Welcome to the Friday, Jan. 31, 2025, Brew.
By: Lara Bonatesta
Here’s what’s in store for you as you start your day:
- 2024 election analysis – the average state legislative margin of victory was more than 27 points
- Our new episode of On The Ballot is about what DOGE can learn from Clinton’s effort to ‘reinvent government’ in the ’90s
- Did you know three states—Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—are holding state supreme court elections this year?
2024 election analysis – the average state legislative margin of victory was more than 27 points
As lawmakers around the country meet in state legislatures for the 2025 legislative sessions, we’re continuing our analysis of the elections that brought them there.
In Monday’s Brew, we took a look at the 94% of incumbents who won re-election in the 2024 state legislative elections. Today, we’re looking at all the winners and their margins of victory (MOV).
The average margin of victory across all 5,807 state legislative seats up for election in 2024 was 27.3 percentage points. This was down from 2022, when the average was 27.7 percentage points. The MOV from 2018-2024 ranged from a low of 25.8 in 2018 to a high of 27.7 in 2022.
An electoral margin of victory (MOV) is the difference between the share of votes cast for the winning candidate and the second-place candidate in an election. Only races with more than one candidate were included in this average. 44 states held state legislative elections on Nov. 5, and about 79% of all state legislative seats were up for election. These included elections for seats in 85 of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers.
Let’s take a look at some key numbers:
- The average margin of victory was 25.1 percentage points for Democrats and 28.9 percentage points for Republicans. This was the lowest average margin for Democrats and the highest for Republicans since 2018.
- The average margin of victory in state senates was 28.2 percentage points, and the average margin in state houses was 27 percentage points. This was down from the 2022 averages of 29.2 percentage points in upper chambers and 27.9 percentage points in lower chambers.
- The chamber with the largest average margin of victory in 2024 was the Delaware Senate (64.1%), followed by the Idaho Senate (45.6%) and the Tennessee State Senate (44.70%).
- The chamber with the smallest average margin of victory in 2024 was the New Hampshire House of Representatives (9.4%), followed by the Nevada Senate and the Vermont Senate (both 10.2%).
- Combining the averages for both chambers in each of the 44 states that held state legislative elections, 22 states saw an increase in average margin of victory between 2022 and 2024, while the other 22 saw a decrease. The state with the largest increase was Delaware (+11.65 percentage points). The state with the largest decrease was New Mexico (-9.2 percentage points).
The following chart shows the 2024 margins of victory by party compared to previous years.
Major party competition
Of the 5,807 state legislative elections in 2024, 2,224 (38%) were uncontested and had no major party competition. This was down from 41% in 2022 but higher than in 2018 and 2020, when 34% and 35% of elections were uncontested, respectively. The remaining 3,583 (62%) seats were contested by both major parties.
810 elections (13.9%) were decided by 10 percentage points or fewer. Major-party candidates won 803 of those seats, with Democrats winning 409 and Republicans winning 394. 47 races had a margin of less than 0.5 percentage points. In 2022, 882 races were decided by 10 percentage points or fewer, and 65 were decided by 0.5 percentage points or fewer.
The map below shows the percentage of races in each state that were decided by margins of 10 percentage points or fewer.
Races decided by fewer than 100 votes
64 (1.1%) state legislative races were decided by fewer than 100 votes. The chart below shows how that compares to past years.
The New Hampshire House of Representatives had 22 races decided by fewer than 100 votes—more than any other chamber. The New Hampshire House also held this distinction in 2022, when there were 36 such races, and in 2020, when there were 11. As of 2020, there were, on average, 3,444 people in each New Hampshire House district, making them the smallest state legislative districts in the country.
Most of the close races took place in districts with small population sizes compared to the rest of the country. Forty-eight (75%) were in districts with a population of less than 25,000. Districts that size made up 26.3% of all state legislative districts as of 2020.
Here are some notable examples and facts about these races:
- Minnesota House of Representatives District 54A: On Nov. 5, incumbent Brad Tabke (D) defeated Aaron Paul (R) 10,973 to 10,959 votes, a margin of 14 votes (0.06%). Paul requested a recount, which determined that Tabke won by 15 votes. Afterward, county election officials announced that 20 ballots were lost and could not be counted. Paul filed a lawsuit asking Scott County District Judge Tracy Perzel to declare the election result invalid. On Jan. 14, Perzel ruled that Tabke’s win was valid. Before the election, Democrats held a 68-64 majority in the chamber with two vacancies. After the election, the chamber was evenly split with 67 Democrats and 67 Republicans. Control of the chamber is still disputed. Click here to see our latest coverage of the Minnesota House.
- The race with the smallest margin was Maine House of Representatives District 141. After an initial tie, a recount determined that incumbent Lucas Lanigan (R) defeated Patricia Kidder (D) 2,478 to 2,477, a margin of one vote.
- The Maine House of Representatives and the Vermont House of Representatives each had nine races decided by fewer than 100 votes in 2024—making them the chambers with the second-highest number of these races. Democrats had a 79-67-2 majority with three vacancies in the Maine House going into the elections. Following the elections, Democrats have a 76-73-2 majority. Democrats lost a veto-proof supermajority in the Vermont Legislature after the 2024 elections.
- The race for Colorado House of Representatives District 16 was decided after a recount determined that Rebecca Keltie (R) defeated incumbent Stephanie Vigil (D) 20,641 to 20,638, a margin of three votes. Democrats lost a supermajority in the Colorado House in the 2024 elections.
Click here for a list of state legislative races decided by fewer than 100 votes in 2024.
Our new episode of On The Ballot is about what DOGE can learn from Clinton’s effort to ‘reinvent government’ in the ’90s
On Jan. 20, following his inauguration for his second term, President Donald Trump (R) signed an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The executive order said the organization will “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The order renamed the existing United States Digital Service to the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and established the agency within the executive office of the President. The order also created the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization within USDS and set the organization to expire on July 4, 2026.
Trump first announced the organization on Nov. 12 and said he would appoint Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (R) to lead it, though Ramaswamy later said on Jan 20 that he would be stepping down.
In this week’s new episode of On The Ballot, Ballotpedia’s Frank Festa interviews Elaine Kamarck, founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, who helped lead the National Performance Review in the Clinton Administration.
Nicknamed REGO for “reinventing government,” the National Performance Review focused on cutting wasteful spending and inefficiencies in federal programs, workforce reductions, and decentralizing authority.
Kamarck talks about DOGE and her experience spearheading one of the last major federal efforts to make the government more efficient.
Subscribe to On the Ballot on YouTube or your preferred podcast app, or click on the link below to listen.
Did you know three states—Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—are holding state supreme court elections this year?
There is one seat on the ballot on the Louisiana Supreme Court, three on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and one on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Louisiana and Pennsylvania are holding partisan elections, while Wisconsin’s is nonpartisan. This list includes regularly scheduled elections and could change if additional judges retire or are appointed.
In 2020, Ballotpedia published Ballotpedia Courts: Determiners and Dissenters, a study on how state supreme court justices decided the cases that came before them. We also published Ballotpedia Courts: State Partisanship in 2020, which studied the partisan affiliation of state supreme court justices.