The Decline of Electoral Competition

David A. Lieb and Emily Wagster Pettus at AP:

More than four-fifths of Mississippi’s legislative candidates will have no major-party opposition in the Nov. 7 general election. And more than half of this year’s winners will have faced no other Republicans or Democrats in either the primary or the general election.

...

Though Mississippi represents an extreme example, it highlights a national decline in competition for state legislative seats. New research suggests the reasons are more complex than mere voter satisfaction with incumbents. It also raises questions about the ability of American voters to hold their elected representatives accountable.

In some states, “there’s so many uncontested seats that one party wins the chamber before an election takes place,” said Steven Rogers, a political scientist at Saint Louis University who focuses on state legislatures.

A democracy “relies on this notion that the people will have some sort of choice,” Rogers added. But “without someone running for office, there isn’t really a choice.”

In Mississippi, the percentage of legislative seats with no major-party opposition in the general election has risen steadily from 63% in 2011 to 85% this year. The percentage with no Republican or Democratic challengers in either the primary or the general election has grown from 45% to 57% over that same time, according to data compiled for The Associated Press by Ballotpedia, a nonprofit organization that tracks elections.

Supermajorities

 Philip Bump at WP:

Two legislators removed — however temporarily — from their positions in Tennessee. A legislator in Montana ordered to remain outside the chamber. In Missouri, a proposal that would make it easier for Republicans to amend the state constitution and harder for Democrats to do so. In states across the country, an embrace of legislation reflecting partisan dominance instead of compromise.

There’s an obvious reason for this pattern. Over the past 15 years, the number of state legislative bodies dominated by one party or the other has increased dramatically. And with that increase, there’s less need to reach across the aisle.

 

Tennessee

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization and aversive or negative partisanship.

Jonathan Allen at Reuters:

In a rare rebuke, Republicans who control the state House of Representatives voted to kick out Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, two Black men who had recently joined the legislature, over their rule-breaking protest on the House floor on March 30.

 Jonathan Martin at Politico:

Today, Tennessee represents the grim culmination of the forces corroding state politics: the nationalization of elections and governance, the tribalism between the two parties, the collapse of local media and internet-accelerated siloing of news and the incentive structure wrought by extreme gerrymandering. Also, if we’re being honest, the transition from pragmatists anchored in their communities to partisans more fixated on what’s said online than at their local Rotary Club.

...

This tunnel vision is part of what convinced the Republicans they had to take such an extreme step last week. Bill Haslam, a former GOP governor, told me he was struck by how even some pragmatic Republican lawmakers were scared for their lives because of the protests and convinced they had to show strength.

“They told me ‘You don’t understand,’” Haslam said.

In fact, it was the GOP legislators who didn’t understand how badly their retribution looked outside their cloakrooms, which is all the more apparent now that the two Justins are being hailed as martyrs and reinstated this week by their local governing bodies.

Movement for a Constitutional Convention

There has not been a constitutional convention since the original in Philadelphia. A 2016 report from the Congressional Research Service discusses the process of calling a convention, as well as the questions and uncertainties surrounding that process. In the 1990s, the issue came up in the context of a balanced budget amendment.

Grace Panetta and Brent D. Griffiths at Business Insider:

"You take this grenade and you pull the pin, you've got a live piece of ammo in your hands," Santorum, a two-time GOP presidential candidate and former CNN commentator, explained in audio of his remarks obtained by the left-leaning watchdog group the Center for Media and Democracy and shared with Insider. "34 states — if every Republican legislator votes for this, we have a constitutional convention."

...

This isn't an exercise, either. State lawmakers are invited to huddle in Denver starting on Sunday to learn more about the inner workings of a possible constitutional convention at Academy of States 3.0, the third installment of a boot camp preparing state lawmakers "in anticipation of an imminent Article V Convention."

...

Some states have tried and tried — without result — to prompt a constitutional convention. They've together issued hundreds of pro-convention resolutions or calls over 200 years to reroute constitutional amendment powers away from Washington. What's new now is the ever-evolving power coupling of a corporation-backed ideological juggernaut led by ALEC, a nonprofit organization with close ties to large tobacco and drug companies, and a determined Republican Party increasingly dominating many of the nation's 50 statehouses.

...

The planks of the Convention of States' movement — such as term limits for federal bureaucrats in addition to members of Congress — stand to attract acolytes of Trumpism savoring the means to MAGA-fy the Constitution, and therefore, the nation.

In fact, it already has. Constitutional convention boosters include many of Trump's current and former allies, including conservative legal scholar John Eastman, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

...

