Democrats In Ur State Legislatures, Flippin' Ur Houses. And Senates.

News just keeps getting happier.

While we all wait to find out — sometime around Easter; that's fine, count all the votes! — whether the US House of Representatives will be narrowly held by Democrats or narrowly taken over by the GOP (at this point, it looks like it's that second one), let's look at how things are shaking out at the state level, where the news keeps looking good. As Yr Wonkette's Jamie Lynn Crofts noted last week, Democrats will control both houses of Michigan's legislature for the first time in 40 years when the new session starts in January, thanks to redistricting that eliminated partisan gerrymandering. It's pretty amazing: They made the maps fair, and democracy broke out!

Read More:  Michigan Unf*cks Its Maps And Democracy Happens 

Republicans have been very deliberately seeking to dominate state legislatures since the 2010 Tea Party wave, but this year, Democrats started to make up some lost ground. Republicans still control more state legislatures, but as Axios reports, "this election shows Democrats are committed to playing the long game, says Daniel Squadron, founder of The States Project." Also too, it's worth pointing out that Democrats didn't lose control of any state legislatures this year, a pretty rare thing for a party that holds the presidency — so rare in fact that it's the first time since 1934. 

So where else besides Michigan did the Wave get Red-shifted to Blue? (We suspect that somewhere, our grad school friend in optical science just sighed heavily.)

Minnesota:

Gov. Tim Walz was reelected and Democrats kept control of the state House, and also flipped the state Senate, where the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor party now has a 34-33 majority. Even Dems (not to mention Farms and Labs) acknowledged the results were a bit of a surprise, but they aren't complaining. It's the first trifecta for Minnesota Dems since 2013. [ Minnesota Public Radio ]

Pennsylvania (Almost, Still Counting):

With two districts still counting votes (and where the candidates are only a few votes apart), the Pennsylvania House is on the verge of flipping to Democrats, or staying under Republican control by the slimmest possible margin. As the Philadelphia Inquirer explains, it's an unexpectedly strong outcome for Democrats, Going into the election, Republicans had a 23-seat majority in the 203-seat state House. If they win both seats that are still undecided, they'd maintain control.

Also complicating matters is the fact that one state Representative, Tony DeLuca, died before the election but won reelection, which

means Republicans and Democrats could be tied at 101 seats apiece come the beginning of the next session, adding to the uncertainty.

As in Michigan, redistricting played a role in ending the GOP majority, resulting in a more evenly split map and helping Democrats to

 oust at least three incumbents in the Philadelphia suburbs, flip at least four open seats that had been previously held by Republicans who retired, and take three newly-drawn districts.

On top of redistricting, the fact that the top of the ballot in Pennsylvania featured two terrible Republicans — Senate candidate Dr. Oz, and racist election denier Doug Mastriano in the race for governor — probably helped Democratic turnout and hurt Republicans farther down the ballot. Add in all the younger voters and women pissed off at the Supreme Court's overturning Roe v. Wade, and you had a voting population that wasn't too friendly to Republicans. Mastriano supported a no-exceptions ban on abortion, and Oz probably didn't win anyone over with his waffling on the issue. [ Philadelphia Inquirer ]

Also Too:

Democrats picked up governing trifectas in Maryland and Massachusetts, where legislatures in both states were already held by Democratic majorities, and the elections of new governors led to unified government. Maura Healy won the open governor's race in Massachusetts, becoming the state's first woman chief executive and sharing honors with Oregon's Tina Kotek as the nation's first lesbian governors, too. (I guess since Massachusetts finished counting first, Healy was the first in the nation to win, if you're keeping track.)

And in Maryland, as we've already noted , Wes Moore became the state's first Black governor, picking up another Democratic trifecta.

Oh, yes, and in Colorado, where Republicans had been hoping to pick up seats, Republicans lost seven seats in the state Lege, and even before the election, one state senator switched parties from Republican to Democrat out of disgust at the January 6 insurrection.

The Red Wave of GOP bloodletting led Republican state Rep. Colin Larson, who had hoped to become minority leader but instead lost his seat, to declare last week's election "an extinction-level event." He added, "This was the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaur, and in this case, the dinosaur was the Republican Party.” Republicans now hold fewer than a third of the seats in each chamber, the poor dears. Larson called on Republicans to finally repudiate Donald Trump and conspiracy theories, please. [ Colorado Public Radio ]

All told, the National Conference of State Legislatures tally shows that before the election, 62 legislative chambers were under Republican control, and 37 were controlled by Democrats. (Although Nebraska's weird unicameral legislature is officially nonpartisan, it's loaded with Republicans.) With the flips, it's now 55 (or 54) Republican chambers and 40 held by Dems, with four states still being decided; other than the uncertain results in Pennsylvania, none of the other three are likely to flip.

[ CNBC / Philadelphia Inquirer / Photo:  Laslo Varga, Creative Commons License 4.0 ]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 or $10 a month to help us keep tabs on all the schadenfreude, huh?

 Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .