Belladonna lives in protective custody inside a men’s prison, a housing assignment for people at higher risk of victimization that separates her from the rest of the prison population. She calls the isolation excruciating. “[Protective custody] is so locked down that the world doesn’t know it’s actually a form of solitary confinement,” she told Bolts by email. She said the prison does little to help her deal with the devastating mental health effects of the isolation. When she does get recreation time, she says she spends it in tiny one-person enclosures that she says are known as “dog cages.”

Trans women in New Jersey prisons say they are routinely isolated for all but one or two hours a day, despite recent reforms to reduce solitary confinement in the state. Gia Abigaill Valentina, another trans woman inside NJSP, said she’s usually locked in her cell for almost the entire day and similarly is given little help coping with the near total isolation. “There is no programming for the transgender women here. The only counseling provided is routine mental health services, in which someone from mental health comes around every two weeks,” Valentina said in an email from the prison. “In this lock down unit I am made to stay in my cell for 23 hours a day. I am allowed out for kiosk and shower.”

The isolation that trans women endure inside New Jersey prisons demonstrates the limits of a landmark reform law that state lawmakers passed in 2019 to reduce solitary confinement. The law, the Isolated Confinement Restriction Act, hailed as the most progressive solitary reform at the time, put strict limits on “isolated confinement”, which it defined as holding someone in a cell for 20 or more hours each day with “severely restricted activity, movement and social interaction.” The law also prohibited isolation of vulnerable groups, including LGBTQ+ people, but still left corrections officials with broad discretion over when to use isolation, including for protective custody. While the law spells out specific guidelines related to vulnerable populations like pregnant or disabled prisoners or those under 21 and over 65 years old, there are none regarding those who are or perceived to be LGBTQ+.

When prison officials do use isolation, the law says it cannot go longer than 20 consecutive days or 30 days in a 60-day period. But Belladonna says she has been isolated since early February—roughly ten months, as of the date of publishing. 

Isolation of trans women in protective custody is just one of the ways solitary conditions persist in the New Jersey prison system despite the reforms. A recent investigation by HuffPost and the Inside/Out Journalism Project found that more than three years after the 2019 law was passed, the prison system’s main alternative to isolated confinement—so-called Restorative Housing Units (RHUs), where incarcerated people are isolated as punishment for breaking prison rules—is largely solitary by another name and seems to defy the reforms. Days after that investigation was published, in early October, New Jersey’s Office of the Corrections Ombudsman, a state prison watchdog, published a report echoing those findings.  

“We found that on any given day, 700+ people are confined to a prison cell for 22-23 hours per day,” Terry Schuster, the New Jersey Corrections Ombudsperson, said in an email. “People spend months or years in these disciplinary tiers, called Restorative Housing Units (RHUs), and reached out to our office in large numbers to draw attention to the apparent violations of state law.” The office confirmed to Bolts that it has also received reports from transgender people about the extent of their isolation. 

A spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC) did not respond to questions for this story, including how many transgender people are in isolation conditions inside the state’s prison system. 

Research has consistently shown that solitary confinement has disastrous consequences on mental and physical health. According to psychiatric experts, isolation can both exacerbate existing mental health issues and even cause the onset of mental illness. And according to a recent study, time in isolation can also increase someone’s risk of death in the first year after release from incarceration, namely from suicide, homicide and opioid overdose. 

There is also overwhelming research to indicate that LGBTQ+ people face egregious and disproportionate violence behind bars. More than half of respondents to a 2022 national survey by legal advocacy group Lambda Legal and prison abolitionist organization Black & Pink said they had been sexually harassed by jail or prison staff, while 1 in 6 said they had been sexually assaulted. A stunning 87 percent reported verbal assault. 

Alongside this pervasive abuse, trans people in prison often land in isolation. A recent report in The Nation detailed how trans people disproportionately face isolation in federal lockups, citing data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 2017 to 2022 that showed incarcerated trans people are typically two to three times more likely to be put in “restrictive housing” than cisgender people.

