Downballot Decisions Will Shape 33 State Supreme Courts in 2024

Crucial legal decisions impacting abortion, election law, redistricting, and more will be shaped by next year’s elections, when voters in 33 states cast ballots for their courts’ top judges.

Roughly a quarter of all state high court justices will be on the ballot in 2024, either because of term limits, retirements, or mandatory retention elections, according to data compiled by Ballotpedia.

Oklahoma and Texas will fill six seats each. Alabama and Oregon will each elect five justices. In states where partisan leanings probably will remain the same, changes in judicial philosophy can make a big difference, said Erin Hawley, vice president of the Center for Life and Regulatory Practice at the anti-abortion Alliance Defending Freedom.

She pointed to the nonpartisan races for two justices in Wyoming and three in Montana, states where a generally libertarian lean of the benches could be changed with a new court composition.

“The abortion battleground has really been taken to state courts since Dobbs,” said Hawley, a lawyer and wife of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. " The state of abortion laws often does depend on court composition.”

Indeed, abortion was among the issues in the only state Supreme Court seat on Tuesday’s ballot, in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania Superior Court Judge Daniel McCaffery (D) won the election after a campaign in which endorsements by anti-abortion groups were the focus of some of the advertising critical of McCaffrey’s Republican rival, Carolyn Carluccio.

Abortion policy also could be on the line in next year’s judicial elections in Ohio, where it will be up to the court to either narrowly or broadly interpret a newly enacted constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to terminate pregnancy.

In that state, three justices—two Democrats and one Republican—will be up for re-election to a bench that currently has 4-3 Republican control.

The opposite is true for the 4-3 Democratic-majority Michigan Supreme Court. With one Democrat and one Republican on the ballot, a GOP sweep would give conservatives the ability to invalidate or curtail a host of pro-abortion rights legislation enacted by the state in 2023 after Democrats took control of Lansing for the first time in decades.

In the 2024 election, 33 states will elect, re-elect, or retain justices on their top courts. Among the seats on the ballots are those of (top row, l-r) Utah Chief Justice Matthew Durrant, Michigan Justices Kyra Bolden and David Viviano, (bottom row, l-r) Ohio Justices Melody Stewart, Joseph Deters, and Michael Donnelly.

Sources: Ohio, Michigan, and Utah state supreme courts

Kentucky also swings in the balance. Though the court technically is nonpartisan, its justices voted 4-3 against abortion providers bringing a case against the state’s procedure ban on behalf of patients. Part of the majority in that case, Justice Lawrence VanMeter, is retiring.

Court contests without immediate partisan impacts also hold implications for years to come. A prime example: North Carolina, which had one redistricting outcome in 2022 and a different redistricting outcome after a new justice was elected.

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The new Republican majority this year reversed precedent and allowed political gerrymandering of the state’s congressional lines. That led to a map giving Republicans a 11-3 edge in a currently 7-7 state.

If North Carolina is a warning for Democrats, Wisconsin is a model, said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. There, a years-long effort to flip the court culminated with Janet Protasiewicz’s record-spending campaign win this spring. She tipped the courts for liberals and will be considering a redistricting case later this month.

‘Long View’

“Far too often in left-leaning politics folks don’t take the long view,” Bisognano said. “We’re now certainly in a place where the long view for Democratically-minded justices is critical.”

But 2024 is a presidential year, and candidates for state supreme courts will need to figure out how to get voters to pay attention and then remember their campaign messages. That will be especially challenging in the states where the airwaves will be inundated with commercials in other top-of-the-ticket contests.

Potentially the most crowded: Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Utah, Washington, and West Virginia, where the state Supreme Court campaigns will be sharing airtime and mailbox space with presidential, US Senate and gubernatorial campaigns. And 15 of the 33 states with a top court election also will elect either a senator or governor.

Utah is worth watching because in the months before a vote on retaining its chief justice, Matthew Durrant (R), the court will issue decisions on the state’s abortion “trigger ban” and a challenge to the state Legislature’s partisan map-drawing, so voters will judge him based on those national political clash points.

“When presidential spending is as much as it is, it’s not harder, just different, figuring out how to break through,” said Bisognano. “Voters are getting attuned to the reality that court elections are really critical.”