A new report by the Center for Media and Democracy first shared with Insider finds that Republicans would control at least 27 and up to 31 out of 50 delegations to a convention, based on delegate selection processes in applications passed thus far.

Bequeathing Elected Office

 Term limits were supposed to bring fresh blood into California politics.

They have not worked out that way. 

Ben Christopher at CalMatters reports on what happened after Assemblyman Tom Daly announced his retirement: " But hours later, the second punch landed: Daly’s district director Avelino Valencia, an Anaheim City Council member, entered the race with the backing of his boss. A new presumptive frontrunner had entered the race, fresh from the “pipeline.”

[This] year’s bumper crop of vacancies in both the Assembly and Senate means there are an unusual number of departing legislators doing their best to bequeath their seats to chosen successors. It’s a trend that highlights just how small and insular the Legislature can be.

Where such behavior can cross an ethical line is when a lawmaker effectively “denies other candidates a fair shot…by essentially gaming the system,” said John Pelissero, a senior scholar with Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Just to name a few more examples from this year: 

• Democratic state Sen. Bob Hertzberg is termed out of his seat in the San Fernando Valley. As he runs to be a Los Angeles County supervisor, he’s throwing his considerable political weight behind Daniel Hertzberg. Connection: That last name is no coincidence. The two are father and son.

• In late January, Democrat Autumn Burke departed the Assembly early to take a job with a lobbying firm. The next day, she endorsed Robert Pullen-Miles for her Inglewood seat. Connection: Pullen-Miles is Burke’s former district director.

• Democratic U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier announced her retirement last November. A few weeks later she backed San Mateo Assemblymember Kevin Mullin to take her spot. Connection: He served as her district director, and Mullin’s father was a close political ally of Speier’s.

California Legislative Tracker

David Lesher at CalMatters:

Six years ago, we started CalMatters with a bold mission to deliver strong public service journalism that empowers Californians to engage with their state government. I’m excited to share with you that we’re continuing this commitment with the launch of Glass House: California Legislator Tracker.

Our team has been working hard to create an accessible place where Californians can learn about their lawmakers and monitor their behavior. You can search for your lawmakers by entering your address and find information on your state Senator and Assemblymember.

Each lawmaker has a page that shares their key biographical information, how they lean politically based on their voting record, which committees they serve on, how special interest groups rate them, the politics of their district and their contact information so you can reach out to them.

Check out the tracker yourself, and let me know what you think. We will continue to add features that create more understanding about each legislator including where they get their money and key details about how they work within the policy making process. That’s why I’m asking for your support.

Drug Money and State Legislators

 Lev Facher at STAT:

In the last two years, at least 2,467 state legislators — over one-third of all state lawmakers nationwide — used pharmaceutical industry cash to fund their campaigns, according to a new STAT analysis of campaign finance records that spans the full 2020 election cycle. The industry wrote over 10,000 individual checks totaling more than $9 million.

STAT’s findings provide an unprecedented look at drug industry influence in state capitols across the 2020 election cycle. The dataset includes the largest 23 U.S. drug manufacturers by revenue plus the trade groups PhRMA and BIO. It builds upon a previous analysis that STAT published prior to the election, and now includes complete data from nearly every state, including all contributions made through Dec. 31, 2020.

Three-Fifths Update

 Oliver Willis at The American Independent:

On Tuesday, during a debate on the floor of the Tennessee General Assembly, state Rep. Justin Lafferty, a Republican claimed that the Three-Fifths Compromise was about "ending slavery."

"We ended up biting a bitter, bitter pill that haunts us today. And we did it to lay the foundation for all this that we enjoy in this country," Lafferty said, referencing the compromise.

He added, "The Three-Fifths Compromise was a direct effort to ensure that southern states never got the population necessary to continue the practice of slavery everywhere else in the country."

Additionally, Lafferty argued that not counting enslaved Blacks as a whole person was a praiseworthy achievement.

"By limiting the number of population in the count, they specifically limited the number of representatives that would be available in the slaveholding states, and they did it for the purpose of ending slavery," he said. "Well before Abraham Lincoln. Well before Civil War."

The claim is inaccurate and ahistorical. The Three-Fifths Compromise, in which enslaved Black people were counted as three-fifths of a human being for the purposes of counting the American population, further enshrined the institution of slavery in America.

