Lawmaking season: Red states redder and blue ones bluer

CHICAGO — America’s state capitals are as polarized as they have been in decades, with lawmakers imposing unflinchingly conservative or liberal agendas this year, even in politically diverse places.

The 2022 election brought single-party control of the governor’s office and legislature to 39 states, the most in at least three decades.

Many of the 22 Republican-led states pushed new curbs on abortion, restrictions on gender transitions for youths and laws limiting discussion about sexuality in school classrooms. Democrats, who have full control in 17 states, passed new gun control measures, set limits on carbon emissions, and created safe havens for abortion and medical care for transgender people.

The result was that the legislative season, which has ended in much of the country, left an even wider divide between Republican and Democratic states on the country’s thorniest social issues.

“We’ve always known that California was progressive; Texas was conservative, but it now feels like almost every state is kind of falling into one of those categories,” said Tim Storey, CEO of the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan group.

Some of the states that pursued ambitious partisan agendas had long been single-party strongholds. In Washington, where Democrats have had full control of state government for 14 of the past 19 years, lawmakers banned the sale of AR-15-style weapons and enshrined protections for abortion and transgender medical care in law. In North Dakota, where Republicans have led the government since 1995, officials banned transition care for minors, outlawed abortion and barred materials deemed to be sexually explicit from the children’s section of libraries.