Valentina said she landed in isolation at NJSP after being transferred from the state’s only women’s prison, the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, earlier this year after Governor Phil Murphy announced his plans to shutter it following years of scandals there. Her path out of isolation isn’t as simple as moving to a women’s prison, particularly in light of a policy NJDOC quietly enacted late last year that gives prison officials greater leeway to override trangender prisoners’ housing preferences. Under the new policy, prisoners have a “rebuttable presumption” that they are housed according to their wishes, but officials now can override that preference based on factors including “reproductive considerations.” 

The new policy was enacted months after another trans woman, Demi Grace-Minor, impregnated two women at Edna Mahan during what NJDOC officials said were consensual sexual relationships. A resulting media firestorm and transphobic criticism preceded the policy change, which now bars many trans women from easily obtaining housing that experts say could make them safer while behind bars.

The new housing policy could also put the New Jersey prison system at odds with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, which tasks prison officials with giving serious weight to a trans person’s housing preferences; still, recent reporting shows that trans women are almost always housed in men’s facilities. PREA also requires housing to be decided on a case-by-case basis, which Valentina said isn’t happening for trans women in New Jersey prisons. 

Valentina alleges that under the new policy, prison officials won’t send trans women to women’s units until they get bottom surgery—referring to surgeries that often include an orchiectomy and vaginoplasty—to eliminate any “reproductive considerations.” Valentina, Belladonna, and other trans women have repeatedly said that they face agonizing, oftentimes bureaucratic, delays in actually obtaining these surgeries, leaving them trapped not just in men’s prisons but in continued isolation. Trans women in New Jersey prisons also allege that medical and mental health care are grossly lacking.

“I truly suffer every second of every day with not having my full surgery, although I feel so much better since my first gender affirming surgery,” Belladonna said. 

“I can honestly express with truth and sincerity that I have NEVER in my life encountered or felt such discrimination, hatred and transphobic opposition as I have experienced since coming out here in the NJDOC,” Valentina said. 

Some trans people have been pushed to extremes to alleviate their suffering. Belladonna has thrice mutilated herself, including trying to cut off her penis, and recently tried to remove her testicles, in order to relieve herself of the debilitating dysphoria she faces without gender affirming procedures. 

Belladonna said that even if she were to be offered less restrictive housing, she would still have to turn it down out of concern for her own safety—meaning she will likely stay isolated until she can move to a women’s prison. 

“I signed into protective custody because in a man’s prison PC is the safest place versus the prison’s ‘male population’ for someone as advanced in her transition as me,” she said. 

Like Belladonna, Valentina also detailed efforts to remove her penis herself amid delays in obtaining gender affirming care and a lack of adequate mental health care. 

And when weeks after Grace-Minor was sent back to Garden State Youth Correctional Facility after the pregnancies at Edna Mahan, she similarly tried to remove her testicles. At the time of the incident, Grace-Minor was housed in isolation and said she felt unsafe surrounded by men. Grace-Minor is now incarcerated in Northern State Prison in Newark. 

“It has been pure hell back here in solitary: lack of food, being sexually harassed and housed around men who flash their genitals and refer to me as ‘he-she bitch,’” Grace-Minor wrote on a public blog in September 2022. “I doubt that I will survive all of this.”

Surgeries aside, trans women in New Jersey prisons say they’ve also had to fight for months to get basic necessities like hair ties, proper underwear and even deodorant. Their complaints mirror allegations from a lawsuit filed against NJDOC in 2019. The plaintiff in that lawsuit alleged that corrections officers misgendered her, denied her female commissary items and failed to prevent harassment against her, all of which trans women say still happens in New Jersey prisons. 

That lawsuit, brought by the ACLU of New Jersey on behalf of an anonymous trans woman, ended with a settlement in June 2021 and a change in NJDOC’s housing policy to give trans prisoners a “presumption” that they would be housed in line with their gender identities, a policy it had to maintain for at least a year. Four months after that time period lapsed, NJDOC rolled back the policy to give prison officials greater discretion over housing assignments for trans people.