After the compromise was agreed to in 1787, millions of human beings lived in bondage until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and the abolition of slavery through the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

Pandemic Surprise: States Flush with Money

 Reid Wilson at The Hill:

In states across the country, legislators who once stared into a terrifying abyss of red ink now face an embarrassment of riches, funded by a booming stock market, rising wages for those at the upper end of the economic stratosphere and what economists say is an unprecedented shift in the way consumers are spending their money.

Budget cycles differ by state, and legislators everywhere are in different stages of arranging their fiscal houses.

But the trends are clear: Minnesota, which once faced a $1.3 billion deficit, now expects a $1.6 billion surplus. Michigan budget figures earlier this year showed a $2.5 billion surplus. Connecticut’s surplus was estimated at $70 million in January, and $130 million by March.

Colorado’s surplus stands north of $5 billion. Rhode Island will have an extra $44 million to play with. Oregon’s tax revenue came in so far ahead of expectations that the state is expecting to shell out more than $500 million in refunds to taxpayers, a provision in state law known as the “kicker.”

The catastrophe avoided comes in part from a stock market that has exploded during the pandemic. The S&P 500 index is up 81 percent since its nadir on March 20, 2020. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 76 percent over the same period. Capital gains from those advances have helped make up for lost revenue growth; in states like California, specific initial public offerings from companies like DoorDash and Airbnb provided their own unique boosts.

State residents also played a role in boosting state revenue. With most service businesses shuttered, consumer spending shifted to goods, especially through e-commerce. A 2018 Supreme Court decision forcing online retailers to collect state sales tax, South Dakota v. Wayfair, meant a sustained infusion of cash headed to state coffers.

Federal expansion of unemployment benefits, first through the $2.2 trillion CARES Act signed by then-President Trump and then again through President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, meant even the millions who were unemployed by the pandemic could keep spending.

“Sales tax was a surprise for many states because people, even those who lost their jobs, were still getting unemployment insurance and they could still spend money,” said Lucy Dadayan, a senior researcher at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center who specializes in state budgets. “If the pandemic-induced recession happened prior to Wayfair, the situation might have been very different but the online sales taxation helped a lot.”

Women Candidates in 2020

 Stacy Montemayor and Pete Quist, National Institute on Money in Politics; Karl Evers-Hillstrom and Grace Haley, Center for Responsive Politics, | 2020-12-21

Key findings:

• Between 2016 and 2020, the percentage of women candidates in gubernatorial and state legislative races saw a massive jump, from 25 percent to 32 percent.
• At least 142 women will hold seats in the next Congress, an all-time high mark.
• In 2020 races for the U.S. House and Senate, women candidates outraised men on average, while also nearly closing the gap in state-level contests.
• In 2020 races, women accounted for 33 percent of donations to congressional candidates and 31 percent of donations to state-level candidates, both record marks.

...

Republican women also made gains in state races, though they were less pronounced. Women made up nearly 23 percent of 2020 Republican candidates, up from 18 percent in 2016. The biggest jump came from non-incumbent Republicans. In 2016, nearly 19 percent of Republican challengers were women. That figure jumped to 27 percent in this year’s elections.

Figure 2: Women candidates in 2020 state races, by party

Women candidates generally won at the same rate at which they ran at the state level. In 2020, 32 percent of all candidates for state legislative and gubernatorial seats were women, and 32 percent of the general election winners were women. In the 2016 and 2012 election cycles, women only accounted for 26 percent of general election winners.

Gender parity at the state level is still a ways off despite modest gains. Nevada remains the only state in the nation with a majority-female legislature. The vast majority of leadership positions in state legislatures are held by men. Just seven women serve as speakers of state houses, and nine women currently serve as governors.

State Government Finance

 Many posts have discussed state government and public finance.

#DYK that in 2019, public welfare exceeded education as the largest state expenditure for the first time since 1942?

Download our summary of the 2019 Annual Survey of #StateGovernment Finances to learn more: https://t.co/f3lkXqr7qg pic.twitter.com/RKcOn7hHHl

— U.S. Census Bureau (@uscensusbureau) December 16, 2020

Drug Money

  Lev Facher at STAT:

Well over one-quarter of all state lawmakers nationwide have accepted money from the pharmaceutical industry since the beginning of 2019, according to a new STAT examination.

In several states, taking drug industry cash was more the norm than the exception: In Illinois, more than 79% of the state’s 177 elected lawmakers have cashed such a check. In California, over 85% of lawmakers have taken pharma money. The data reveals the drug industry has poured over $5 million into state legislators’ campaigns in the past two years alone.

