“What a long strange trip it’s been.” No, not the Grateful Dead’s 1977 album, but Tuesday’s state elections.
The gubernatorial race results were what we expected. Democrats retained Governors’ mansions in Delaware, North Carolina, and Washington State, while Republicans kept Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia. Republicans even picked up the Governor’s seat in Montana, which will bring the 2021 partisan breakdown to 27 Republican Governors and 23 Democratic Governors. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats made significant gains in gubernatorial races across the country, which brought some degree of parity in party control. That parity is still somewhat intact.
Where Democrats struggled was in their attempt to flip state legislatures. Democrats had the possibility of gaining control of one or both legislative chambers in Iowa, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, but failed on all accounts. One of the most surprising results for me was in Minnesota, where Democrats were expected to gain control of the Senate and the entire state government. While the partisan breakdown is not final, we expect Republicans to hold the Minnesota Senate by a thin margin. I was also surprised by Michigan, where Democrats were expected to take the House, but failed.
Republicans held their ground in the state chambers they were defending, and picked up both the New Hampshire House and Senate, giving Republicans total control of the state. Arizona remains the only wild card as the results are still being tabulated. There, Democrats were expected to take control of both the House and Senate, but the latest intel is that Democrats may only get one chamber, if any.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning some key state legislative leaders who lost their elections—the Democratic Speaker of the Rhode Island House, Nicholas Mattiello, as well as the Democratic Speaker of the Vermont House, Mitzi Johnson.
This is still very much a fluid situation in many states as mail-in, absentee, and provisional ballots still need to be counted, but suffice to say that Republicans held their own in the states, while Democrats fell short.
What does this mean for BIO? With no drastic changes on Tuesday, we will go into the 2021 state legislative sessions focusing on some of the same issues we dealt with in 2020. State legislators will be focused on filling budget shortfalls resulting from decreased tax revenues and getting COVID-19 under control. And both Republicans and Democrats will become more focused on prescription drug prices given the budget implications of increased Medicaid rolls and falling tax revenue.
– Patrick Plues, BIO’s VP of State Government Affairs
