The turnout of voters in the recent midterm election as compared with the number of people eligible to vote was at the lowest level since 1942. It was 32%. That was about 5% lower than the last several midterms. There is at least a moderate level of evidence that the various more restrictive election laws that have been passed by Republican controlled legislatures was one of the significant factors in producing that decline.
The legal reality is that the US does not hold national elections. On the first Tuesday of November in even years all 50 states hold elections on the same day. Each of those elections is conducted by the terms of the election code of the particular state. None of those codes are identical to other election codes. Even when the election of a president and vice-president will eventually result, voters are not electing national candidates. They are electing electors who will then cast votes for those two offices. There is not an ironclad guarantee that they will all vote as expected. There have been occasions when they didn't.
Any government anywhere that holds elections has some form of laws that control the electoral process. The US has a long history of debate over who should be allowed to vote. There has been a general trend toward making the rules more inclusive. There have been amendments to the constitution that hard wired some rules about this. The most specific one was women's suffrage. The 14th amendment was designed to prevent various forms of discrimination but was not effectively used for that purpose until the Warren court came along. The federal voting rights act placed the southern states that had been the most notorious for Jim Crow voting laws on a status of having to obtain prior approval from the Dept. of Justice for modifications of election laws. That was an historical exception to the general approach of state control over elections. A recent Supreme Court decision has watered that power down considerably. All states can now modify their election laws without prior approval.
State governments have control over both the conduct of elections and the reapportionment of congressional and state legislative districts. These powers have strong implications for the party that gains control of state governments. Districts can be gerrymandered to weight the chances of electoral success and voting access can be made either more convenient or more restrictive. The bases of the Democratic and Republican parties tend to be impacted differently in the matter of access. Restriction favors Republicans. Republicans have been making progress over an extended period in gaining control of state governments. Here is what the situation looks like after the last election.
Full control means a majority in both houses of the legislature and a governor of the same party. This trend toward Republican control has received little national attention. It has been paying dividends in an increasing number of congressional districts that have a bullet proof Republican constituency. More recently it has resulted in the passage of election laws intended to suppress voter turnout. Requirements for voter ID have received the most attention, but other efforts have included things to restrict things such as early voting, voting by mail and longer hours for polling places. None of these things have ever been standard for all states.
Efforts are being made to challenge these voting laws in the federal courts. So far the courts have not shown a strong willingness to overturn them. It would seem necessary to establish a case that they serve the purpose of racial discrimination. There are arguments that can be made for that, but this is not the 1960s. The problems are not limited to the south and the courts are more conservative than they were then. Even if some laws do get thrown out by a court decision an election can take place under their terms without the prior approval requirement. The reality is that the party that controls state governments has an advantage.
So just what happened to create this imbalanced state of affairs?
Republicans Crush Democrats At State Level, Control Two-Thirds Of Legislatures Now
On the eve of this week’s election, HBO comedian John Oliver delivered a hilarious reminder of how important -- yet ignored -- state legislatures are. Democratic donors didn’t seem to get the message, as they dumped almost 16 times more money into the party organization that waged a handful of Senate campaigns than into the organization that runs their national campaign for state legislatures.
According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) raised more than $146 million in the 2014 election cycle. In that same time, the party’s group that finances state legislative races, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), raised just $9.3 million. That haul was dwarfed by the nearly $26 million raised by the Republican State Leadership Committee.
To put the DLCC's fundraising total into context, consider Kentucky’s election. Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes raised almost double the amount of money for her single unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid than the national party apparatus raised for its campaign for more than 6,000 state legislative seats.
The election results starkly reflected the decision by party donors and operatives to direct so few resources into state races. As the National Conference of State Legislatures reports, Democrats are now “at their lowest point in state legislatures in nearly a century.” In this week’s election Democrats lost their majorities in legislative chambers in Washington, Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York and West Virginia. In all, NCSL reports that there are 67 legislative chambers controlled by Republicans and just 29 controlled by Democrats. Republicans gained seats in every region, adding up to 375 seats to their column. That gives the GOP more than 4,100 of the country's 7,383 legislative seats.
While Democrats have directed most of their resources into winning seats in one of the most unproductive Congresses in history, Republicans have been using their majorities in legislatures to enact a flood of new laws that affect millions of Americans' daily lives, voting to (among other things) restrict abortion rights, require identification to vote and cut education funding.
Much of Democratic strategy focuses on high visibility races that make it easier to get mass attention. This has worked well in the last two presidential elections. But the further down the ballot races are the less money and less attention they get. The only way that Democrats are going to tip the scales at the state level back in their favor is by winning state elections. The courts are not going to fix the problem for them. Racking big majorities in California doesn't have any impact on Ohio.