Beyond the White House: These 10 down-ballot races could change everything

While serving as an Arizona state senator, Christine Marsh encountered a bill proposing that pregnant people be allowed to drive in the high-occupancy vehicle lane – an attempt at codifying fetal personhood.

New Hampshire state representative Ben Ming, who is running for New Hampshire State Senate District 12, said the state Republican Party supported a bill that bans transgender girls from playing sports, requiring them to show documentation of their gender.

“If that's not extreme, I'm not sure what is,” Ming told Raw Story.

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Kevin Volk, a candidate for Arizona House of Representatives District 17, said one of his opponent’s presented a proposal that would preemptively award all of the state's electoral votes to former President Donald Trump — no matter how voters elected.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the official arm of the Democratic party that focuses on state races, identified Marsh, Ming and Volk as part of a new list of more than 180 candidates in highly competitive state races with the chance to help Democrats make gains or maintain control of the state legislatures — and to defeat potential Republican extremists.

“As we look to top battleground races in 2024, the difference for majority control in multiple states will come down to single seats and tight margins — and determine the rights of 70 million Americans,” wrote Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, in a memo released Monday. “In fact, by flipping just eight state legislative seats across the country this year, Republicans could simultaneously take control of four legislative chambers.”

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee identified 10 “must-win” races to help maintain the party’s majorities, flip a seat or break up Republican supermajorities, which include the following Democratic candidates:

• Rep. Jaime Churches, Michigan House of Representatives District 27
• Susie Greenberg, Georgia House of Representatives District 53.
• Ann Johnson Stewart, Minnesota State Senate District 45
• Rep. Ben Ming, New Hampshire State Senate District 12
• Rep. Brian Munroe, Pennsylvania House of Representatives District 144
• Dante Pittman, North Carolina House of Representatives tDistrict 24
• Rep. Lucy Rehm, Minnesota House of Representatives District 48B
• Vanessa Vaughn West, Kansas House of Representatives District 39
• Kevin Volk, Arizona House of Representatives District 17
• Yee Leng Xiong, Wisconsin State Assembly District 85

In 2022 Munroe became the first Democrat to win the District 144 seat in the Pennsylvania state legislature.

“I'd like to think of this district as being hope in what is a very not unified nation,” Munroe, who considers himself a moderate in his “very purple district,” told Raw Story.

The stakes for these state races as high as the state legislatures are where issues like access to abortion and school funding often play out.

New Hampshire’s abortion ban after 24 weeks is “causing doctors to really think twice about whether they want to practice medicine in the state, and it's no way to provide healthcare when doctors have to think twice about whether they can save a life,” Ming, whose wife is a doctor, told Raw Story.

In Arizona, public education funding has become “our local or state education version of the debt ceiling, where it used to be a procedural thing, until some extreme folks said, ‘hey, this is political leverage. If we're willing to burn down the system, we might be able to get something out of this,’” Volk told Raw Story.

“They've basically threatened to shut down public education, and, by extension, our economy, if they don't get their way on other things,” he said.

Rep. Hope Damon, who is running for reelection in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, representing Sullivan 8, said bills banning abortion at 15 weeks, six weeks and 15 days all appeared during the latest legislative cycle. Other bills were presented limiting LGBTQ+ rights, she said.

“We expect that the Republicans will continue to push a very divisive, extreme agenda that is not about meeting the needs of ordinary, hardworking families, and it's not about protecting our rights and freedoms,” Damon told Raw Story.

Marsh, who is running for re-election in Arizona State Senate, District 4, said Democrats are fighting “one crazy bill after another.” Democrats are one seat away in both the state House and Senate from breaking Republicans’ majorities, which could put Democrats “in a position where we're not spending so much time trying to stop bad legislation and actually pushing forward good legislation that would help Arizonans,” she said.

“We are right now, in the state of Arizona, in a situation where even really good, small, even life-saving bills, don't necessarily see the light of day if they have a D after their name,” Marsh told Raw Story.

The campaigns for Damon, Marsh, Ming, Munroe and Volk’s opponents did not immediately respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

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