Republicans were victorious last month in state house races across the country. The GOP power will give the party its largest number of seats in state legislatures since the Great Depression, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). As you may know, NCSL is a bipartisan organization that provides research for state legislators and their staffs.
Republicans now hold about 3,890, or 53%, of the total state legislative seats in the country. This will be the most seats in the Republican column since 1928. The GOP will now control at least 54 of the 99 state legislative chambers, its highest number since 1952. It will be interesting to see how the GOP handles this situation when the bodies convene around the U.S. in 2011. Tim Storey, elections specialist with NCSL, observed:
2010 will go down as a defining political election that will shape the national political landscape for at least the next ten years. The GOP, in dramatic fashion, finds itself now in the best position for both congressional and state legislative line drawing that it has enjoyed in the modern era of redistricting.
There can be little doubt that all of the problems in our Nation’s Capitol – and the belief around the country that very little was being done to make things better – contributed to the GOP takeovers on the local level. Democrats were blamed to a larger degree than Republicans and you know the rest of the story.
Source: NCSL
