The Most Republican and Democratic Legislatures

by Karl Kurtz

Alan Greenblatt's well-done piece in Ballot Box last week, "Seeing Red in Oklahoma," taking NPR to task for calling Oklahoma "the most Republican state in the Union" suggests that we should publish the list of the most Republican and Democratic state legislatures.

There are three states in which Republicans hold more than two-thirds of the total seats after the 2008 election:

	House	Senate	Total
Idaho	74.3%	80.0%	76.2%
Utah	70.7%	72.4%	71.2%
Wyoming	68.3%	76.7%	71.1%

Kansas, where Republicans hold 77 percent of the seats in the Senate--second among senates only to Idaho, just misses the two-thirds cut with 65 percent of the total seats in the Legislature in Republican hands.  Oklahoma ranks 10th among the most Republican legislatures.

Democrats will hold two-thirds or more of all legislative states in seven states in 2009:

	House	Senate	Total
Rhode Island	92.0%	86.8%	90.3%
Hawaii	88.2%	92.0%	89.5%
Massachusetts	89.4%	87.5%	89.0%
West Virginia	79.0%	82.4%	79.9%
Connecticut	75.5%	66.7%	73.8%
Maryland	73.8%	70.2%	72.9%
Arkansas	71.0%	77.1%	72.6%

The 89-90 percent numbers for Rhode Island, Hawaii and Massachusetts are remarkable.  New York Democrats hold nearly three-quarters of the seats in the Assembly, but their narrow, two-seat margin in the Senate means that they miss the two-thirds threshold among total seats by 0.1 points.

Trivia time (courtesy of Tim Storey):

1. What are the four states in which Republicans have never held a majority in either chamber since Reconstruction?
2. What is the only state in which Democrats have never held the majority in both chambers at the same time? (Yeah, I know, this sounds like one of those stupid sports statistics that Frank Deford was complaining about the other day.  My only defense is that this is a blog by and for legislative junkies.)

Answers below the jump.

1. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, [and Mississippi--see qualifying comments below] are the last remnants of the "Solid South."  (Louisiana currently has a Republican speaker, but Democrats still have the majority of seats.)
2. North Dakota--Democrats have at some point had the majority in both the House (1982 election) and the Senate (1994) but never at the same time.

Comments

[Marco]

Republicans did briefly hold a 27-25 majority in the Mississippi Senate after the 2006 election and held for about a year, I think, before the Democrats took control again.

[Karl Kurtz]

Thanks for the comment, Marco. However, our records, which are post-election to post-election and sometimes don't capture party switches or special elections, show the Democrats never dropping below 27 seats in the 52-member Mississippi Senate. Like the Louisiana House today, the Democrats maintain a nominal majority in the Mississippi Senate under the leadership of a Republican lieutenant governor. Both Republicans and Democrats hold committee chairmanships in that chamber.

[Marco]

Well, what about after the 2006 election? I'm looking at the NCSL StateVote 2006 page that shows a 27-25 Republican edge in the MS Senate, and the NCSL 2007 election post-mortem that says Democrats regained control of the state Senate from the GOP in November 2007. See also this news article (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5277/is_200704/ai_n21236169) and Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Senate#Composition).

Love your blog, by the way. It's an excellent resource.

[Karl Kurtz]

OK, Marco, we stand corrected. Once again, though, all of this Mississippi activity was between elections, which, in our time series of data on state legislative elections, we don't track.