The 2025 United States state legislative elections were held on November 4, 2025, for two state legislative chambers in two states. Across the fifty states, 3 percent of all lower house seats were up for election, with no upper house having regularly scheduled elections. These elections take place concurrently with several other state and local elections, including the 2025 gubernatorial elections.
Democrats expanded their majorities in the Virginia House of Delegates and the New Jersey General Assembly, gaining a supermajority in the latter, in the November general election. They also flipped seven legislative seats across the country in special elections throughout the year while generally outperforming districts' partisan lean in other races. Several other special elections determined partisan control of legislative chambers, though each party held their respective seats in these, resulting in no change of control. This is the first time that no state legislative chamber has changed partisan control since 2015.
The 2025 state legislative elections were the first held during the second presidency of Donald Trump following his victory in the 2024 presidential election. Republicans had seen very modest coattails in the 2024 legislative elections, flipping a net of just over 50 seats from the Democrats and breaking Democratic trifectas in two states, but establishing no new trifectas of their own. Entering 2025, Republicans fully controlled 23 state governments, Democrats controlled 15, while 12 states were under split control. Only two states held regularly-scheduled legislative elections in 2025: New Jersey, which Democrats fully controlled, and Virginia, where Democrats controlled the legislature but not the governorship.
Seven incumbent state legislators switched political parties during 2025, four leaving the Democratic Party and three leaving the Republican Party. In March, Daniel Thatcher, a moderate Republican Utah Senator left the party and joined the Utah Forward Party. Florida Senate Democratic leader Jason Pizzo announced he was leaving the Democratic Party to become an Independent in April 2025, citing the party's recent decline in power the state. He later announced an Independent run for governor of Florida. In May, Robin L. Webb, the last remaining rural Democratic member of the Kentucky Senate, left the party and joined the Republican supermajority. In June, Maine state senator Rick Bennett left the Republican Party and became an Independent, while simultaneously announcing a bid for governor of the state. In August, Maine state representative W. Edward Crockett left the Democratic Party and became an Independent for the same reason. In September, Republican Oregon State Representative Cyrus Javadi switched political parties and joined the Democratic supermajority. Later in September, South Dakota State Representative Peri Pourier left the Democratic Party and joined the Republican Party.
Affordability emerged as the defining issue of all the 2025 elections, beyond the state legislative level. While this worked in Republicans' favor in 2024, when Democrats held power, voters shifted their blame towards Republicans as the issue persisted amid Donald Trump's second term in office. Democrats particularly homed in on the cost of electricity amid rate hikes tied to the construction of artificial intelligence data centers. The election also took place during the 2025 government shutdown, caused by disagreements over federal healthcare subsidies, which particularly affected Virginia.
Regularly scheduled elections are to be held in two of the 99 state legislative chambers in the United States. Nationwide, regularly scheduled elections are to be held for 180 of the 7,383 legislative seats. This table only covers regularly scheduled elections; additional special elections will take place concurrently with these regularly scheduled elections.
Several sites and individuals publish predictions of competitive chambers. These predictions look at factors such as the strength of the party, the strength of the candidates, and the partisan leanings of the state (reflected in part by the state's Cook Partisan Voting Index rating). The predictions assign ratings to each chambers, with the rating indicating the predicted advantage that a party has in winning that election.
Most election predictors use:
Democrats performed extremely well in the off-year elections, flipping 25 Republican-held legislative seats out of the 118 that were up, while losing none of their own. They gained 18 across the regularly-scheduled elections in Virginia and New Jersey and an additional 7 through special elections. These gains came amid electoral victories across the country, both at the statewide level and at the local level, for the Democratic Party. In contested special elections, Democrats performed 13 percentage points better on average than they did in the 2024 presidential election. No state legislative chambers changed partisan control, but Democrats gained a supermajority in the New Jersey General Assembly while breaking Republican supermajorities in the Mississippi Senate and Iowa Senate.
Multiple sources have compared the results to those from the 2017 elections, where Democrats made gains in both regular and special elections as a precursor to the blue wave 2018 election. These gains were attributed to the declining approval ratings of Republican President Donald Trump, as well as a focus on affordability. Democrats are attempting to maintain this electoral momentum into the 2026 elections, where they are targeting control of state legislative chambers in battleground states across the country, as well as attempting to break Republican supermajorities in several other states.
All of the seats of the New Jersey General Assembly were up for election in 2025. Democrats had controlled the chamber since the 2001 elections. Democrats gained a supermajority in the chamber, flipping five seats for their largest majority since 1973.
All of the seats of the Virginia House of Delegates were up for election in 2025. Democrats had controlled the chamber since the 2023 elections. Democrats won in a landslide, gaining 13 seats, greatly expanding their majority, their largest since 1987. The most immediate effect of this victory was the survival of Democratic plans to pass a constitutional amendment to allow them to redraw the state's congressional districts amidst a flurry of mid-decade redistricting across the country. The amendment needs to pass the legislature in two consecutive legislative sessions before being sent to voters.
There were 93 state, 1 territorial, and 1 informal legislative special elections held in 2025. Four seats flipped parties in vacancy-related special elections: Georgia's 121st House District, Iowa's 1st and 35th Senate Districts, and Pennsylvania's 36th Senate District flipped from Republican to Democratic. Special elections called due to court-ordered redistricting in Mississippi allowed Democrats to break the Republican supermajority in the Mississippi Senate as well, gaining two seats, and gain one seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives. Many Democratic special election candidates have outperformed Kamala Harris' 2024 performance in their respective districts, often by 10 percentage points or more, but almost all featured turnout less than half of that of the 2024 election.
Democrats have additionally maintained their narrow control of the Minnesota Senate, Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Virginia Senate, and Virginia House of Delegates, through special election victories, as well as reaffirming the tie in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Their gains in the Iowa Senate and Mississippi Senate allowed them to break the Republican supermajorities in those chambers as well.
Nine special elections for the Mississippi Senate and five special elections for the Mississippi House of Representatives were be held on November 4, 2025. These special elections were called as a result of redistricting mandated by a federal court designed to increase the number of majority-Black districts in both chambers to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Democrats flipped a total of three seats, breaking the Republican supermajority in the state Senate.
Utah does not normally conduct special elections to fill vacancies in its legislature. Rather, new members are selected by party delegates who live in the district where the vacancy occurred, and then they are appointed by the governor. Daniel Thatcher, who left the Republican Party to join the Forward Party earlier in the year, asked that his replacement be appointed using approval voting in an election open to all voters in the district. He set up a website and in-person voting locations for this to take place.