How many state legislatures are controlled by democrats versus republicans in the southern US in 2025?
Executive summary
The supplied reporting establishes national party control of state legislatures going into 2025 — Republicans held the majority in far more chambers than Democrats (Republicans 57 chambers; Democrats 39 chambers) and, by multi-source tallies, 28 state legislatures were under full Republican control and 18 under full Democratic control, with a handful split or governed by coalitions [1] [2] 270towin.com/2026-state-legislature-elections/state-house" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[3]. However, the documents provided do not break those counts down into a “southern US” subtotal, so an exact regional count cannot be produced from the supplied material alone [4].
1. Why the national tallies are clear but a southern subtotal is not
Public trackers like Ballotpedia, MultiState, 270towin and NCSL publish clear national snapshots — for example, Ballotpedia reported Republicans held a majority in 57 legislative chambers versus Democrats’ 39 as of late 2025 [1], while MultiState summarized 18 legislatures fully Democratic, 28 fully Republican and four split [2]; NCSL maintains a partisan composition dataset as well [4] [5]. None of those supplied snippets, however, include an explicit, pre-made aggregate that isolates only the states conventionally defined as the “southern US,” so a regional subtotal is not directly available in the provided sources [4] [5].
2. What would be required to answer the question precisely from these sources
A precise answer for “the southern US in 2025” requires two inputs: (a) a bounded list of which states count as “southern” for the user’s purposes (Census regions, the “South” in political analysis, or a custom set), and (b) chamber-by-chamber partisan-control data for those states. The NCSL partisan composition file and Ballotpedia’s chamber-by-chamber maps provide the necessary raw data to perform that filter [5] [1]. The sources here include those datasets or summaries but do not present the filtered southern subtotal in the excerpts provided [4] [5].
3. How to compute the southern subtotal (method, not a guess)
Using the NCSL or Ballotpedia state-by-state tables (both cited in the source list) a researcher would: choose a definition of “southern” (for example, the U.S. Census “South” states), extract each state’s upper- and lower-chamber control from the NCSL PDF or Ballotpedia chamber maps, then count how many of those states have both chambers controlled by Democrats, how many by Republicans, and how many are split or coalition-led. The referenced NCSL partisan composition report and Ballotpedia’s 2025 chamber summaries are precisely the inputs needed to perform that count [5] [1].
4. What the available summaries say about partisan control trends that matter for the South
The national summaries point to a Republican advantage in state legislatures after the 2024–2025 cycle — Republicans held more chambers and a larger share of legislative seats overall (Republicans controlling a majority of chambers and around 55% of seats in the national tallies reported by Ballotpedia and summarized across trackers) — a pattern that typically translates into a Republican edge across many Southern states, but these sources stop short of delivering the region-specific tally in the excerpts provided [1] [6] [2].
5. Transparent limitation and suggested next step
Given the constraint that the supplied sources do not include a pre-filtered “southern US” count, the only rigorous answer is procedural: obtain the NCSL partisan-composition table or Ballotpedia’s state-chamber map (both cited here) and filter those entries for the states that define the user’s “South” to produce the exact 2025 count [5] [1]. The cited trackers already provide the raw data; a short manual aggregation or a quick spreadsheet filter will yield the definitive regional totals.