Tom Cronin & Bob Loevy
Colorado is one of only seven of the 50 states which could have a state legislative chamber shift from one political party to the other in the upcoming November general elections.
Democrats currently control the Colorado state Senate, which now has 20 Democratic state senators and only 15 Republicans. A shift of just three seats from Democratic to Republican in next fall’s elections would give the Republicans an 18-17 vote majority.
According to Louis Jacobson, an analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, political party control of state legislative chambers — state senates and state houses of representatives — tends to be static and not change much from election to election. That Colorado has a state Senate capable of being won by either political party in the 2022 elections is an exception.
Other states that will, like Colorado, have a state legislative chamber up for grabs are Alaska, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Oregon. In the remaining 42 states, political party control of either house of the state legislature is not expected to change.
Left out of these calculations is Nebraska, which has a unicameral state legislature (one house rather than two) and is non-partisan (Democratic and Republican identifications are not used).
The University of Virginia study identified Colorado as one of 17 states in which both the state Senate and the state House of Representatives are controlled by the Democratic Party. This compares with 29 states, almost twice as many, where both houses are controlled by the Republican Party. In only three states — Alaska, Minnesota and Virginia — is party control of the state legislature divided with the Democrats controlling one house and the Republicans the other.
Note that, should the Republicans win control of the Colorado state Senate in the general election this November, Colorado will join this small group of states with a different party in control of the state Senate from the party that controls the state House of Representatives.
That 46 of the 49 states with two house state legislatures have both houses under the control of one political party might be considered by some people as an undemocratic aspect of government in the United States. The presidency and control of Congress tend to shift back and forth between the two major parties as public opinion shifts from one to the other.
Governorships also change party identification with some regularity, Republican Kansas has a Democratic governor. Meanwhile, often Democratic Virginia just elected a Republican governor. The state legislatures, however, seem to be largely immune from reflecting these short-term partisan shifts.
Gerrymandering of state legislative district boundary lines to guarantee voting control by one party over the other is credited with some of this rigidified partisan control at the state legislative level. Those in charge of state redistricting tend to draw district lines which put one political party in power in both houses. Only a national wave election in favor of either the Democrats or the Republicans can break that partisan grip.
Much can be learned about national voting behavior by studying the large number of states that have both houses of the state legislature firmly in the grip of one political party or the other. In the case of the Democratic Party, the “two-house” states are concentrated in the Middle-Atlantic and New England states and the West Coast states. Between the East Coast and the West Coast, there are only four states with Democrats in control of both houses of the state legislature. Those states are Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico and our own state of Colorado.
We think it is noteworthy that Colorado is one of only four states between the East Coast and the West Coast that have both legislative houses under the control of the Democratic Party. It confirms a long-held theory of ours that Colorado votes more like a high-income, urbanized, and well-educated East Coast or West Coast state rather than similar to our close-by Rocky Mountain and Midwestern states.
The 29 states that have both houses of the state legislature controlled by the Republican Party literally fill the middle of America from the East Coast to the West Coast. This is so-called “flyover” country. The Rocky Mountain west, the high-plains states, the entire southern United States and the midwestern United States are solidly in the grip of the GOP at the state legislative level.
It is in these states that the rural and small-town political preferences of the Republican Party are most strongly represented and encourage strong political control at the state legislative level.
If the United States Supreme Court does overturn the Roe vs. Wade decision this June and return jurisdiction over abortion to the individual states, we can expect the two-house Democratic states to legalize abortion, as Colorado Democrats have done. Meanwhile, the two-house Republican states will predictably limit abortion in many ways, as Texas and Oklahoma have.
Both houses of the state legislature controlled by one political party is not what the Founders of our constitutional democracy had in mind. Their writings indicate they hoped the state legislatures, particularly the state houses of representatives, would become the home of the popular views of the average citizenry. Sadly, because of gerrymandering of state legislative district lines, our state legislatures are now resistant to the popular will and remain firmly in the grip of their dominant political parties.
The political scientists at the University of Virginia rank Colorado as one of just seven states that could have a state legislative chamber shift in its political party allegiance in the upcoming fall elections. Both political parties will invest a lot of money and encourage lots of volunteer activity in the key races for Colorado state Senate seats. It could be an electoral battle royal.
Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy write about national and Colorado politics.
