The 2024 elections reshaped the political landscape in Washington, D.C., with Republicans capturing a national trifecta: the White House and both houses of Congress. At the state level, the change was less dramatic. Republicans won eight of 11 governors’ races, retaining their total of 27. Democrats lost full control of two state legislatures, in Minnesota and Michigan, which will now have divided government. The state political map looks only slightly different from the way it did before the election, with the GOP boasting 23 state trifectas, or unified government control, to Democrats’ 15.
Underlying November’s results, however, is an ongoing shift over the last 30 years in state politics. America went from having 31 states with divided government in 1992 to just 12 after this election. The trend toward one-party domination has accelerated in the last 15 years, largely because of a massive turnaround in Republican fortunes that began with the 2010 midterm elections. The GOP has more than doubled the number of states that it fully controls since then, while Democrats have lost complete control of a net of one state.
Political scientists sometimes warn that unanimous government can be a curse for a party if its leaders, without effective opposition, pursue an agenda too radical for voters. So far, though, the era of one-party control has been a bonanza for Republicans. The political shift has been accompanied by massive changes in migration patterns toward Republican states. That has corresponded with rising economic power of areas like the Southeast, now solidly Republican, even as Democratic-leaning regions decline.
While the red–blue divide is often cast as a cultural clash, Republicans have focused on economic competitiveness through tax cuts and deregulation. This strategy emerged after Democratic governors imposed steep tax hikes during the Great Recession. In 2009 alone, states raised taxes by nearly $29 billion—the largest aggregate state tax increase in history—hitting Democratic bastions like New York, Connecticut, Illinois, and California. President Barack Obama also enacted a multibillion-dollar federal tax hike to fund the Affordable Care Act.
Republicans elected in the 2010 midterms responded with billions in state tax cuts—including some $3 billion in reductions in Ohio by Governor John Kasich, and similar slashing by GOP governors in states ranging from Kansas to Maine. Republicans also focused on unleashing emerging industries, such as hydraulic fracturing, in places like Texas, North Dakota, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, even as Democratic governors in California and New York sought to rein them in. At the same time, Indiana, Wisconsin, and West Virginia passed right-to-work laws that gave workers the ability to opt out of joining a union. A 2012 survey of manufacturing companies by Area Development magazine found that 75 percent considered right-to-work laws a key factor in deciding where to locate factories—one reason that automobile manufacturing has largely shifted to the southeastern U.S.
The unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic beginning in 2020 accentuated differences between red and blue jurisdictions. Democratic-dominated states kept their children out of school far longer, and imposed more restrictions on social gatherings, workers, and employers, than did Republican states. Even as they shut down their economies, blue states like California, New York, and New Jersey, facing self-imposed budget problems, raised taxes by billions of dollars. Meantime, 11 Republican-led states cut taxes during the Covid year of 2021.
Though subsequent studies have found no clear pattern tying Covid death rates to state pandemic policies, those states that imposed fewer restrictions experienced much less disruption in their economies. Eighteen months into the pandemic, nearly all states with the lowest unemployment rates were Republican-led. As Covid subsided in 2022, a Moody’s study found that red states were leading the nation’s economic revival. The pandemic also accelerated a long-developing trend: a Bloomberg analysis revealed that five southeastern states, plus Texas, surpassed northeastern states in GDP in 2020—a gap that has continued to widen.
Migration patterns reflect the changing fortunes. California and New York have long been net losers of residents to other states, but those losses exploded during the pandemic, with some three-quarters of a million more Californians leaving than arriving from other states, and about half a million New Yorkers leaving on net. Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts also experienced steep declines, as did Oregon and Washington, which had previously attracted new residents. In contrast, Texas and Florida saw massive population gains, welcoming hundreds of thousands of newcomers. Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia likewise experienced migration booms, with annual net gains nearing 100,000.
Democratic-controlled states responded by focusing on cultural issues. California governor Gavin Newsom tried to coax Florida businesses with attack ads against the Sunshine State’s social policies. “I urge all of you living in Florida . . . to join us in California, where we still believe in freedom,” he said. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democratic governors Phil Murphy in New Jersey and Ned Lamont in Connecticut sent letters to businesses in Republican states, pledging, as Murphy wrote, to protect “the rights of women.” A handful of Democratic states, including California and New York, also forbade state employees from traveling on government business using taxpayer funds to Republican states that banned men from playing in women’s sports or from using women’s bathrooms.
Though these appeals have yet to reverse their losses, Democrats might take some solace in recalling the state-level political gains that they made in Donald Trump’s first term, when the party clawed back some of the power it had lost during the Obama years in places like Wisconsin and Michigan. Given that some local Democratic politicians are vowing to fight Trump’s agenda, the next four years will almost certainly see a renewed clash of ideas. Voters will first have a say in 2026, when 36 states hold gubernatorial elections.
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