STAT’s analysis, conducted in partnership with the National Institute on Money in Politics, provides a first-of-its-kind study of the drug industry’s influence in state capitols. It follows a companion analysis of drug industry spending at the federal level, which revealed $11 million in industry giving as of July.

Interest Groups, Top Two, and Factional Politics

From Reconstruction through the 1950s, Texas was a one-party state.  Notwithstanding small GOP pockets, the real conflict in the state was between liberal and conservative factions of the Democratic Party, with the conservatives usually having the upper hand.  California politics is becoming a doppelganger.  Republicans are largely irrelevant, and the real struggle is between moderate liberal Democrats and hardcore progressives.

Jeremy B. White at Politico:

There is no other state where Democrats wield the absolute power the party enjoys in California. Democrats occupy every statewide office and command two-thirds majorities in both houses. Former GOP strongholds like Orange County have shaded blue. Republicans don’t just lag behind Democrats — there are also fewer registered Republicans than no-party-preference voters.

Before 2011, when the state replaced party primaries with a general primary after which the top two vote-getters square off in the general election, establishment-backed Democrats running in safe seats could often sail to assured victories; now, they often findthemselves fighting for their political lives against a rival from their own party.

The liberal-versus-moderate dynamic in California presaged not only the rift that blew open in this year’s presidential primaries, it established its parameters: between unions and environmental activists; between single-payer advocates and Democrats working to expand coverage within the health care system; between educational reformers and teachers unions; between law enforcement and those who regard the legal system as hopelessly biased against communities of color.

California’s experience with top-two voting, rather than partisan primaries, also offers a lesson for other states that are dominated by a single party — like Democrats in Massachusetts or Republicans in Mississippi. In safe seats that would have allowed an earlier generation of Democrats to comfortably coast to victory, California now regularly sees battles between Democrats who differ on issues that otherwise would split along party lines.

Traditionally conservative interests like the oil industry and charter schools increasingly court friendly Democrats — often by contributing money to a constellation of innocuously named political action committees that then spend millions on advertising: In districts where a Democratic win looks inevitable, the thinking goes, better to boost the Democrat who’s likely to vote with you than a Republican who is likely to lose.

David Townsend, a Sacramento political consultant, said he used to have to work to convince business-oriented groups on the wisdom of getting behind Democrats. Now that tactic has become so ingrained that Townsend said he has “a waiting list” of interested players hoping to invest in moderate Democrats.

“Year in and year out the business community, the health care community, the insurance community can look at all the scorecards and see where mods have been on their issues and on trying to tamp down too much regulation,” Townsend said. “We don’t have to do the sell anymore. Everyone totally gets how important the mods are.”

State Politics and Policy

Grossmann, p. 9: "Republicans, as the more nationalized of the two major American parties, had developed mature institutions – such as think tanks, state legislator associations, and grassroots networks -- to promote conservative goals."

Hertel-Fernandez & Skocpol

Across much of America, conservatives can mount powerful state legislative campaigns through three well-funded networks that operate as complements to one another. Think tanks affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN) spew out studies and prepare op-eds and legislative testimony. Paid state directors and staffers installed by Americans for Prosperity (AFP)sponsor bus tours, convene rallies and public forums, run radio and television ads, send mailers, and spur activists to contact legislators. And inside the legislatures themselves, many representatives and senators, especially Republicans, are members of ALEC, which invites them to serve alongside business lobbyists and right-wing advocacy groups on national task forces that prepare “model” bills that the legislators can advance at the state and local level, with assistance from ALEC staffers.

AND THE IRON LAW OF EMULATION CONTINUES...

Tom Steyer and The State Innovation Exchange 

The Troika:

• State Policy Network
• Americans for Prosperity
• ALEC 

The Policy:

• Model Legislation
• Liberals, not so much.

State polarization (update from p. 46 of Grossmann)

The obstacles:

• Path dependence, or as Robert Frost wrote, "way leads on to way."
• Retrenchment is harder than enactment.
• Feds encourage growth of state government.
• Courts may hinder activism.
• MARC:  Americans are ideologically conservative and operationally liberal.  See earlier post on coronavirus

Tracking Political Money

Many posts have discussed campaign finance, state legislatures, and congressional elections.

From the National Institute on Money in Politics:

It's March, and Congress and many state legislatures are busy! If you are a reporter covering proposed bills, be sure to remember this arrow in your quiver: the National Institute on Money in Politics identifies the members of legislative committees in the states and in Congress, compiles data about who contributed to those committee members' election campaigns, and makes tools available to inform your work as you decipher it all. Institute researchers have nearly completed the 2020 legislative committee membership lists; you can access this essential information in three ways, all for free at: www.FollowTheMoney.org.

My Legislature allows you to identify who has contributed to the committee members considering legislation you care about, in addition to seeing who has given to sponsors of any piece of legislation. This enables you to analyze how political contributions correlate with actions by bill sponsors, legislators, and committees. My Legislature also contains information about what actions have been taken on each bill. Simply select for congressional delegates or select your state from the drop-down menu at My Legislature and use the tabs in the upper left to navigate your own very specific search.

Power Mapping for states or for Congress empowers analysis of how members of a legislative chamber or a committee may be inclined to vote on specific legislation or general issues based on their campaign donor pools. If you are an advocate, this tool can be extraordinarily useful for identifying legislators who may be open to persuasion either for or against your issue based on patterns in their fundraising. Journalists may find interesting stories here, as well, particularly in cases of legislators who have donor pools that are dominated by interests pushing a specific agenda. The Power Mapping page includes links in the lower right that describe the tool functionality and provide a video tutorial.

Finally, the Institute's powerful Ask Anything search function serves fully tailored searches. For example, with only a few clicks it is possible to see the largest donors to members of the New York State Senate Housing, Construction, and Community Development Committee or the largest donors to members of the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee.

With the Institute's freshly updated legislative committee membership lists and comprehensive campaign finance data, the possibilities are truly endless.
As always, do call us with any questions. We actually answer the phone: 406-449-2480.

###

The nonprofit, nonpartisan National Institute on Money in Politics collects and analyzes campaign contribution information on state and federal candidates, political party committees, and ballot committees. Its free, searchable database of contributions is online at FollowTheMoney.org

Learning about State Politics: Good News and Bad

In a letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Chris W. Bonneau and Kristin Kanthak, co-editors of  State Politics and Policy Quarterly (SPPQ), discuss the academic study of state politics:

SPPQ published its first issue in 2001, so it is a relatively new journal. Its purpose is to publish high quality original research on the politics of the states — both in the U.S. and in other countries. The circulation of the journal is about 9,000 and the acceptance rate hovers around 20%, depending on the year. In 2018, we exceeded 25,000 downloads of our articles. Recently, we received our highest impact factor ever of 1,675, with a 5-year impact factor of 1.645, This ranks us 70th in political science out of 176 ranked journals. This also puts us ahead of more well established journals such as Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and American Politics Research. We are not throwing shade at those journals — they all publish excellent work, and even publish some okay work we have written ourselves. But no one would claim that there is a dearth of research on topics like American politics or legislative politics.

SPPQ is also not the only place scholars of state politics publish their work. As mentioned in the original article, there is also State and Local Government Review and Publius. But wait, there’s more! And you may want to sit down for this one. Scholars of state politics publish their work in journals of broad, general interest as well.

From Governing: 

Governing magazine has told important stories for over three decades. Stories from and about state and local government – what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called America’s laboratories of democracy.

So it is with a very heavy heart that we’re announcing that Governing will be discontinuing publication this fall. For the past several years, Governing and our parent company, e.Republic, have made continued investments in the magazine, in governing.com and in the numerous events we host throughout the country. Ultimately, however, Governing has proven to be unsustainable as a business in today’s media environment. We will cease publication of the monthly print magazine after September, and we will be ramping down our web presence and the rest of our operations over the next few months.

George Skelton at LAT:

Cable TV — specifically its California Channel — has been the public’s eyes and ears on Capitol sausage-making for more than two decades.

But now the cable industry, which is the Cal Channel’s sole financier, is pulling the plug on this cheap, mini-version of national C-SPAN.

...
Cal Channel has announced it will go black on Oct. 16. That will make it even more difficult for interested citizens to keep tabs on what their elected representatives are doing in Sacramento — how they’re spending tax dollars and making decisions about all sorts of issues including welfare, water, higher education and homelessness.

It’s coming at a time of declining news media coverage of the state Capitol. There hasn’t been a full-time TV reporter here in years. Newspaper staffs have dramatically declined.