Amid the constellation of struggles these women face behind bars, they agree that moving to a women’s prison would make them feel safer, but that likely won’t happen until they obtain bottom surgery, which all of them are desperately waiting for. And until then, their isolation and the anguish that comes with it—compounded by their continuing dysphoria absent gender-affirming surgery—will continue.

Belladonna called her situation “agonizing,” writing in a recent email, “It is torture for me because I only have half of my bottom surgery and so I’m stuck in the room all day with this part that doesn’t belong to me.”

The post New Jersey Prisons Isolate Trans Women Even After Reforms to Reduce Solitary Confinement appeared first on Bolts.

A boon for the GOP, the results will have stark consequences for state policy, easing the way for new legislation that would target LGBTQ+ residents, and empowering politicians who have championed draconian anti-crime measures and attacks on public education. They will likely set up more clashes between the conservative state government and the city of New Orleans. 

The results also signaled that election conspiracies continue to resonate with the GOP base, as several campaigns emerged triumphant after fueling false allegations of fraud during a critical juncture for the state’s voting systems. Jeff Landry, the incoming governor, tried to help Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as attorney general, and he doubled down on his alliance with the former president during his campaign this year.

Bolts covered the elections in the lead-up to Oct. 14, with an eye to its ramifications for criminal justice and voting rights. Below are seven takeaways on the results. 

1. Landry’s win hands the GOP a new trifecta

Jeff Landry, the state’s arch-conservative attorney general, easily prevailed in the governor’s race on Saturday, receiving 52 percent in a 16-person field. He will replace John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who was barred from seeking reelection due to term limits. 

Landry’s victory hands Republicans full control of the state government for the first time since 2015, since his party also defended its large majorities in the state House and Senate.

The result will free conservative policy ambitions, which were held back over the last eight years by Edwards’ veto power. Even when the GOP gained a supermajority capable of overriding Edwards’ vetoes earlier this year, it remained frequently unable to do so. This summer, for instance, the GOP failed to muster the votes to override Edwards on a bill that would have prevented discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. 

Landry is sure to bring an entirely different outlook on such issues. Throughout his career, he has pushed Louisiana to restrict LGBTQ+ rights and block teaching of such issues in education, including at the collegiate level. Last year, Landry created a new tool for people to file complaints against teachers and libraries. He has also worked for the state to obtain information about Louisiana residents who travel out of state to obtain gender-affirming care or abortions.

Landry has fiercely fought local and state reforms meant to reduce the state’s near-record incarceration rate, Bolts reported in a profile of the attorney general in August. This year alone, he ran ads lambasting “woke DAs,” fought efforts by Louisianans on death row to seek clemency, and championed a measure, which ultimately did not pass, that would have opened the criminal records of children as young as 13 to the public—but only in three predominantly Black parishes. 

2. Things are about to get more complicated for New Orleans

Republican-run states commonly preempt liberal policies adopted in their cities, so just the fact that the GOP gained a trifecta in Louisiana would put New Orleans in a tough spot. But beyond that, Landry has been particularly aggressive in undercutting his state’s most populous city. As attorney general, he retaliated against New Orleans officials when they crafted policies to protect immigrants and to shield residents from anti-abortion laws, proposing to withhold flood protection funds. He has also undermined efforts to reform New Orleans police while also setting up a short-lived state task force with the authority to make arrests in the city. 

And Landry has made it clear he would double down as governor, telling Tucker Carlson last year that the governor’s office in Louisiana “has the ability to bend that city to his will,” and that “we will.”

New Orleans voters on Saturday signaled their appetite for a very different politics. Landry received less than 10 percent of the vote in the city, far behind Democrat Shawn Wilson who drew 71 percent. A former public defender with some progressive support, Leon Roché, also defeated a former prosecutor for a position as criminal court judge in the parish. And one of Louisiana’s most left-leaning lawmakers, Mandie Landry (no relationship to Jeff Landry), defeated more centrist challengers in a heated state House race for an uptown district.

