The most competitive races for attorney generalships in the United States this year are playing out across two of the same states that will decide the next occupant of the White House, and which party controls the next Congress.
Ten states will elect attorneys general this year, and only three races feature incumbents running for second terms. Those incumbents — Indiana’s Todd Rokita (R), Montana’s Austin Knudsen (R) and Vermont’s Charity Clark (D) — are all likely to coast to easy re-election bids.
Another incumbent, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R), won the Republican primary last week with 63% of the vote. Bailey was appointed to the post by Gov. Mike Parson (R) when his predecessor, Eric Schmitt (R), quit to take a seat in the U.S. Senate.
But both Democrats and Republicans see two major contests shaping up in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, states that are also at the heart of the battles for the White House and control of Congress.
In Pennsylvania, former state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (D) faces York County District Attorney Dave Sunday (R) in a heated race to replace interim Attorney General Michelle Henry (D).
Following national Democratic plans to run heavily on protecting abortion rights, DePasquale has touted endorsements from groups like Reproductive Freedom for All and Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates.
“As long as I’m your attorney general, Pennsylvania will be a where women get to choose what they do with their own bodies,” DePasquale said when he won his primary in April. “Anyone fleeing one of these right-wing authoritarian states that needs to come here for their rights, they will get my protection as well.”
Sunday, a former assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting federal gang and drug cases, has won support form the Fraternal Order of Police and the State Troopers Association. He has used his campaign to spotlight a decline in crime in York County, south of Harrisburg, and his efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking.
“We need accountability and redemption in our criminal justice system,” Sunday told a reporter after securing the Republican nomination. “If communities aren’t safe, then nothing else matters.”
The North Carolina contest features two sitting members of Congress, U.S. Reps. Dan Bishop (R) and Jeff Jackson (D), who have built very different records in Washington.
Bishop, a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus on Capitol Hill, has cast himself as a law and order candidate who would work with the federal government to control illegal immigration.
“The problem in North Carolina, if you ask a law enforcement officer or a [District Attorney] in North Carolina, is an unsecured border where fentanyl pours over the border. And the way to fix that is not tinkering with this statute or that statute in North Carolina, it is to secure the border,” Bishop said at a forum in June.
Jackson, who won his congressional seat in 2022 only to see it redrawn to favor Republicans the following year, is a member of the Army National Guard’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps. In the June forum, he said he worried about the threat artificial intelligence could pose as a tool for scammers.
“AI-enabled scammers is [sic] going to be a new type of threat that the attorney general needs to aggressively meet,” he said.
Other states that will elect new attorneys general are less competitive. Voters in Oregon and Washington will choose replacements for outgoing Democratic attorneys general in races where Democratic candidates are favored. Voters in Utah and West Virginia are likely to replace retiring Republicans with their respective Republican nominees.
Observers say the office of the attorney general has become increasingly important in recent years as a platform to influence national policy, largely by bringing legal challenges against legislation, executive orders or actions of the opposite party’s presidents.
Attorneys general “have always been important — they’re typically the chief law enforcement officer in a state, so they have long been asked to make tough calls on everything from criminal prosecutions to litigation over constitutional issues. What’s shifted over the 20-plus years I’ve been covering them is that — on both sides — they have taken up a more aggressively partisan role,” said Louis Jacobson, a nonpartisan election handicapper who rates attorneys general races for Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
“It used to be that bipartisan groups of AGs would band together to do things like sue the tobacco companies,” Jacobson said. Now, “whether your state has a Republican AG or a Democratic AG will go a long way to determining whether your state weighs in with the red states on abortion, election, or civil rights lawsuits, and on which side of the issue. Because these types of issues grab the most headlines, the image of most AGs has become, more than in the past, that of a partisan warrior.”
Sean Rankin, executive director of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, said attorneys general have filled a gap left by a dysfunctional Congress.
“We’ve seen attorneys general become de facto national players as the gridlock in Congress has continued. More decisions are being made at the state level,” Rankin said in an interview. Because they advise the legislative branch, serve in the executive branch and argue before the judicial branch, he said, “they truly move across the chessboard.”
Jacobson pointed to several high-profile attorneys general who have made a name for themselves suing the other party’s presidential administrations, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach (R) on the right, and Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) on the left.
The office has always been a stepping stone to bigger roles in politics. Five of the 10 elections up this year will not feature elected incumbents because those incumbents are either running for governor (Washington Attorney General Ferguson and North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, both Democrats, and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, are their party’s nominees for governor), already became governor (Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, appointed Henry as his own replacement) or already became a U.S. senator, as in the case of Schmitt in Missouri.
Many of today’s governors made a name for themselves as attorneys general. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D), Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R), Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D), Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D), North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D), Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R), Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Pennsylvania’s Shapiro all moved directly from the attorney general’s office to the governor’s office. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) made a stop in the lieutenant governor’s office after his tenure as attorney general. Seven other former attorneys general now serve in the U.S. Senate.
The increasingly partisan role attorneys general have played has created special bonds between them. One former attorney general, Vice President Kamala Harris, considered at least three of her former colleagues — Shapiro, Beshear and Cooper — as potential running mates.