Daily Brew: 2018 likely to reverse decade’s trend of uncontested legislative elections

May 11, 2018

Nearly one-third of state legislative elections will feature candidates from just one major party + Does aging federal workforce demonstrate potential agency talent gap?   Nearly one-third of state legislative elections will feature candidates from just one major party —Nearly 82 percent of the total state legislative seats in the country are up for election this November. Since 2010, Ballotpedia has published a regular competitiveness analysis. With more than half of state filing deadlines passed, here’s a quick check-in on the data to this point. In 1,089 (32.8 percent) elections, there is a candidate from only one major party running in the general election. There are 612 races where no Republicans filed and 477 races where no Democrats filed. The most competitive states are Maine, North Carolina, and South Dakota, where fewer than 7 percent of races are uncontested by one of the major parties. The least competitive states are Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, New Mexico, and South Carolina, where more than half of races are uncontested by one of the major parties. Incumbents are retiring in 617 (18.6 percent) of the races with filing deadlines so far. Nearly one-fifth of legislators elected in 2018 will be newcomers to the office. A majority of these retirements (65.4 percent) are in Republican-held districts, while 31.7 percent are in Democratic-held districts and the remaining 2.7 percent are in districts not held by either party. Two states—Maine and Missouri—had over 50 sitting legislators retire in 2018. In 24 states where data was available, 364 districts with elections in 2018 voted for the presidential candidate of the opposite party from their state legislator. The incumbent is retiring in 90 of those districts. In the 50 states, there are 99 state legislative chambers and 7,383 state legislative seats. In November 2018, 87 of these 99 chambers are holding general elections for a total of 6,070 seats. We’ll have much more on this data in the coming months ahead. Stay tuned next week for more historical comparisons of this year’s data relative to prior elections. Learn more         Maryland gubernatorial candidate Kevin Kamenetz dies of heart attack Maryland gubernatorial candidate and Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz (D) died Thursday morning of a heart attack at the age of 60. Kamenetz was the fundraising leader among Democratic candidates as of the January campaign finance reports, with $2 million cash on hand. He had been endorsed by Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D). Opinion polls of the Democratic primary field showed Kamenetz with levels of support between 10 and 15 percent, behind only Prince George's County Executive Rushern Baker (D). Kamenetz was considering a leading candidate and The Baltimore Sun wrote of his death, that it will “upend the political calculations in the race for governor.” Kamenetz was among nine Democratic candidates who filed to seek the party's gubernatorial nomination in the June 26 primary. The winner will face Gov. Larry Hogan (R) in the November general election. Learn more→ Does aging federal workforce demonstrate potential agency talent gap? Ballotpedia is compiling scholarly works related to how the administrative state works. We studied a podcast for RealClearPolicy titled “Reforming the Administrative State," where Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former head of the Clinton administration’s National Performance Review, stated that the federal government is experiencing a talent gap. Salary limitations and an archaic pay schedule, said Kamarck, make it difficult for the federal government to compete with the private sector for talented employees. Kamarck attributed the growing talent gap to what she describes as the government's clerk mentality—the continued view that government employees are the clerks of the 20th century rather than the highly-skilled professionals of the present day. The federal government’s aging IT workforce demonstrates the growing talent gap in government agencies. The number of federal IT workers over the age of 60, however, currently outnumber those under the age of 30 by a ratio of 4.64-to-1, according to a May 7 report by Nextgov, a news organization focused on technology and government. Learn more→