redraw political boundaries. That is how Michigan went from one of the most gerrymandered states in the country a decade ago to one in which the close partisan edge in the state legislature now reflects the popular vote. Ohio is voting on a similar measure this year.

Communities can increase voter participation by focusing on the stunning lack of awareness about state-level politics. Promising innovators in this space are a non-profit called CivicLex based in Lexington, Kentucky and States Newsroom, which is expanding legislative coverage by building non-profit newsrooms in every state capital.

Other ideas include inspiring people to run for office with public campaign financing and limits on campaign spending; increasing voter engagement through open primaries, multi-member districts, fusion voting or ranked choice voting to get around polarizing primaries. Voters in Colorado, Idaho, Nevado, Oregon, the District of Columbia, Arizona, Montana and South Dakota have ballot measures before them in November with many of these proposals. All attempt to increase incentives for elected officials to appeal to broader segments of the population than a narrow partisan base.

The single-party problem in the United States can be difficult to behold: 82% of Americans are living under it. But it’s also a profoundly local issue, and one with opportunities for citizens to get involved. Instead of only obsessing about Congress and the White House, start tracking your state legislature and governor’s office, too. Your vote matters, and the more people who participate in the electoral process, the faster change can happen. Until the weaknesses that have led us to unresponsive government are rectified, states will continue to be laboratories of democratic backsliding and voters will continue to be ignored.