Introducing Signal: The View From All 50 States
On Tuesday, voters in all 50 states head to the polls. Today, we’re sharing what the people who are deep in those states’ politics have been telling us.
Precision has spent years building relationships with political strategists at every level of government and across the political spectrum in every state in the country. This fall we started asking them questions, systematically, and taking down the answers. We call it Signal.
The timing for this is deliberate. Election night will produce a national story within hours. The decisions that follow it — which bills move, which coalitions hold, which issue eats a legislative session alive — get made over the next year in 50 statehouses, in part, by the people we surveyed.
What Signal is
Signal runs on Precision’s 50 State Network: more than 300 political strategists and practitioners across the political spectrum and across the country.
They’re former elected officials, campaign and official staff, party leadership, and other deeply connected people who read their state’s politics for a living. We know them and we work with them, but we’re also impartial about what came back. Network members in both parties told us things their own side would rather not hear, and we’re reporting those the same way we report everything else.
The point of Signal is not to predict the outcome of the election; there are more than enough public polls that do that. Instead, we set out to learn what this expansive network perceives, what trends they are seeing in their state, and what they expect to come post-midterms and beyond.
What We Found
Respondents in both parties describe a national environment running hard against Republicans and driving sentiment in their states.
Nearly two-thirds give Democrats the momentum in their state, including over half of Republicans. It reaches well into states Trump carried in 2024, not only the Blue and Purple states. But they credit prices and an unpopular president more than anything Democrats have done.
But at the same time, our network members expect roughly three-quarters of state legislative chambers to stay right where they are. Even those who say it might change hands are relatively skeptical.
Republicans describe their own coalition fraying.
Asked in their own words which voters might be moving, Republican strategists named groups drifting away from their party more than three times as often as groups moving toward it. Independents and soft Republicans. Women. Men under 35. Hispanic voters. The suburbs.
Where Republicans do expect to hold, the argument never touches the environment. Every respondent who cited Republican momentum sits in a state Trump carried, and more than eight in ten point to registration margins, supermajorities and statewide office-holding. Not one points to a favorable national mood.
They aren’t disputing the headwinds. They’re betting their state’s structure absorbs it.
Affordability decides the election. It may not drive the session.
Over half of the political strategists surveyed name the economy and affordability as the single biggest factor in their state’s outcome, four times the next answer. No surprise there.
Then the gap opens. While 57% expect affordability to dominate the conversation in their state, only 30% expect their legislature to prioritize it. That 27-point spread is the widest of any issue we asked about.
Our network members were clear about why, and it isn’t that legislatures don’t care. Affordability is largely a federal problem, and the statehouse has relatively few tools at their disposal to address it. There are other more tangible issues to address in the short-term, such as looming budget shortfalls.
Which brings us to…
Data centers: the top priority of the next legislative session.
Political strategists and practitioners were almost unanimous in their belief that their state will take significant policy action on data centers next session. To many, this is voter driven: 83% say they believe their state’s voters are concerned about AI and data centers.
It’s the rare issue where both parties are angry at once, with two-thirds saying the concern is coming from Democrats and Republicans equally. Asked where their legislature is likeliest to find bipartisan movement, nearly half said data centers, seven times the next policy area.
The fight around data centers was seen by some as a proxy for affordability — this is an issue that affects Americans’ pocketbooks and that states and localities can impact in a tangible way, as opposed to affordability more broadly.
The Upshot
The national environment and the state legislative environment are moving at different speeds, and a plan built on one will misread the other. The results will provide significant insight into the road ahead. But that will just be the beginning of it.
Compared to the often glacial pace of legislation moving on Capitol Hill, state legislatures tend to move at breakneck speed, and by the time you realize you have a problem in a state house, it is often too late. Planning ahead for state legislative sessions is critical, and Precision’s 50 state network is prepared to help. The full report is available now.
Read Signal here.
If you want to talk through what it means for your organization, we’d welcome the conversation.