On Sunday, even as she celebrated her own win, Mandie Landry said she was preparing for a “sobering” stretch for her city. “I think there is going to be more of a push from Baton Rouge to interfere in New Orleans than usual,” she told Bolts. “I am not under any delusions.”

3. This was a low-turnout election

For an election that will deeply affect Louisiana, engagement was very low: just 36 percent of registered voters turned out on Saturday.

Turnout fell sharply in the state’s two most populous urban regions, which vote very Democratic. Compared to the 2020 presidential election, the number of voters who cast a ballot fell by 60 percent in New Orleans and by 52 percent in East Baton Rouge Parish. In the rest of the state, it only fell by 49 percent. 

Mandie Landry, the New Orleans lawmaker, faults the state Democratic Party for doing little outreach to her city’s voters. Compared to the “huge efforts to get out the vote” she witnessed in 2015 and 2019, “there was none of that this time,” she told Bolts. “I didn’t see any get out the vote effort.” The state Democratic Party, which scarcely spent money in the run-up to the primary, did not respond to a request for comment. 

4. Secretary of state race heads to a runoff, but a new frontrunner emerges

Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin has tried to appease election conspiracists since 2020, for instance quitting a multi-state consortium that monitors voter registration after false claims that it was tied to George Soros. With Ardoin retiring this year, the big question on Saturday was which of the many Republican candidates would advance to a runoff. 

Ardoin’s deputy Nancy Landry (no relation to Jeff Landry or Mandie Landry) barely edged out her rivals, coming in first with 19 percent. Bolts reported earlier this month that, much like her boss, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals while also echoing unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities. 

Mike Francis, the Republican who most firmly rejected election conspiracies, very narrowly lost out on a runoff spot, coming in third with 18 percent. Brandon Trosclair, a little-known businessman who ran as a hardline election denier and called for fully hand-counting ballots, got 6 percent.

Landry will now face Democrat Gwen Collins-Greenup, an attorney who snatched the second runoff spot. Collins-Greenup got 19 percent as well, but Landry will be the clear front-runner since all Republican candidates combined for 68 percent of the vote cast on Saturday. The state is at a crossroads on election administration since it has to soon replace its outdated voting equipment, an issue around which the far-right has mobilized.

5. In first referendum inspired by “Zuckerbucks,” voters ban private election grants 

Voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1, a measure that will block Louisiana’s election offices from receiving private grants from outside organizations. 

A non-profit with ties to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020 to local election offices nationwide, in order to help them run elections during the early pandemic. The right quickly dubbed these grants “Zuckerbucks,” fueling conspiracies about election interference, and many GOP-run states proceeded to pass laws to ban such grants. To circumvent the Democratic governor’s veto, Republican lawmakers in Louisiana placed such a ban directly on the ballot for the first time.

Some elections experts critical of such bans share the reservations about private money flowing into elections, but they also stress that public funding is woefully inadequate, and that the bans risk further starving cash-strapped offices, threatening election security rather than protecting it. 

“Nobody’s got money to pay election officials what they’re worth (particularly in this new environment), to invest in new systems, to make improvements to back-end security,” Justin Levitt, a voting expert who now teaches at Loyola Law School, told Bolts on Sunday. “If the state actually responded by funding the elections we deserve, banning private money wouldn’t be the worst outcome. Private donations were only ever there to stop the bridge from collapsing entirely. They never should have been necessary. Yet they were.”

He added, “I think we can all hope that we’re not dealing with that kind of 10-alarm fire in 2024.”

6. In sheriff’s races, a sea of white men—again

Sixty-three parishes held sheriff elections, and only three even featured women running for the office. All lost on Saturday. 

