Winners and losers from 2020 state battles

In a year in which voters had to focus more than ever on how they vote because of the pandemic, people were also open to changes in how states run their elections.

For the first time ever, ranked-choice voting was used in a presidential election, in Maine. The system awards second-choice votes to the top vote-getters if no candidate gets over 50 percent, which places more emphasis on third-party candidates and voters. (Though it didn’t come into play in the presidential or Senate races there because candidates won with more than 50 percent of the vote there.)

Alaska became the second state to approve ranked-choice voting. It also eliminated partisan primaries, which means all candidates in the primary will be on the ballot together, and the top two vote-getters will go to a general election. Locally, ranked-choice voting became more popular. Voters in five cities — Boulder, Colo.; Minnetonka, Minn.; Bloomington, Minn; Albany, Calif.; Eureka, Calif. — also adopted it for their local elections, according to the bipartisan electoral reform group Unite America.

In Virginia, Democratic voters defied some of their party leaders and approved a bipartisan redistricting commission. It means that Virginia Democrats, who control state government, will have much less say in how congressional and state legislative electoral lines are drawn next year in federally mandated redistricting.

And in California, voters gave felons who are on parole the right to vote.

On the other end of the political spectrum, Alabama, Colorado and Florida changed their constitutions from saying “every” citizen can vote to “only” a citizen can vote. That’s a big trend for such a symbolic change, said Amanda Zoch with the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks ballot measures.

That could signal some states’ willingness to tighten voter security, even as a widespread search by Republicans after President Trump’s loss failed to come up with evidence of voter fraud that changed results. There also wasn’t success for measures regarding changes to electoral systems across the board, as we’ll get to below.

Some of the most conservative states in the country now allow some form of legal marijuana use. South Dakota legalized marijuana, with a sizable chunk of Trump supporters voting in favor of it. Mississippi legalized medical marijuana with the same political dynamic. Arizona, Montana and New Jersey also legalized marijuana in some form. That means 15 states have legalized recreational marijuana, and 36 allow at least medical use.

The changes helped give momentum to a House Democratic push to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level. For the first time ever this month, the House voted in favor of that. (It has little to no chance of passing a Republican-controlled Senate, but if Democrats retake the Senate in two Georgia runoff races, that could change since President-elect Joe Biden supports decriminalization.)

Florida became the first state in the South — and the first state that voted for Trump — to require a $15 minimum wage, after voters easily approved this ballot initiative this November. Eight states now require or will soon require workers get paid at least that. Having Florida among them raised hopes among minimum wage advocates that they can expand their fight into other purple or conservative-leaning states, too.

After hoping to flip as many as a half-dozen state legislative chambers this year, Democrats ended up losing two. Democrats needed to get a foot in the door in states by 2021, when many state politicians get to redraw congressional maps. These are lines that will last for the next decade and help determine which party controls Congress. Instead, Republicans will go into yet another redistricting effort controlling a majority of chambers — 53 to Democrats’ 31.

The battle for state legislatures was also historically static. You have to go back to the 1940s to find an election when so few chambers flipped parties, said Tim Storey, the executive director of the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures. Voters were just not that motivated to make big changes in who represents them. In addition, Storey says lawmakers will have some practical limitations to legislating next year in a pandemic — virtual sessions, or plexiglass between lawmakers, or limited access to state capitols — that could make big, bold legislative changes hard to come by in 2021.

In yet another example of how unwilling voters were this year for change with state leadership, every single challenger to a sitting governor lost in 2020, regardless of party, noted state political analyst Louis Jacobson. The only seat that flipped parties was Montana, from Democrat to Republican, but it was an open seat, so the challenger didn’t have to kick anyone out to win.

There weren’t that many competitive governor races to begin with this year, but it was still notable not to have any surprises. And that’s more good news for Republicans, who control slightly more than half of the governor’s mansions and will get to keep it that way.

There were failures in some places along with the wins. Ranked-choice voting failed in Massachusetts, even though it’s popular just up the road in Maine.

And in Missouri, voters actually got rid of a nonpartisan redistricting process less than two years after approving it, handing power back to politicians. There was some controversy that voters didn’t understand what the ballot measure actually did.