Now that the candidate filing deadline has passed for major party candidates in over half the states, I thought this would be a good point to take a look at where things stand.
As of today, the 2024 General Election candidate filing deadline has passed in 28 states (not including New York, which hasn't updated their filing database yet). When you include the states which have their legislative elections in odd-numbered years (New Jersey, Louisiana, Mississippi & Virginia), as well as the two states which don't have their legislative elections until 2026 (Alabama and Maryland), that's a total of 33 states.
Across these 33 states there's a total of 4,693 legislative districts: 3,353 House/Assembly seats and 1,330 Senate seats.
However, of those, only 3,975 are actually on the November ballot (or were last November). This is partly due to Alabama and Maryland not having theirs until 2026, but it's mostly because many states stagger their Senate terms every two years (similar to the U.S. Senate staggering theirs in thirds).
As a result, there's only 3,975 seats actually up this cycle (and 578 of those were already settled last fall).
This leaves a total of 3,397 seats actually on the ballot this November:
- 2,700 State House/Assembly seats
- 697 State Senate seats
Of those, there's at least one Democratic candidate running in 2,565 (76%) of them:
- 2,039 House/Assembly (76%)
- 526 Senate districts (75%)
This ranges from as high as 99% in North Carolina (they filled all 50 Senate districts and are only missing candidates in 2 of the 120 House districts) to as low as a pathetic 39% in Oklahoma (which only managed to recruit Democrats for 12 of the 26 Senate races up this year and 37 of the 101 House districts).
I'll revisit this once the filing deadlines have passed for the remaining states (Louisiana is last on July 19th). The spreadsheet below includes every state except for New York, which is why it's slightly lower (74%) than noted above:
