The Chart That Shows Some of the Biggest Midterm Surprises

In many states, American voters cast their votes for ballot measures that resolved questions about raising the minimum wage, expanding access to health care, or expanding or contracting energy production.

Voters in some states may also have scrambled the 2020 political landscape, largely by changing the mechanics of who can cast ballots, and who gets to draw state and congressional district lines. But voters decided other issues too — on marijuana, Medicaid expansion and more — that will shape political debate.

Florida could add a decisive number of new voters.

Amendment 4, which won with more than 64 percent of the vote, restores voting rights to as many as 1.5 million convicted felons.

To put that in perspective, according to the most recent results in the state’s unresolved race for governor, Ron DeSantis, an Amendment 4 opponent, is ahead of Andrew Gillum, 49.6 percent to 49.2 percent — by fewer than 35,000 votes. In the recent election cycles, victory margins for presidential and gubernatorial candidates in Florida ranged from less than 100,000 to roughly 250,000.

We’ll have to wait until 2020 to see what effect will these new voters have on Florida’s highly competitive elections. But the amendment represents a sudden and significant change in Florida’s electorate, and it will almost certainly change the parties’ approaches to elections.

It’s also a good example of the impact that money can have on ballot measures: Supporters raised $25 million, while opponents spent nearly nothing.

Voters take redistricting out of the hands of state legislators.

Legislative and congressional district maps will look a lot different in at least four and possibly five states because of ballot measures passed in 2018.

Colorado, Michigan, Ohio (in May) and Missouri (and perhaps Utah, where voting is still unresolved) passed proposals that will take redistricting out of the hands of partisans and put them into the hands of balanced commissions or, as in Missouri, a demographer.

Medicaid expansion is a new frontier for ballot initiatives.

In 2017, Maine voters were the first to approve a citizen initiative expanding Medicaid under Obamacare. Last week, Idaho, Nebraska and Utah voters approved their own expansion plans. Montana voters narrowly defeated a similar measure that would have extended the state’s already expanded Medicaid coverage and increased tobacco taxes to help fund the state’s portion of costs. (Tobacco companies spent $17.5 million against the measure.)

Voters have shown they support expanded coverage in states where elected officials haven’t. Fourteen states remain without expanded coverage, and at least six of them have some sort of process for citizen-initiated measures — and Medicaid expansion proponents may view their best way forward is through that process, not the legislature.