Sister District’s initial post-election state legislative analysis showed that, given the top of ticket outcomes, Democratic candidates in many battleground state legislatures performed better than expected in the 2024 elections. Given Donald Trump’s state-level wins, we would have expected to see significant Republican gains at the state legislative level, but that didn’t happen uniformly. In fact, Democrats held on to slim majorities in critical chambers like the Minnesota Senate and Pennsylvania House, picked up enough seats to break Republican supermajorities in Wisconsin, North Carolina and even Montana, and gained seats in the Georgia House—all in states that Trump carried. Of course, the story was not all positive for downballot Democrats, who narrowly lost control of the Michigan House and Minnesota House. But in terms of state legislative chambers and seats held, Democrats had more success than the historical trends around presidential coat-tails and downballot roll-off would have predicted. 

In this report, we focus more specifically on downballot roll-off patterns at the state chamber level. Until all of the necessary data become available, including presidential vote totals by district, we are unable to fully analyze and draw strong conclusions about voter roll-off in 2024, but we present below an overview of key trends and findings based on the aggregate, chamber-level results.

More Downballot Roll-Off than Expected Among Republicans

In our prior research, we identified a long-term trend of downballot roll-off, which happens when people vote for a candidate at the top of the ticket, but then decline to vote, or “roll off,” in races that are farther down the ballot, including state legislative contests. Sister District analyzed election data from the years 2012-2020 and found widespread evidence of roll-off, across 10 states and a variety of top-of-ticket races. We also found that roll-off occurred much more often for Democratic state legislative candidates than for Republicans. Updating this analysis with results from the 2022 elections, we showed again that in most cases, Democrats at the top of the ticket received more votes than Democratic state legislative candidates (collectively), while the exact opposite was true for Republican candidates, who sometimes even received more aggregate votes for state legislature than the Republican at the top of the ticket. 

Given these earlier findings, we expected to see similar patterns of roll-off in the 2024 results. Using the official vote totals compiled from states’ election websites, we calculated roll-off rates at the state chamber level. This analysis revealed some interesting variation from the historical patterns. First, while roll-off levels historically among Democrats are much higher than among Republicans, there were notable deviations in 2024—including that Democratic state legislative candidates in both the Senate and the House in North Carolina actually received more votes than Harris did statewide, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Roll-Off in Battleground Chambers in 2024, by Party

Note: Vote totals are current as of Jan. 24, 2025 and were compiled from official state government sources and websites (e.g., secretary of state or state election offices). Negative values indicate more votes cast for state legislative candidates than for President. Roll-off at the chamber level cannot be measured for chambers where only a fraction of the seats were up for election (NV Senate, PA Senate, WI Senate) or for chambers with multi-member districts where voters are allowed to vote for more than one candidate in a district (AZ House, NH House). The totals reflect all state legislative races, including uncontested ones.

Statewide, Kamala Harris received 2,715,375 votes in North Carolina. NC Democratic candidates collectively received more votes than Harris, both in the state house (7,657 more votes) and in the state senate (4,043 more votes). This finding was unexpected, because in both 2016 and 2020, the results were the exact opposite: NC state legislative Democrats received far fewer votes (hundreds of thousands) than the Democratic presidential candidates.

By contrast, Donald Trump received 2,898,423 votes statewide. NC Republican candidates received fewer votes in the state house (371,306 fewer votes than Trump) and in the state senate (297,102 fewer votes than Trump). Again, these amounts of roll-off among Republicans are quite contrary to expectations: State legislative Republicans in NC saw less state legislative roll-off in both 2016 and 2020 than Democrats did, not more.

In short: NC state legislative Democrats outperformed Harris, collectively receiving more votes than she did in the state. And, by this metric, NC state legislative Republicans underperformed Trump. Note that ticket-splitting may have been a factor here—meaning that some number of NC voters likely cast their ballots for Trump but then voted for a Democrat for state legislature—but we can’t know for sure how many voters split their tickets vs. rolled off.  

Comparisons with the 2020 and 2016 Elections

For purposes of comparison with the last two presidential elections, roll-off numbers by state chamber and party are displayed in Table 2. Here, we observe the highest Republican roll-off rates of any of the last 3 presidential elections in nearly every chamber analyzed: AZ Senate, GA Senate, MI House, NC House and Senate, NV Assembly, and PA House. In the MN House, state legislative Republicans still received more votes than Trump (consistent with the historical pattern in that chamber), but the differential is much smaller in the 2024 election. 

Table 2: Chamber-Level Roll-Off in 2016, 2020, and 2024

Note: Negative values indicate more votes cast for state legislative candidates than for President. These are the state chambers where we have roll-off data for all 3 elections. 

Discussion

It is noteworthy that roll-off rates for Republican candidates were generally high in 2024, compared to the last two presidential elections. However, the fact remains that there was still more roll-off among Democratic candidates than Republican ones in almost every battleground chamber; NC is the only exception. In the GA House, for example, there is a huge gap—Democratic candidates collectively received ~393,000 fewer votes than Harris did statewide, while Republican candidates received only ~29,000 fewer votes than Trump statewide. These partisan differences are highly consistent with the pattern in previous elections. 

To be clear, the numbers reported here are aggregate, chamber-level totals that include votes cast in all state legislative races, including uncontested ones. In an uncontested race, voters of one party simply do not have a co-partisan candidate on the ballot to vote for, and ideally this should not be counted as roll-off. To get a more accurate picture of roll-off, it would be best to restrict the sample to contested races only (as we’ve done in past studies), but this more detailed analysis cannot be done until the data on presidential vote totals in each state legislative district become available. Our previous work has also found that the partisan differences in roll-off persist even when uncontested races are excluded. 

Finally, as we noted earlier, the frequency of split-ticket voting vs. roll-off is unknown. We cannot know for sure how many voters split their tickets between presidential and state legislative candidates and how many did not vote for a state legislative candidate at all. Reports on recent elections indicate that split-ticket voting has declined, but it is entirely possible that this conventional wisdom is no longer correct—or that 2024 was an outlier in this respect and a higher-than-expected number of voters split their tickets. 

Gaby Goldstein

Co-Founder, Gaby is one of the Co-Founders of Sister District, and the Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives (SDAN) at Sister District Project

Gaby is one of the Co-Founders of Sister District, and the Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Sister District Action Network