All in! With a dysfunctional federal government, states are where the action is, making for high stakes in legislative races.

AuthorCullen, Morgan
PositionELECTIONS - Cover story

A trend in American politics nearly as consistent as the sun rising in the East is that the party holding the White House takes it on the proverbial chin every four years in midterm elections. That's why Republicans are optimistic, and Democrats are working harder than ever to buck history.

In the past 114 years, there have been 28 midterm (between presidential) elections. In 26 of those, the party holding the presidency lost an average of 415 seats, or 5.6 percent, of all state legislative seats nationwide. The extent of the losses, however, has varied widely. The worst defeat for any party, in any election since the Civil War, was in 1922, when Republican Warren Harding lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. His party lost 1,749 legislative seats.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the two lone occasions when voters rewarded the president's party in midterm elections. The first was in 1934 when the nation was in the midst of the Great Depression and President Franklin Roosevelt was two years into his first term. Democrats gained 1,108 legislative seats that time. The second occasion was in 2002, when George W. Bush was in the White House and the nation was poised for war with Iraq. Republicans that year pulled off the history-defying trick of netting 175 seats.

This year, voters are extremely frustrated with the dysfunction of the federal government, yet most observers believe the current gridlock is unlikely to improve following the election. In fact, it could get even worse, although that's hard to imagine. All this increases the stakes in state elections, as state legislators continue to make the big policy decisions of the day.

Whose Year Is It?

In the last midterm election cycle in 2010, a massive Republican wave swept over the state political landscape and the party wound up in their best position in more than six decades. Republicans netted an historic 725 legislative seats and wrested control of 21 chambers--the biggest shift since the Great Depression. Democrats, with President Barack Obama at the top of the ticket, recovered only a little of that territory in 2012, gaining a modest 150 seats. And, although the Democrats won back eight chambers that were lost in 2010, they lost another five.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Republicans in 2014 is that they enter the November election in such a dominant position in legislatures that it might be difficult for the pendulum to swing any further toward the GOP. The low-hanging fruit is gone.

Currently, out of a total of 7,383 state legislators, 3,836 are Republicans, 3,448...

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