CHICAGO (news agencies) — The 2024 elections will be dominated by the presidential contest and the battle for control of Congress, but another series of races is shaping up to be just as consequential.
Crucial battles over abortion, gerrymandering, voting rights and other issues will take center stage in next year’s elections for state supreme court seats — 80 of them in 33 states.
The races have emerged as some of the most hotly contested and costliest contests on the ballot since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the consitutional right to an abortion. The decision shifted the abortion debate to states, creating a “new era” in state supreme court elections, said Douglas Keith, senior counsel in the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks spending in judicial races.
“We have seen attention on state supreme court elections like never before and money in these races like never before,” Keith said.
Heated court races in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2023 handed victories to Democrats and saw tens of millions of dollars in TV ads, offering a preview of 2024. They’re also prompting groups to consider investing in states they would not previously have considered.
At least 38 lawsuits have been filed challenging abortion bans in 23 states, according to the Brennan Center. Many of those are expected to end up before state supreme courts.
The ACLU is watching cases challenging abortion restrictions in Wyoming, Kentucky, Ohio, Utah, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska, Georgia and Montana.
“After Roe v. Wade was overturned, we had to turn to state courts and state constitutions as the critical backstop to protecting access to abortion,” said Brigitte Amiri, deputy director at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. “And the stakes are unbelievably high in each of these cases in each of these states.”
The ACLU was among major spenders on behalf of Democrats in this year’s state supreme court contests in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Another big player in recent court races has been the Republican State Leadership Committee, which has said its focus is mainly on redistricting, or the drawing of political district boundaries. The group called state supreme courts the “last line of defense against far-left national groups,” but didn’t say how much it intends to spend on next year’s races or which states it’s focusing on.
In Ohio, Democrats are expected to cast state supreme court races as an extension of the November election in which voters enshrined the right to abortion in the state constitution. The state has more than 30 abortion restrictions in place that could be challenged now that the amendment has passed.
“The state supreme court is going to be the ultimate arbiter of the meaning of the new constitutional amendment that the people voted for and organized around,” said Jessie Hill, law professor at Case Western Reserve University and a consultant for Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights. “That is a huge amount of power.”
With three seats up for a vote and a current Republican majority of 4-3, Democrats have an opportunity to flip the majority of the court while Republicans will try to expand their control. Hill said the “very high-stakes election” will serve as another test of the salience of the abortion issue in turning out voters.
“We saw an incredible number of voters come out to vote on that amendment and an incredible amount of investment in those campaigns,” Hill added. “I think we’ll see a similar attention and investment in Ohio come next year.”
Redistricting also is likely to be a main focus in the state’s supreme court races, given the court will have realigned politically since it issued a series of rulings finding Ohio’s congressional and legislative maps unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans, said David Niven, political science professor at the University of Cincinnati. He expects millions of dollars to be spent on those campaigns.
“There’s often little conversation about these races, but they are just so utterly consequential in very tangible, practical ways that touch voters’ everyday lives,” he said.
Pending legislative and congressional redistricting cases also could play a role in North Carolina.
Republicans in North Carolina are looking to expand their majority two years after the court flipped from Democratic control in the 2022 election. That flip to a 5-2 GOP majority led to dramatic reversals in 2023 on rulings made by the previous court, which had struck down a 2018 photo voter identification law as well as district maps for the General Assembly and the state’s congressional delegation.
Groups on both sides also are expected to focus on Michigan, where Democrats hold a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court. Candidates run without political affiliations listed on the ballot, though they’re nominated by political parties.
Two incumbents — one Democrat, one Republican — will be up for election in 2024. The court recently kept former President Donald Trump on the state’s ballot, denying a liberal group’s request to kick him off. It is currently weighing a high-profile case over a Republican legislative maneuver that gutted a minimum wage hike backed by voters.
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