The last time Democrats controlled the Arizona Capitol, Bob Dylan had only just gone electric. The last time Georgians elected a Democrat as governor, Google was still run from a garage.
Tuesday’s national electoral thrashing did more than upend the U.S. Congress. It saw Democrats flip control of state legislatures and governor’s offices around the country, shatter Republican supermajorities that once seemed impenetrable and lay the groundwork for potentially profound policy changes in formally conservative strongholds.
“We’re describing this as a really seismic shift,” Mandara Meyers, executive director at the nonprofit States Project, which raised roughly $100 million to help elect more Democrats to state legislatures, said in an interview. “It’s just truly an historic outcome.”
Even as the result of some races remained unsettled Wednesday, a picture emerged of a starkly different balance of power in many state capitals, even ones that previously were deeply red.
At least five states — Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — will join 16 others that have Democratic “trifectas,” meaning that the party will control the governor’s office and both legislative chambers.
In Arizona, where Democrats haven’t held a majority in the House since the 1960s and in the Senate since 1992, the party also appeared to be on the brink of seizing total control of state government.
Equally significant, Democrats broke numerous Republican state government trifectas, including in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Texas. They flipped the North Carolina House and nearly claimed its Senate, both of which previously were solidly Republican.
In addition, Democrats will now hold the governor’s office in at least 28 states after prevailing in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas. It marks the first time the party will hold a majority of governorships since 2010.
“I’ve been doing this work for a long time. There are very few elections you see where you run the table, and we did just that,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “We have a real opportunity here to demonstrate our ability to lead.”
How Democrats choose to lead in the states could prove as consequential, if not more so, than how they exercise their power in a newly blue Congress.
With President Donald Trump already threatening to wield his veto power over a U.S. House and Senate now controlled by Democrats, state legislatures might well be where Tuesday night’s victories translate into tangible changes for millions of Americans in coming years.
Democrats will have the power to rewrite policies on redistricting, abortion, climate, health care, education and taxes in more states than ever in the Trump era. Even in Republican-led states, Democrats now have more capability to shape or block legislation.
“Trump’s not going anywhere for two more years,” Meyers said. But his veto pen cannot paralyze state governments, she added, and Democratic-led legislatures can take meaningful steps on lowering utility costs, expanding access to child care and health care, reproductive rights, safeguarding elections and other issues that voters made clear matter to them.
“Democrats now have more power in the states than at any other time in the 21st century,” she said.
The Democratic state-level gains, while sweeping and in some places startling, did not quite match the Republican conquest during Obama’s first midterm.
A massive GOP wave in 2010 saw more than 20 state legislative chambers change hands and more than 700 seats flip to Republicans, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“That was bigger than this one,” said Katy Owens Hubler, director of elections and redistricting for the group, which has closely tracked the changes.
Hubler said over the past 125 years, 11 to 12 state chambers have flipped during each two-year cycle, though that figure has trended lower in recent years. In that sense, Tuesday marked a return closer to the historical norm.
Even so, given Trump’s widespread 2024 victory and his focus on expanding Republican strongholds, the extent to which voters imposed wholesale changes to state governments this week is stunning, even to some party leaders.
Democrats’ performance in Wisconsin was particularly impressive. They won the governor’s mansion and flipped the Wisconsin House and Senate, securing a governing trifecta for the first time in 16 years.
“We do have a big list, and we are going to be ambitious,” state Rep. Greta Neubauer, leader of the Democrats in the Wisconsin Assembly, said Wednesday. She said the caucus is exploring creating a public option for health care, providing free meals to all schoolchildren and finding ways to bring down the cost of child care, as well as considering a redraw of the state’s congressional maps.
Democrats also broke Ohio Republicans’ grip on power, winning the governor’s mansion and almost all other statewide seats while eliminating Republicans’ supermajority in the state legislature.
In Georgia, Democrats won every statewide race, from governor and U.S. Senate down to schools superintendent, and along the way flipped the House.
In North Carolina, Democrats succeeded despite heavily gerrymandered legislative districts in flipping the House; a win that surprised even some Democratic operatives.
In Texas, Democrats are poised to hold the offices of governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House — gatekeeping positions that Republicans controlled for decades.
In coming months, Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa will set legislative priorities as state lawmakers reconvene in January. She campaigned on taking immediate action to declare a data center moratorium, expand Medicaid in a state with the most uninsured people in the country, fire the conservative state superintendent of schools, block further mid-decade redistricting and increase teacher pay.
Democrats appear likely to flip the Texas House, which would trigger an election for a Democratic speaker. State Rep. Senfronia Thompson, 87, of Houston is the party favorite. First elected in 1973, “Miss T” is the longest-serving woman and Black state lawmaker in the state’s history.
In New Hampshire, Democrats were on track to flip both chambers of the legislature, including the state’s infamously large lower house (with 400 members, the biggest in the country).
One of those voted out of office in Tuesday’s wave was Kathleen Paquette, a Republican representing part of Manchester, who was elected to the House in 2024.
Paquette got a hint of what likely lay ahead while knocking on doors during her campaign. Not only were Democrats irate, she said, but some Republicans weren’t far behind.
Paquette knew Republicans who voted for Democrats for the first time ever in the midterm elections “just to give the middle finger to Trump,” she said. “And they did.”
Some Republicans said disaffection with Trump had pushed them to give votes to Democrats at the local level. Elizabeth Krueger, 54, hadn’t voted in five years. On Tuesday, the Bedford resident split her ballot: she still supported a Republican for the U.S. Senate, but voted for several Democrats in the State House, some of whom she knows personally.
“They’re good people,” said Krueger, who was frustrated by high prices and Trump’s rhetoric. “The stuff he says — I cringe.”
In many places Wednesday, there were calls to use this political realignment to forge bipartisanship. In Missouri, for instance, voters approved abortion rights and rejected a plan to gerrymander the state’s congressional map in Republicans’ favor.
“Maybe this is God’s way of saying, ‘You all have to work together for the benefit of your constituents,’” said Kathy Bernier, a former Wisconsin legislator who helps lead the Chippewa County Republican Party. “I hope Republicans don’t just fight and be the opposition party. I hope we work together to pass legislation, to better our state and country.”
As the fog of victory began to lift Wednesday, there was broad recognition that the clock already is ticking, and that hard work lies ahead if Democrats hope to maintain their newfound power in the states.
“Voters are notoriously impatient,” said Carolyn Fiddler, a Democratic state legislative analyst who writes the newsletter This Week in Statehouse Action. “They will look at their ballots in 2028 and think, ‘I gave these folks power and what did they accomplish with it?’ And states will be where Democrats can point to their fastest and biggest accomplishments over the next two years.”
Barrett Marson, a longtime GOP strategist in Arizona who had described the elections as a “bloodbath” for Republicans, cautioned Democrats around the country against overreaching with their new power and misreading the rebuke of Trump as an endorsement of their entire agenda.
“This is not a mandate for Democrats — this is a mandate about one guy,” Marson said.
Williams, the DLCC president, said most Democrats will feel a keen sense of obligation after Tuesday’s monumental gains. She said the party will soon hold a majority of state legislative chambers in the country, and must use that power wisely, with integrity, to live up to their promises to make people’s lives better.
“No one is under any illusion that governing is going to be easy. It is an honor and a privilege — and it is a responsibility,” Williams said.
“Winning elections is fun,” she added, “but the real work is delivering for people.”
Joanna Slater in New Hampshire, Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Texas and Hannah Knowles in California contributed to this report.
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