Outlook for 2025

Work in state legislatures often begins slowly after a presidential election cycle, as state legislatures find their footing and one party grapples with a major election loss. However, conservative states are in a fundamentally different place after the re-election of Donald Trump, as Republicans at the state level will be in a position to double down on their culture war agenda from the past several years: attacking imaginary critical race theory in K-12 schools, stripping rights from trans people, advancing vague parental rights bills, using the Dobbs decision to attack reproductive freedom, and passing dangerously broad religious exemptions. Democrats, on the other hand, will likely focus on measures to limit federal interference and push back on President Trump’s agenda.

Post-Election Legislative Responses

Just as we saw states engage in election reform and anti-democratic election manipulation after the 2020 and 2022 elections, we are likely to see more of the same in 2025. Specifically, we may see efforts to redistrict or more fairly apportion districts through nonpolitical means, changes in certification and the influence of state legislatures in voting processes, and rigid identification requirements for voting or other efforts to combat largely nonexistent voter fraud. We expect the successful use of ballot measures to advance reproductive rights and oppose school privatization in various states will continue to result in a backlash against those methods of direct democracy.

In states where control of the legislature has changed hands, we often see a rush of bills that the party used as messaging tools while they were in opposition. The rate of passage of such bills varies significantly by state, depending on factors such as effective leadership, the numerical strength of the majority party, the political climate of the state, and the party of the governor.

Lastly, it is often the case that whichever party lost control of Congress and/or the White House will pursue state legislation on key messaging bills considered in the previous Congress or major policies announced by the presidential campaign. For example, the bills many states considered to eliminate critical race theory in schools were derived from an administrative rule first proposed during the Trump presidency, which became a major theme during the 2020 campaign. It is likely that we will see a similar influence on the 2025 and following state legislative sessions.

Religious Intrusion Into Public Schools

The influence of the Kennedy v. Bremerton decision in 2022, which made it significantly more difficult to challenge violations of the Establishment Clause in public schools, will increasingly impact schools in the 2025 legislative session. In 2024, we saw states pass bills that create special allowances for school chaplains, mandate released time, and even require the Ten Commandments to be posted on classroom walls. It is very likely that each of these trends will continue and even accelerate in 2025 if these measures are not stopped by courts and the lawmakers who passed them pay little political price. Advocates for such bills are able to quickly spread them from state to state, so we anticipate a wave of similar legislation pushing religion into schools in the coming legislative session.

In addition, we are likely to see more legislation in 2025 to strictly regulate which books are allowable for teachers and students to use as well as efforts to allow propagandistic material, like those developed by PragerU and Hillsdale College, into schools. States like Florida and Texas pioneered these approaches to controlling exactly what materials are allowable in the classroom, and it is likely other states will follow their lead.

Finally, it is probable that more states will adopt universal school voucher programs, as states with more limited programs expand their funding and reach. Although these programs have been marked with runaway costs and fraud in those states that have implemented them, and they are demonstrably harmful for students, they are supported by powerful political interests that seek to undermine public education. In several states that have managed to stave off school privatization policies thanks to the heroic efforts of advocates and rural lawmakers, many of those legislators were targeted and primaried by their own party leadership. As a result, these measures are more likely to pass in this legislative session following the election.

Court Influence On Health Care Access

Although the legal challenges to the abortion drug mifepristone and to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) were unsuccessful before the U.S. Supreme Court this term, they will likely continue to have an impact on state legislatures in the 2025 legislative session. Shortly before the decision in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, Louisiana was the first state to make mifepristone a controlled substance. Other states could certainly follow suit in 2025.

Similarly, the Court’s reticence to clarify how federal protections for health care access interact with state abortion bans in Moyle v. U.S. means that states will continue to pass and enforce punitive abortion bans. For example, six states have exemptions to their abortion bans to preserve the life, as opposed to the health, of the patient. Even after a patient in Texas fought successfully in court to make use of such an exemption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made national news by sending threatening letters to providers in Texas, making clear that he would use the power of the state to prosecute doctors and hospitals if they offered this patient appropriate care.

In addition to efforts to narrow exemptions and vigorously enforce abortion bans, there will likely be targeted legislation to attack abortion access both in and out of state. Efforts to block travel for abortion access were stayed by a lower court after Idaho passed a law criminalizing so-called “abortion trafficking” for minors in 2023. However, that did not prevent Tennessee from passing similar legislation in 2024, and other states are likely to introduce similar bills in the coming legislative session. While most states seeking to protect access to abortion have already passed shield laws, it is likely that states will fine-tune these laws in response to other states’ attempts to undermine interstate abortion access.

In the coming U.S. Supreme Court term, the U.S. v. Skrmetti case challenges Tennessee’s law banning appropriate medical care for trans young people based on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The case is likely to have a significant impact on legislation affecting trans people. Over the past several years, Republican-led states have passed a host of bills restricting the ability of trans people, particularly trans youth, to access school athletics, medical care, public bathrooms, private and public health coverage, and identity documents. There has been a significant amount of litigation to oppose these measures, and the lower courts are split on relevant issues, with supporters of LGBTQ equality often winning at the district court level and then being overturned on appeal to the more conservative circuit courts.

The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits states from infringing on the rights of groups that are marginalized, for example, on the basis of race or gender. While there have been landmark cases upholding the rights of LGBTQ people to engage in same-sex marriage, to have consensual sexual relations, and to be free of discrimination under federal law, the Court has never explicitly said that LGBTQ people are a marginalized population that receives heightened protection under the Equal Protection Clause. If the Court decides trans people are entitled to such protection, it is likely that many of the laws targeting trans youth would be vulnerable to attack. If not, then there may be a significant increase in state legislation targeting trans people as they will be more vulnerable without constitutional protection. In such a case, we would likely see state bills banning access to medical care for trans adults, bans on public bathroom usage, and potentially even more extreme measures.

It is also expected that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is going to amend the Ethical and Religious Directives that restrict care at Catholic health systems in order to prohibit medical care for trans people. However, this is likely to conflict with state and federal nondiscrimination law. Therefore, we may see more states pass either broad denial of care laws or targeted denial of care laws that allow facilities to deny care to trans people based on their religious beliefs.