Legislators and Constituent Opinion

Joshua L. Kalla and Ethan Porter have a paper titled "Correcting Bias in Perceptions of Public Opinion Among American Elected Officials: Results from Two Field Experiments."  The abstract:

While concerns about the public’s receptivity to factual information are widespread, much less attention has been paid to the factual receptivity, or lack thereof, of elected officials. Recent survey research has made clear that U.S. legislators and legislative staff systematically misperceive their constituents’ opinions on salient public policies. We report results from two field experiments designed to correct misperceptions of sitting U.S. legislators. The legislators (n=2,346) were invited to access a dashboard of constituent opinion generated using the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Here we show that despite extensive outreach efforts, only 11% accessed the information. More troubling for democratic norms, legislators who accessed constituent opinion data were no more accurate at perceiving their constituents’opinions. Our findings underscore the challenges confronting efforts to improve the accuracy of elected officials’ perceptions and suggest that elected officials may be more resistant to actual information than the mass public

Polarization and Single-Party Control of Legislatures

Timothy Williams at NYT:

It is the first time in more than a century that all but one state legislature is dominated by a single party. Most legislative sessions have ended or are scheduled to end in a matter of days in capitals across the nation, and Republican-held states have rushed forward with conservative agendas as those controlled by Democrats have pushed through liberal ones.

Any hope that single-party control in the states might ease the tone of political discourse has not borne out. Lopsided party dominance has not brought resignation; instead of minority parties conceding that they lack the numbers to effectively fight back, the mood has grown more tense and vitriolic.

“The whole nation is speaking about how divisive we are,” Thomas Jackson, a Democrat in the Alabama House of Representatives, told colleagues during a contentious meeting last month.

In Oregon, where Democrats control state government, Republicans boycotted sessions for several days over disagreements about taxes and gun control. In Tennessee, where Republicans are in charge, Democrats staged a walkout during a heated and chaotic budget debate, and Republicans ordered the police to go find them.

MN will have the only legislature under divided control in the entire country. Something that hasn't happened since 1914 https://t.co/NpIGLIKyIk #NCSLelections #ElectionDay pic.twitter.com/Df0OExb1Oz

— NCSL (@NCSLorg) November 7, 2018

Model Legislation

Rob O'Dell and Nick Penzenstadler at USA TODAY:

Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks.

Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.

A two-year investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic  and the Center for Public Integrity reveals for the first time the extent to which special interests have infiltrated state legislatures using model legislation.

USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.

The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search – powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months – compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers.

The phenomenon of copycat legislation is far larger. In a separate analysis, the Center for Public Integrity identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country.

.

Polarized Legislatures

Timothy Williams at NYT:

Republicans continue to hold majorities in most of the nation’s state capitals, as they have in recent years, but Democrats now control six new legislative chambers, including the Minnesota House of Representatives. Along the way, though, Minnesota — where Republicans hold a narrow majority in the Senate — became the only remaining state in the nation where control of a legislature is divided.

Even in an era of single-party dominance in state legislatures, it is a stunning notion: It is the first time in more than a century that only one state has split control of its legislative chambers, and is one more indication of the depth of the nation’s bifurcated political sensibilities.

...
In the opening days, Democrats who have vaulted to positions of full control in their legislatures (Colorado, New Hampshire and New York), achieved parity (Minnesota), or solidified their power (California, Nevada and New Mexico, among others) have wasted little time.


In New Hampshire, one of 18 state legislatures controlled by Democrats after both of its legislative chambers flipped in 2018, lawmakers have already banned firearms in the House chamber over the objections of Republicans, and have voted to require every lawmaker to undergo sexual harassment awareness training. Up next, the Democrats say: a family medical leave bill.

In New York, where Democrats won full control of the Legislature, lawmakers have approved a bill that offers undocumented students access to state financial aid and scholarships and another that expands protections for the state’s abortion laws.

In Colorado, where Democrats took the Senate and already controlled the House, lawmakers have introduced bills to expand access to affordable health care, allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada, and give 100 teachers as much as $5,000 a year each to help pay off college loans.

From NCSL:

 After legislative elections on Tuesday, Nov. 6, five legislative chambers flipped from Republican to Democratic. Democrats also took control of the tied Connecticut Senate and fully functional control of the New York Senate—it was a Democratic sweep. However, compared to past midterms, the gains were modest with Republicans maintaining a robust position in state legislatures.

	Republicans	Democrats
	Pre/post Election	Pre/post Election	Pre/post Election
Chambers (98 total)	65 / 61	31 / 37	tied: 2 / 0
Legislatures (49 total)	31 / 30	14 / 18	divided: 4 / 1
State Control (49 total, 1 undecided)	25 / 21	8 / 14	divided:  16 / 13

The big news is that Minnesota is the only state in the nation where the legislature is divided—the Senate remains in Republican control, and the House flipped to the Democrats. The last time there was only one divided state legislature was over 100 years ago in 1914.

Six legislative chambers flipped from Republicans to Democrats.