Democrats Trim GOP’s National Lead

Democrats wrestled half a dozen state legislative chambers away from Republicans in Tuesday’s elections, including capturing both houses in Colorado.

The Colorado Legislature has generally been under GOP control for the last 30 years, and President Bush carried the state Tuesday with 53% of the vote.

The Democratic gains in the state and in a few others were one of the party’s few bright spots in the election, showing they could still make some headway with voters on a grass-roots level.

Republicans made gains in several Southern states, winning the Georgia House and the Oklahoma House, as well as the Senate in Tennessee. They also captured the House in Indiana.

“Democrats stopped the Republican surge [in picking up state legislative seats] and got a bit of it back, but we continue to see the erosion of the Democratic Party ... in the South,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego.

On Tuesday, more than 80% of the 7,382 legislative seats in the country were up for grabs. Elections took place in every state except Alabama, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia.

Republicans now control 20 state Legislatures. Democrats have 19, and 10 are split, with Democrats holding one chamber and Republicans the other.

Before Tuesday’s vote, the GOP held 21 and the Democrats 17, with 11 split. The Nebraska Legislature, which has only one chamber, is nonpartisan.

Democratic gains came largely in states where the party’s presidential candidate, Sen. John F. Kerry, won the popular vote, such as Vermont, Washington state and Oregon.

Democrats benefited from a court-ordered redistricting plan in North Carolina, while the party’s showing in Colorado drew on the coattails of Ken Salazar, the popular attorney general who was elected to the U.S. Senate, said Tim Storey, an elections analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The biggest Republican gain came in Georgia, where the GOP -- with an increase of 20 seats -- took over the state House for the first time in more than 130 years.

Term limits helped the GOP pick up nine seats in the Oklahoma House, tipping the party balance away from the Democrats for the first time in about eight decades.

Storey noted that gains made in one election cycle at the legislature level are frequently reversed in the next -- a situation he described as “a perpetual game of political tug-of-war.”