It's not just control of Congress that's up for grabs in 2022: Hundreds of influential state court judgeships, including a quarter of the nation's state supreme court seats, are on the ballot as well.
Most state court judges, including state supreme court judges, are largely unknown to the public, but they have a profound impact on Americans' lives.
"The court is already something that no one understands," Davis Hammett, an activist with Kansas-based youth-voter-engagement group Loud Light, told Insider. "The number one question I get from even people who are engaged is, 'Do I retain these judges?' This is pretty obscure stuff for most people."
But an estimated 96% of all legal cases in the United States are filed in
Those jurists are the chief architects of the legal landscape in each state, defining the terms of justice under their state's constitutions and shaping the guardrails of American society with their decisions.
"These courts are as important as they've ever been, and poised to become even more important," Douglas Keith, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice who studies state court races, told Insider.
Justices for state supreme courts decide whether to overturn lengthy prison sentences, hand down multimillion-dollar civil judgments, and hold powerful corporations like pharmaceutical companies and tech giants to account, establishing legal precedent on key issues along the way.
And they're set to play an even more active role in key issues like redistricting, election and voting laws, abortion access, gun rights, and education policy.
With the conservative lean of the US Supreme Court more entrenched, it's "more and more likely that high-profile cases are going to be brought to state courts," Keith said.
"State courts have always had the last word when it comes to questions of state law," he added.
In just the past few weeks, the Ohio supreme court has weighed whether to hold the state's redistricting commission in contempt for failing to produce fair maps; the North Carolina supreme court's chief justice replaced the judge overseeing a crucial education-funding case; and the Louisiana supreme court ruled that an activist can be sued and held liable for an injury at a protest he organized even though he wasn't physically present.
"The state courts are going to become even more important and even more high-profile as they are issuing decisions related to issues that normally come to the US Supreme Court," Keith said.
Who picks state supreme court justices?
Thirty-eight states give the voters some say in choosing their state supreme court justices.
In eight states with judicial races in 2022, including Ohio, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Texas, judges run against each other as partisan officials under the Democratic or Republican Party banners. In 13 states, including Wisconsin, judges run for office as technically nonpartisan, but they are often supported by conservative or liberal interests.
In states like Florida, Kansas, and Maryland, judges are appointed but later face a retention election, where voters decide whether to keep them on the bench.
Of the state supreme court seats up for grabs in 2022, 18 will be decided with partisan
How many seats are up for grabs in 2022?
A quarter of all the nation's state supreme court judgeships, 86 in total, will be up for election in 2022 in 32 states, according to Ballotpedia.
In several key states, 2022's elections could reshape the composition of entire state supreme courts for years to come. Ohio and North Carolina both have multiple state supreme court seats up for election that could shift or even flip the partisan balance of each court.
Most or nearly all of the justices on Kansas', Florida's, and Tennessee's state supreme courts are also up for retention elections in 2022.
What are the stakes of 2022's state supreme court elections?
State courts have gained a massive amount of power over redistricting, the once-a-decade process of redrawing the US's political lines following the Census.
Courts in Ohio and North Carolina have already shaped the balance of political power in Congress by rejecting congressional district maps for unfairly favoring Republicans. And many other states are likely to be mired in litigation over political maps in state courts for years.
"We're going to see a decade's worth of redistricting litigation. Maps will be redrawn throughout the decade, that's nothing new," Adam Kincaid, president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, told Insider.
But the power of state courts over those cases is a more recent phenomenon.
In 2019, the US Supreme Court ruled that cases challenging political maps for being biased toward a particular political party are nonjusticiable political questions that are off-limits for federal courts, putting partisan gerrymandering lawsuits squarely in the domain of the states.
New redistricting commissions and anti-gerrymandering amendments have also placed state courts in the position of resolving disputes over political maps between state legislatures and governors — or taking over when redistricting commissions failed to agree on new maps.
Voting-rights litigators have increasingly turned to state courts after the US Supreme Court bludgeoned major chunks of the Voting Rights Act, in the Shelby v. Holder case in 2013 and again in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021. The high court could even further weaken the VRA's protections against racial gerrymandering in a case out of Alabama.
State courts could also soon be the last line of defense for abortion-rights advocates if, as expected, the US Supreme Court's conservative majority overturns or weakens the federal protections for first-trimester abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade in its forthcoming ruling on Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban.
The Supreme Court eliminating the federal standards in Roe would send the question of abortion access back to the states. In a matter of months, hundreds of state supreme court justices could be tasked with determining what a right to abortion means in their state, making them more powerful arbiters of justice than ever before — and intensifying the already-heated political battles to control their seats on the bench.
This is part one of Insider's three-part series on state supreme courts. Read part two and part three here.