AP Photo/Andy Manis
- Democrats are working to break GOP legislative supermajorities in 2024.
- The party had a banner year, winning the Va. legislature and picking up seats in the NJ legislature.
- "2023 laid the foundation for 2024 to be the year of the states," the DLCC president said.
This year, Democratic state legislative candidates in key races across the country were buoyed by abortion rights and gun reform, and as 2024 approaches, the organization that works to elect more of the party's candidates at the state level said it's ready to keep going.
Some of the biggest Democratic victories this year were ones that the party had been eyeing for some time, which included flipping the Virginia House of Delegates and holding the Virginia Senate, enshrining abortion rights into law in Michigan and Minnesota, and voter approval of a constitutional amendment ensuring access to abortion in Republican-leaning Ohio.
Democrats also picked up seats in the New Jersey legislature, including several South Jersey districts it lost two years ago.
In a memo first shared with Business Insider, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) said that it was building on the party's 2023 wins to make further gains in the 2024 elections.
The DLCC has its eye on breaking GOP supermajorities in otherwise competitive states like North Carolina and Wisconsin, where lawmakers have put into place heavily gerrymandered maps that have severely weakened Democrats in those legislatures. In North Carolina, Republicans hold supermajorities in both legislative chambers; they also hold a supermajority in the Wisconsin Senate.
"Our work is not over — 2024 promises even more opportunities for building Democratic power and infrastructure in the states," DLCC president Heather Williams said in a statement. "We have record-level momentum fueling us into the new year, and the DLCC is poised to protect our progress, flip key chambers, and unravel GOP supermajorities."
"2023 laid the foundation for 2024 to be the year of the states," she added.
The memo also touted the election of Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which not only ended 15 years of conservative control of the court but could potentially reshape the state's aforementioned legislative districts.
And it highlighted the new national prominence of the "Tennessee Three" — the trio of Democratic lawmakers that includes state Reps. Justin Pearson, Justin Jones, and Gloria Johnson — who protested on the floor of the Tennessee House of Representatives to push the GOP-controlled body to pass gun reform after a mass shooting at a Nashville private elementary school earlier this year. (Both Pearson and Jones were expelled from the legislature, but subsequently won special elections and returned to the body.)
In addition to their legislative wins, Democrats also had a key hold on the statewide level in reelecting Andy Beshear to a second term as Kentucky's governor over Republican state Attorney General Daniel Cameron. And despite Democrat Brandon Presley's loss in the Mississippi governor's race, he won 47.7% of the statewide vote (compared to GOP Gov. Tate Reeve's 50.9%), the closest gubernatorial election in the deep red state since 1999.