This means that all 63 parishes have elected a man, or are sure to do so after the Nov. 18 runoffs. This dynamic is nothing new: All of these parishes already have a male sheriff. 

Nearly all incoming sheriffs will also be white. Across these 63 parishes, only three elected a Black sheriff on Saturday, with Black candidates advancing to a runoff in three additional parishes. By contrast, 57 of these 63 parishes elected a white sheriff on Saturday or will do so after the runoff. Louisiana’s population is 30 percent Black. 

This pattern is symptomatic of the societal biases regarding what law enforcement should look like, though breaking it up would not in itself change brutal conditions and treatment inside the state’s jails. And here again, New Orleans stands out from the rest of the state.

Its sheriff, Susan Hutson, is a Black woman who took office in 2022 (New Orleans holds its elections on a different cycle than all other parishes, and so Hudson was not on the ballot this fall). “As a woman and as a Black woman, I go through additional types of microaggressions in the job,” Hutson told Verite News last year. “So just having somebody else there who might be experiencing something similar with me, it’s good—it’s good to see someone like you.”

7. East Baton Rouge sheriff secures another four years 

The jail in Louisiana’s most populous parish is notorious for an alarming death rate and for the brutal treatment of people detained there. But, as Bolts reported in August, organizers and civil rights lawyers have run into Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, who has overseen the facility for 15-plus years, boosted by campaign contributions from people and groups that benefit from more jail spending. 

Gautreaux won reelection with 86 percent of the vote on Saturday. He is a Republican in a heavily blue jurisdiction but he faced no Democrat; two opponents were kicked off the ballot over the summer, though neither was expected to mount a serious challenge to the entrenched sheriff.

Reverend Alexis Anderson, co-founder of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, a local organization that has pushed back against the sheriff’s practices, told Bolts on Sunday that she would continue to demand accountability regardless of these results. “I stand committed to working towards independent investigations of each and every death that has occurred in that facility under the Gautreaux administration,” she said. “We will continue engaging our community on the development of real public safety tools.”

Anderson added, “There are too many lives at stake to become discouraged.”

Piper French contributed reporting for this article.

The post Louisiana Takes a Hard Swing to the Right appeared first on Bolts.

Most of these elections are playing out in the South, where Republicans could secure three more trifectas than they currently have—that is, control of the governorship and both chambers of their state legislature. 

The biggest and most suspenseful battle is taking place in Virginia. Despite Democrats’ gains in the state since the 2000s, the GOP just needs to flip a couple of seats in the state Senate to grab full control of state government. Republicans are also aiming to gain control of Kentucky and Louisiana, in each case by flipping the governor’s mansion. All three states currently have divided governments. 

In Mississippi, the GOP is defending its existing trifecta. 

Democrats don’t have the opportunity to gain a new trifecta this fall, but they’re aiming to keep control of the state government in New Jersey, the most populous of these five states. And in a bonus addition to the fall’s calendar due to a single special election in New Hampshire, they have a shot to keep eroding the GOP majority in the nearly-tied state House, though they won’t be able to quite erase it for now.

These elections are a final messaging test for the parties before 2024, but they’ll also profoundly affect public policy around critical rights within these states, with measures ranging from LGBT rights in Louisiana and new abortion restrictions in Virginia hanging in the balance.

Below, Bolts guides you through each of the states electing governors or legislatures this year as part of our coverage of the 2023 local and state elections around the country. Much more is on the ballot in these states and many others, from a supreme court election in Pennsylvania—the only such race this year—to referendums in Maine or Ohio. 

Kentucky 

Current status: Split government, with a Democratic governor and Republican control of both legislative chambers

What’s on the ballot: The governorship

No matter what, the GOP will retain control of the Kentucky legislature heading into 2024 after very comfortably retaining majorities in the state House and Senate in 2022; those seats are not up for grabs until November 2024.

Republicans also have the votes to override vetoes by the governor, in a rare state where that only takes a simple majority, and they’ve rarely blinked. This year, the GOP-run legislature overrode Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s veto of 15 bills, ramming through a ban on gender-affirming care for minors and major abortion restrictions.

