At the state level—where congressional maps are ultimately drawn, and where Republicans have enjoyed a structural advantage over Democrats since the Tea Party wave of 2010—the blue tsunami has dramatically shifted the balance of power. Some red states that might have sought to redistrict (or redistrict again) ahead of 2028 will soon, at least partially, be in blue hands, including Texas and Georgia. (Texas could yet pursue a sneaky gerrymander in the lame-duck session before Democrats take over the governor’s mansion and the state House, but the outgoing Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, has already ruled out doing likewise in his state.) Meanwhile, Democrats won trifectas in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It’s far too early to say what this means for the 2028 maps, and there are legal obstacles in the way in, for example, Michigan, where redistricting is handled by an independent commission. But some power brokers are already thinking about redraws. “We have gerrymandered maps, and they favor Republicans to a significant degree, and we know that other states will consider redistricting efforts in the months ahead that will further attempt to entrench Republican power,” Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in Wisconsin’s state Assembly, said. “And so we will be considering a congressional redistricting effort.”
Voters in three other states sent even clearer signals about redistricting on Tuesday night—and each of the results seemed, on the surface, to favor Democrats. Colorado is on course to reject a conservative-backed amendment to the state constitution that would have made it harder for Democrats to redo districts mid-decade. In Maryland, a successful amendment supported by Governor Wes Moore seems to have cleared a previously thorny legal path for Democrats to try and eke out an extra seat—a significant victory, especially in light of the amendment’s confusing wording. (“I have a freaking Ph.D. in political science and American politics,” an academic told the news site Maryland Matters, “and if I didn’t know what that amendment was about, I would have no idea what that amendment was about.”) In Missouri, voters rejected a redrawn map that local Republicans were so eager to implement that they used it for the primaries before it was even legal.
Beyond redistricting, voters in Missouri approved an amendment that should impede politicians from overturning citizen-initiated ballot measures. (Not that this is entirely unrelated to redistricting: Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me that he expects the amendment to make it harder for the Missouri G.O.P. to try again to pass its new map, or a similar one, in the medium term—though this question is murky and likely to be litigated.) In the same vein, voters in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah rejected measures that would have watered down their direct-democracy rights. Massachusetts voted decisively to permit same-day election registration, over G.O.P. objections, and Virginians opted to guarantee the restoration of voting rights to people convicted of felonies at the end of their sentences, removing that determination from the discretion of the governor. Some Trumpier-sounding election-administration measures did win out. North Carolina and Ohio voted to extend or entrench existing voter-I.D. requirements, and Nevada opted to create new ones. But three other states—Arizona, Colorado, and California—appear to have rejected comparable proposals, a notable batting average given that, according to Votebeat, the vast majority of I.D.-related ballot measures that have been introduced nationally in the past two decades have been approved. Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia approved measures banning non-citizens from voting, though in each state this was banned already.
Some election-related ballot measures this year were harder to parse. Massachusetts asked voters whether they wanted to replace their partisan primaries with a free-for-all, with the top two vote-getters advancing regardless of party. (This already happens in California and Washington State—and, locally, in Boston—with some small differences.) The change was pushed by Danielle Allen, a scholar of democracy renovation at Harvard, who argued that it would make elections more competitive in the state. It was also backed by prominent donors from the private-equity business, making many liberals squeamish; this also seemed to reinforce critics’ fears of a jungle-type primary favoring candidates with more money, or even allowing a pair of Republicans to lock out Democrats in a blue state, should a large number of the latter split the vote, as nearly(-ish) happened in California this year. (Allen attributed the donors’ interest to civic-mindedness, and pointed to a write-in option on the ballot that could be used in cases where the majority party gets locked out of a runoff.) The state Democratic and Republican apparatuses opposed the reform, even as prominent pols of both parties supported it; the regional N.A.A.C.P. was in favor, too, though the chair of the “No” campaign said that he feared an all-party primary could dilute Black voting power in a manner “not dissimilar” to that of G.O.P. gerrymandering in the South. After listening to all the arguments, I still have no idea how I’d have voted if I were a Masshole. In the end, voters said no.
