Come January, 37 states will be under single-party control,

"Twenty-four states will be controlled by Republicans, including Alaska and Wisconsin, where the party took the State Senate, and North Carolina, where the governorship changed hands. At least 13 states will be Democratic, including Colorado, Minnesota and Oregon, where control of the legislatures shifted, and California, where the already dominant Democrats gained a supermajority in both chambers. (The situation in New York, where the potential for single-party control by the Democrats rests on the makeup of the Senate, is still uncertain.)

Power will be split in, at most, 12 capitals — the fewest, said Tim Storey of the National Conference of State Legislatures, since 1952.

So while President Obama and Republican leaders in Washington have made postelection hints of an openness to compromise, many in the states may see no such need.

“The fact is, they can do whatever they want now,” Chris Larson, the Democrats’ newly chosen Senate minority leader in Wisconsin, said of the Republicans in his state. He noted, glumly, that they have been holding planning meetings behind closed doors since the election.

In Minnesota, where a budget fight last year between a Republican-led Legislature and the Democratic governor, Mark Dayton, led to a shutdown of state government for two weeks, the governor seemed buoyed. We’ll trade gridlock for progress,” 

"There is also a risk of intraparty factions and, in the words of Fred A. Risser, a Wisconsin state legislator since 1956 (and the longest-serving sitting state lawmaker in the country), intramural fights. In Kansas, which has one-party Republican control, conservative Republicans have increasingly battled with moderate Republicans. And though Democrats have run Illinois for a decade, leaders have still been unable to find an answer to the state’s profound financial woes, including the most gravely unfinanced pension liabilities in the nation."

“We are going to see government activism to the left and to the right that we haven’t seen in years,” said Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “If you wondered what Washington would look like under single-party rule, the states are a laboratory for that now.”

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