State, local races provide opportunities for diverse candidates, MSU PLS research finds

May 21, 2026 - Karessa Weir

For most of his career as a political scientist, Dr. Eric Gonzalez Juenke has focused his research on state legislative elections. These normally fly under the radar of both national media and voters.  

In the past, these races were usually determined by local-level concerns and driven by candidates’ own personalities, résumés, and connections with voters. However, with the rise of hyper-partisanship, these races have attracted new attention from national parties and leaders, and from voters themselves. State legislatures often have responsibility over issues central to national parties’ concerns, including how elections are run and electoral districts are drawn.  With Michigan’s closely divided Senate, the victory of Democrat Chedrick Green in the Michigan State Senate District 35 race over the Republican candidate this spring attracted a lot of attention.  

“This is a validation of our research that people will vote for their team above all else,” Juenke, an Associate Professor who joined PLS in 2009, said. “Local and state races are going to receive much more attention. People are watching them and considering how they affect the 2026 general election and beyond.” 

 But to only look at these elections through the prism of how they impact national politics is short-sighted, Prof. Juenke argues. In fact, state and local races provide potential opportunities for candidates from diverse groups to win office. Candidates from historically underrepresented groups—based on race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, education—do sometimes break through for the first time in these local and state legislative races. 

This provides opportunities for what social scientists call descriptive representation. The theory goes that having elected representatives who look more like the country, in all its diversity, enhances democracy. 

By this measure, for a long time, democracy in the US wasn’t meeting expectations. State legislatures were overwhelmingly white and male, for example. Researchers blamed this on voters’ biases. 

Prof. Juenke’s research challenged those assumptions, by collecting lots of data. 

“My work over the past 10-15 years has been to spotlight these state legislative races where there is so much data available. I collect the data on who is running and how. Previously, studies only focused on the winners in a district and theorized that the lack of diversity is what the voters chose,” Prof. Juenke said.  

This skewed our understanding of politics, Prof. Juenke argues. Research needed to consider not just who was winning office, but who was running in the first place. If voters in these local and state races were mainly presented with candidates from certain groups, they could, by definition, only elect people from certain groups.  
By looking at data on who was running, Prof. Juenke discovered something important. Voters didn’t seem to consider candidate race and gender as much as researchers had thought. What they overwhelmingly cared about was party.  

This meant that voters are just as likely to vote a minority candidate into office if that is the candidate on their party ticket.  This is especially true under hyper-polarization. Voters use their party identity to look past any other biases they may have for or against candidates.  

“Minoritized candidates do really well when they have a chance to run, but rarely are they on voters’ ballots,” Prof. Juenke said. “ Researchers thought it was due to racism by the voters, when actually it is because the voters often only have the option of a white man.” 

In practice, the Democratic Party appears to be more diverse thanks to decades of party-wide recruitment of minority candidates for all races – not just governors and the U.S. Congress.  Republicans have not made similar efforts historically, Prof. Juenke said.  This research has culminated in a pending paper on the ways party elites have limited voters’ choices, expected out next year . 

Meanwhile, the new emphasis by party and the public on these state races – and the widespread attempt at mid-decade redistricting – may mean that many voters will see more diversity in their state legislative ballots than previously.  

“What we have shown is districts don’t have to be majority-minority in order to elect a minoritized candidate into office,” he said. “In some of these newly redrawn districts, minoritized candidates will still have a chance of being elected - depending on the partisan makeup of the district.. It’s not guaranteed but there is still a chance.” 

The precedents these redistricting efforts are making could change everything for local and state races, he said.  

“This is a whole new world now. These states can decide they are going to redistrict after each election,” Prof. Juenke said. “This will be super important to watch as we approach the census of 2030.” 

Because Prof. Juenke’s work also touches on the way minority candidates and communities perform in state elections, he is paying close attention to the effects of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision relating to the Voting Rights Act.  

“The effects of the decision are disastrous for many voters, but they don’t have to be disastrous for descriptive representation in the future,” he said. “The parties are really going to have to figure out how to move forward without the Voting Rights Act protections in place.  My colleagues and I will be looking at what representation looks like in a post-Voting Rights Act world. Right now, things are so unstable that we are going to have to wait until the dust settles before making predictions about the near future.”