Republicans are losing their bench.
More than a dozen GOP leaders in state legislatures across the country — including North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia and Iowa — have opted to resign or have announced their retirement over the past 14 months, in what could be another sign of the party’s dimming prospects in the midterms.
Individual explanations for the departures vary, but they suggest it’s not just congressional Republicans facing down a stormy November as polls show President Donald Trump’s popularity sinking amid higher gas prices and doubts about the Iran war. The GOP could be facing another midterm like 2018, when Democrats flipped six legislative chambers and netted over 300 seats nationwide.
“I think he puts Republicans on the defensive with his actions,” said Dick Wadhams, a longtime consultant and a former state GOP chair in Colorado. “They can’t stand it anymore.”
Other Republicans dispute the notion that Trump is anything other than a popular standard-bearer for the party. They argue the loss of GOP leaders in some legislatures isn’t necessarily a sign of deep trouble for the midterms, even if it does mean that some states will be more of a challenge than in the past.
“If the election were next week, I’d be bothered,” said Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming. “The election is not next week.”
Still he concedes the loss of Republicans from the legislature in Wisconsin, where Assembly Speaker Robin Vos announced his retirement in February and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu followed suit last month, will make it harder for the party to hold its razor-thin margins, at least in the upper chamber. “The Senate side is just more problematic,” he said.
In addition to being a possible bellwether for the midterms, the loss of at least 14 Republican leaders, compared to about half as many Democrats, points to a broader shift in state-level politics and the loss of some lawmakers who might have become the next generation of leaders on the national political scene.
The decisions by state lawmakers to quit or retire mirrors what has been happening in Congress, where 36 Republican members of the House and seven GOP members of the Senate have announced they are not running for reelection this November. That compares to 21 House members and four senators among Democrats.
On the state level, Democrats are hoping to reverse more of the Republican gains in legislatures dating back to 2010, when the GOP flipped 22 chambers — enabling them to push through conservative legislation on issues from voting rights to abortion, and to redraw congressional maps in their favor.
Democrats have been whittling away at those gains, starting with the midterm election during Trump’s first term and making further progress in 2020 and in 2022, when they flipped four Republican-held chambers.
Republicans still control 60 percent of state chambers across the country, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Democrats, inspired by success in New Jersey and Virginia in November, hope 2026 could be their own 2010. To that end, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee is spending $50 million to target 42 chambers this November — its largest spend and broadest map yet. The Republican State Leadership Committee plans a similar effort but has not yet announced the details.
Democrats view the departures of senior Republicans as a sign of momentum. One of the first came in New York, where Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay announced in February 2025 that “it was the time for me to move on.” Republicans broke a Democratic supermajority in the New York Senate just a few months earlier when Trump was on the ballot, but since then have failed to flip key seats in special elections. A handful of Democrats are already competing to flip Barclay’s seat.
In June, Colorado House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese resigned, a surprise following Republicans’ 2024 success in breaking Democrats’ House supermajority. A few months later, Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen left government to serve as CEO of a conservative nonprofit.
“[Lundeen] clearly showed that he didn’t think that Colorado was ever going to be winnable,” said Wadhams. “At least in the foreseeable future.”
The loss of GOP leadership crescendoed last month, when Wisconsin’s LeMahieu and Speaker Pro Tempore Kevin Petersen announced their retirements and North Carolina Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger lost his primary for reelection.
Berger’s departure will be the second leader this cycle for North Carolina Republicans — following Senate Majority Leader Paul Newton’s resignation in March 2025 to be vice chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The departures come as Democrats seek to break the supermajority Republicans built in the Senate after redrawing district maps.
“Berger’s retirement will have an impact on the Senate side as it relates to the political operations that are raising money,” said GOP strategist Paul Shumaker, who has run state and federal campaigns and helped flip the North Carolina Assembly red in 2010. Shumaker counters, however, that Republicans are already making up what they lost in fundraising and recruitment. “Leadership has done a pretty good job of making sure they had a good field of candidates lined up,” he argued.
Democrats and Republicans are most focused on Wisconsin. Democrats flipped 10 Assembly seats in 2024 after the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered maps redrawn, bringing Democrats within five seats of a majority. The state Senate is two seats from flipping, and half its members face the redrawn maps for the first time this cycle. The prospect of taking both chambers has already led Democrats to an off-year fundraising record, with the Democratic Assembly and Senate committees collectively reporting nearly $3.3 million in 2025. That compares to $2.2 million in 2023.
Schimming, the Wisconsin GOP Chair, said he is not worried about Democrats’ fundraising totals or his party’s ability to hold the Assembly. “[If] it was late in the season, I’d probably be more worked up by that,” he said.
A recent Marquette Law School poll showed just 42 percent of Wisconsin voters approve of Trump’s performance, a finding that Schimming dismissed eight months before election day. The poll also found that a majority of Wisconsin voters disapproved of the war in Iran and approved of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Trump’s tariffs.
In dismissing concerns about Trump’s popularity, White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement that the president “has delivered for Americans with a secure border, cooling inflation, working-class tax cuts, new trade deals, new drug pricing deals, and trillions in investments,” and said the White House “is keen to tout these victories in the months ahead as we continue to work to Make America Great Again.”
If Democrats succeed this November, party officials say they intend to put up more resistance to the president’s agenda on redistricting, immigration, Medicaid funding and voting.
“This administration is going to continue to push work into the states, we know that,” said DLCC President Heather Williams. “The outcome that certainly we are working toward, on our target map, is that we are putting Democrats in an increased position of power.”
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