Global Courant
While lawmakers said most day-to-day dealings between the parties tend to be peaceful, tensions between the supermajority and the superminority can sometimes lead to high-profile stunts fueled by pent-up animosity. In Oregon, Republicans staged a weeks-long strike to boycott Senate business. In Tennessee, the GOP leadership has expelled two Democrats for violating house rules while protesting gun violence.
“I’ll tell you straight-up — it really sucks,” said Sen. Mike Caputo, one of West Virginia’s three Senate Democrats.
Caputo served in the West Virginia legislature for nearly thirty years and witnessed his party shift from a supermajority to a superminority. While West Virginia is an extreme example, it still represents the story of declining Democratic power in the US over the past decade, as Republicans launched a nationwide state strategy following the election of former President Barack Obama that gave them control of the majority of state legislatures.
However, Democrats have seen some recent gains in state houses. The party flipped legislators in key states like Michigan and Minnesota and took seats in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
But Republicans maintained their grip on most state chambers last November and this year, solidifying their power in the South and parts of the Midwest. The GOP won supermajorities in chambers in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Carolina. Across the country, Republicans hold 55 percent of the state’s more than 7,000 legislative seats, according to NCSL.
Interviews with nearly a dozen legislators serving in a superminority revealed that they share a common strategy for trying to pass or destroy legislation: taking advantage of factions within the majority party and trying to pick potential allies, whether progressive Democrats or are conservative Republicans.
“You can get more power by forming alliances to destroy legislation,” said Gierau, the minority whip representing Jackson, Wyoming, the tourist haven and liberal oasis. “You measure your success more by what you can kill than by what you can pass.”
Charged with whipping the votes of his only fellow Democrat, Gierau often ends up whipping Republicans as well. He is the more conservative of the two Senate Democrats and has been referred to as a “DINO” (Democrat in Name Only). Gierau has a dinosaur figurine on his desk.
In previous sessions, Wyoming Democrats had the good fortune of working with moderate Republicans to vote down legislation restricting abortion rights. But that success came to an end this year. In March, Wyoming became the first state to ban drug-induced abortions and later passed laws restricting nearly all abortions.
“I get kicked in the ass every twenty minutes,” Gierau said. “We have to get ourselves off the ground. We must accept defeat and move forward and continue to do so. We can’t sit there crying into our beer.”
The day-to-day business of the state legislature is fairly mundane and mostly bipartisan. But superminority Democrats in multiple states said in interviews that they felt deep discouragement this year over their inability to do much about recent controversial culture war battles. Republicans have sparked a national debate on transgender rights as dozens of states considered legislation that would limit transgender people’s ability to access health care and other restrictions that limit their public lives.
