Former president Trump made hundreds of candidate endorsements in the 2022 Republican primaries. The state of Georgia garnered outsized attention because it was ground zero for Trump’s false accusations of a stolen 2020 presidential election. Trump endorsed several candidates in Georgia’s May 2022 GOP primary contests, including candidates challenging Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, incumbents drawing Trump’s ire for upholding the 2020 outcome favoring Joe Biden. In a survey of likely Georgia GOP primary voters randomizing whether they are told which candidate Trump endorsed in five statewide races (governor, US Senate, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and insurance commissioner), our analysis shows substantial variability in the influence of Trump’s endorsement. With scant prior information in low-profile contests (e.g., insurance commissioner), the Trump endorsement has a substantial impact, whereas it is rendered ineffectual in the most high-profile race for governor. Thus, the findings demonstrate the remarkable variability of a Trump endorsement, which is primarily contingent upon the salience of a specific race.

A growing literature has revealed a notable electoral advantage for congressional and gubernatorial candidates with deep local roots in their home districts or states. However, there is a dearth of research on the presence and impact of local roots in state legislative races. In this paper, we close that gap by demonstrating the consistent and significant electoral impacts that state legislators’ local roots have on their reelection efforts. We use data capturing a representative cross-section of state legislative incumbents (N = ~5,000) and calculate a novel index measuring the depth of their local roots modeled after Hunt’s (2022, Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress) measure for the US House. We present evidence that state legislators with deep local roots in the districts they represent run unopposed in their general elections nearly twice as often as incumbents with no such roots. Of those who do attract challengers in their reelection efforts, deeply rooted incumbents enjoy an average of three extra percentage points of vote share. Our results have important implications for candidate emergence in state legislative elections during a time when so many are uncontested. They also demonstrate the limits of electoral nationalization for understanding state politics.

What is the effect of divided government on issue attention in state legislatures? Much of the research on divided government examines how it affects the enactment of significant legislation but does not consider other effects on legislative behavior. In this article, I propose a new theory of the relationship between divided government and legislative activity. Regardless of partisan control, reelection-minded legislators face pressure to deliver benefits to voters, yet divided government can make substantive policy change difficult. As a result of these competing pressures, under divided government legislators increasingly turn their focus to bills that benefit their local constituents, which are seen as easier to enact and allow them to engage in advertising, credit claiming, and position taking. Consistent with this theory, I find that under divided government, legislators introduce bills at the same rate, but the type of legislation introduced shifts away from statewide policy changes and towards district-specific legislation.

Political scientists have largely come to a consensus that “most citizens are politically uninformed” (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1997), but even with increased attention to state-level representation and electoral behavior, political scientists know surprisingly little themselves regarding what Americans know about state politics. Past studies of state political knowledge examine narrow domains of knowledge and make few comparisons between individuals’ understanding of national and state politics. To provide a more comprehensive account of Americans’ state political knowledge, I conducted a novel national survey that included over 30 political knowledge questions. In a descriptive and exploratory analysis, I show Americans demonstrated more knowledge about who their Governor is but less knowledge about who represents them in the state legislature, state government institutions, and the state economy, particularly compared to their knowledge of federal politics. The different levels of political knowledge across different domains and levels of government raise concerns for statehouse democracy and should be considered before testing theories at the state level. To guide future research and surveys, I identify political knowledge questions that discriminate well between those who know little, some, and a lot about state politics across different domains of political knowledge.

Interest groups and policy advocates often view the initiative process as a way to circumvent a gridlocked state legislative process. A major assumption behind this strategy is that this alternative path can be successful. We theorize that the same conflict and lack of consensus that killed the legislation in the legislative process may resurface in the electorate and jeopardize the measure’s chances of success at the ballot box. We test this proposition on all initiatives in California from 1912 to 2020 and on a smaller subset of the data that controls for campaign spending and the economy. We find clear and consistent evidence that voter support for initiatives, especially fiscal initiatives, declines under periods of divided government. In addition, interactive models show that increasing levels of party polarization exacerbate these effects. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for the debate about whether the initiative process makes states more responsive to constituent opinion.

We build upon Brace, Langer, and Hall’s (2000, The Journal of Politics 62: 387–413) original measure of American state supreme court justice ideology – the PAJID scores. To do so, we gather new data on 1,666 state supreme court justices who served between 1970 and 2019 and update the PAJID scores throughout this period. Testing indicates that PAJID scores are a valid measure of state supreme court justices’ policy preferences and compare favorably, though less efficiently, to others such as Bonica and Woodruff (2015, The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 31: 472–98) and Windett, Harden, and Hall (2015, Political Analysis 23: 461–9). Given limited data availability for other ideological measures pre-1990 and post-2010, we conclude that these updated PAJID scores should prove attractive to scholars studying state courts during these periods and among those who desire additional state supreme court ideological data for robustness checks.