Democrats have flipped attorney general offices in five Republican-leaning states, handing the party a powerful new line of resistance against President Donald Trump’s agenda in the courts.
Key Points
- Democrats flip attorney general offices in Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Iowa and Kansas in the midterm elections.
- The new attorneys general could halt cooperation with federal immigration operations and defend abortion access.
- Texas and Kansas could withdraw from lawsuits challenging the abortion drug mifepristone.
- The victories are a significant blow to the conservative legal movement, which has relied on Republican state attorneys general.
The victories, reported by Reuters on Sunday, threaten to disrupt years of conservative legal strategy. Republican attorneys general have been central to challenges against Democratic administrations and to defending Trump-era policies. Now, incoming Democratic attorneys general could reverse course — dropping their states from lawsuits, refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, and filing multistate challenges of their own against the administration’s environmental and gun policies.
“The Texas AG’s office has been operating as the private law firm of the MAGA movement,” Texas Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson said in an interview, summing up the shift Democrats hope to deliver in the country’s second-largest state.
What changes in the courts
The consequences are most immediate in the abortion cases. Texas is among the states suing the US Food and Drug Administration over its approval of mifepristone, arguing the agency failed to thoroughly evaluate the drug’s safety and effectiveness. If Texas withdraws, Florida — where Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier won a new term on Tuesday — would be the remaining plaintiff.
In Kansas, Democratic Attorney General-elect Chris Mann could withdraw the state from a separate challenge to regulations that expanded access to mifepristone, which would leave Missouri and Idaho as plaintiffs. In Georgia, Democrat Tanya Miller’s election could change how the state defends HB 481, the 2019 law banning abortion after six weeks.
A broader midterm backlash
The attorney general wins form part of a wider Democratic sweep in which the party retook both chambers of Congress and won governorships and state offices across the country. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on the results, and the White House referred to previous comments from Trump in which he said Republicans lost the midterms because he was not on the ballot.
The new attorneys general take office in January, alongside the new Congress. Their first decisions — which lawsuits to drop, which to join and which to start — will show quickly how far the legal resistance to the Trump administration will go.
For background on the election that produced these results, see our report on Democrats sweeping the midterms to win the House and Senate, and on Harmeet Dhillon resigning as the Justice Department’s civil rights chief after the midterms. More in our Politics section.
Sources: Reuters, “Democratic wins in state AG races give Trump a new headache“; Reuters, “Factbox — Democratic attorney general wins could reshape US lawsuits on abortion, immigration and more“.