Still, Beshear has flexed his executive power during his first term, issuing public health orders during the COVID-19 pandemic and winning a legal fight against GOP lawmakers who sought to block them. He also issued an executive order in 2019 that restored the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians who were permanently disenfranchised. And last year, he issued other executive orders to allow some people to access medical marijuana, drawing condemnation from Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is now challenging Beshear for the governor’s office; Beshear’s order eventually pressured state lawmakers into legalizing medical marijuana through legislation this spring. 

The ensuing clashes have put November’s race between Beshear and Cameron on track to break fundraising records.  

Louisiana

Current status: Split government, with a Democratic governor and Republican control of both  legislative chambers

What’s on the ballot: The governorship, and both chambers of the legislature

All legislative seats in Louisiana are on the ballot this year, but we already know who will run the legislature come 2024 before a single vote has been counted. 

Only Republican candidates filed to run in the majority of districts in both the House and the Senate, guaranteeing GOP majorities in each chamber. Still, the fall’s elections will determine whether they can easily pass their priorities in coming years. 

John Bel Edwards, a Democrat has occupied the governor’s mansion over the last eight years, and he has vetoed many Republican bills in that time. Just this summer, he vetoed a barrage of legislation, including laws that criminalized getting too close to an on-duty police officer and banned discussion of sexual orientation in a classroom. Republicans have made major gains in the legislature during Edwards’ tenure, and earlier this year they finally clinched supermajorities in both chambers after a longtime Democratic lawmaker switched parties, giving them the power to  override vetoes. But veto overrides have remained unusual in Louisiana; Republicans this summer held a special session to take up just a few of the bills Edwards vetoed, and while they passed a bill to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth, they could not muster the votes for other legislation.

Edwards is now barred from running for re-election due to term limits. If the GOP flips the governor’s office, it would gain unified control of the state government and no longer have to worry about vetoes. The front-runner is Jeff Landry, the state’s ultra-conservative attorney general, who is worlds apart from the outgoing governor on criminal justice policy. 

And even if Democrat Shawn Wilson pulls off an upset victory to become governor, the state’s legislative elections will determine the size of the Republican majority. Democrats have said they hope to break the GOP’s new supermajority, though the party has suffered from dysfunction, undercutting its preparation. Republican leaders, meanwhile, would like to grow their edge even more to make it easier to override vetoes.

Mississippi

Current status: Republican trifecta

What’s on the ballot: The governorship, and both chambers of the state legislature

The GOP is vying to keep unified control of Mississippi’s state government, which should be easy on the legislative side: Republican candidates are running unopposed in most Senate districts as well as in just shy of a majority of House districts, shielding them from any big surprise at the polls in November.

But Democrats have zeroed in on a scandal involving misspent welfare funds that has engulfed Republican Governor Tate Reeves, who is running for re-election and banking on the state’s red lean to prevail. He faces Brandon Presley, a member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission and a well-known politician in the state, who is aiming to hand Democrats’ their first victory in a governor’s race since 1999. Like past Democratic candidates in the state, Presley has vowed to expand Medicaid if he is elected, a reform Reeves has opposed; Mississippi remains one of only ten states that hasn’t expanded the program as provided by the Affordable Care Act, even though the expansion would cover more than 200,000 Mississippians.

The elections are unfolding in a tough landscape for voting rights and restrictions that depress participation, including a lifelong ban on voting for people convicted of many felonies—a policy that disenfranchises more than one in ten adults in the state, including sixteen percent of Black residents. And even though a new law meant to criminalize assistance with mail-in voting was blocked by a judge this summer, it has still left local organizations in a difficult position as they mount turnout efforts. 

New Jersey

Current status: Democratic trifecta

What’s on the ballot: Both chambers of the state legislature

Democrats walked into the 2021 elections confident they would easily keep unified control over state government, but they only barely survived with Governor Phil Murphy’s securing re-election in a surprise squeaker. 

Two years later, the stakes are considerably lower since the governorship is not on the line, but all legislative seats are up for grabs. And although the GOP, which gained seven seats in 2021, once made noise about 2023 being the year they flip a chamber for the first time in two decades, the party has already hit most of its obvious targets and it would have to reach into districts that are firmly blue. According to calculations by the New Jersey Globe, President Biden carried 25 of the state’s 40 legislative districts by double-digits in the 2020 presidential race. Even when Murphy survived statewide by three percentage point in 2021, he carried the majority of legislative districts by at least five percentage points. That gives Democrats a clear roadmap to retaining their legislative majorities this fall. 

Unified Democratic control hasn’t meant that those in the party always see eye to eye, though. Relationships between the legislature’s Democratic leaders and the more progressive governor have been difficult at times since Murphy’s first election. Senate President Steve Sweeney’s shock election loss in South Jersey in 2021 removed one of the state’s more centrist politicians, but progressive priorities like same-day voter registration have still died in the chamber.

Virginia

Current status: Split government: a Republican governor and House, and a Democratic Senate

What’s on the ballot: Both chambers of the state legislature

Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin badly wants his party to seize control of the Virginia legislature, which would give him far more control over the affairs of the state. Alongside Youngkin’s victory in 2021, the GOP also flipped the state House. But the Senate was not on the ballot that year and remained Democratic, and since then it has frustrated conservative ambitions on many issues, including abortion rights, criminal justice, and voting rights. 

Senate Democrats over the last two sessions have killed a barrage of Republican legislation, including bills that would have banned access to abortion at 15 weeks, ended same-day voter registration, enacted new voter ID requirements, and restrained the discretion of reform prosecutors to drop low-level cases.

If the GOP gains the Senate and keeps the House in November, it would open the floodgates for such bills. To get there, they need to flip two Senate seats (out of 40), and not lose more than one House seat compared to the state’s last elections. These margins are tight enough that Democrats are hopeful they’ll be the ones celebrating on Nov. 7 if they manage to not just retain the Senate but also flip the GOP-run House. 

And there are many competitive seats; 14 House districts and 7 Senate districts were within 10 percentage points in the last governor’s race, according to a review of data supplied by the Virginia Public Access Project. (The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics reviews the specific districts that are the likeliest to decide the majority.) Both parties are pouring in large amounts of money to win them, with many ads focusing on abortion access.   

These legislative races are the first general election since Youngkin dramatically tightened voter eligibility in March by ending his predecessor’s practice of automatically restoring the voting rights of people who leave prison. Many Virginians are unable to vote as a result. 

Bonus: New Hampshire 

Current status: Republican trifecta

What’s on the ballot: Just one state House seat

In the entire state of New Hampshire, only one state House district around Nashua is up for election in November. But with the state House nearly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, that election carries great symbolic weight. 

Big gains in the 2022 midterms left Democrats within three seats of a majority in the state House and they made further gains in special elections this year, most recently on Sept. 19 by flipping a district in Rockingham County. That cut Republicans’ edge to just one seat, 198 to 197, putting Democrats on track to tying the chamber with an even number of representatives per party ahead of Nashua’s Nov. 7 special election, which is taking place in a district that leans strongly blue, according to Daily Kos Elections. 

Then, on Monday, a House member announced that she would quit the Democratic Party, leaving her former party two seats behind heading into Nov. 7. 

Practically speaking, the exact number of seats held by each party wouldn’t at this stage change the bottom line: The GOP’s hold on the chamber is already tenuous. This is the largest legislative body in the U.S. by far, and lawmakers have other jobs since they’re only paid $100 a year. This means that chronic absences make the chamber difficult to predict and manage on any given day. Expect more vacancies, and party switches, over the next 15 months.

The post The Five States Where Trifectas Are At Play in November appeared first on Bolts.