This symposium consists of six articles that examine the 2018 state legislative elections. The first article by Adam S. Myers sets the stage by highlighting the unprecedented level of contestation in state legislative elections, especially by Democratic candidates.

The second article by Bernard L. Fraga, Eric Gonzalez Juenke, and Paru Shaw continues the theme of motivated elites within the Democratic Party. The authors demonstrate that the election of more women and candidates of color in the 2018 elections was driven by such candidates running in greater numbers than ever before rather than by an uptick in the demand for such candidates among voters.

The third article by Kristin Kanthak, Eric Loepp, and Benjamin Melusky further explores how electoral arrangements either stymie or enhance the election of women in state legislatures.

The fourth article by Ana Bracic, Mackenzie Israel-Trummel, Sarina Rhinehart, and Allyson F. Shortle takes a closer look at only one state—Oklahoma—unlike the other articles that examine all 44 states that had partisan state legislative elections in 2018. The authors examine voting behavior in Oklahoma City in the context of a highly publicized teachers’ strike that brought attitudes about gender to the forefront of voters’ minds.

The fifth article by Donald P. Haider-Markel, Barry Tadlock, Patrick R. Miller, Daniel C. Lewis, and Jami K. Taylor examines whether LGBTQ candidates experienced an electoral penalty and concludes that they did not. By examining a model of change in Democratic support between 2018 and the election preceding it, the authors address the problem that LGBTQ candidates tend to run in areas where they are less likely to be penalized by voters.

The sixth article by Jordan Butcher and Jeffrey Milyo assesses the impact of several campaign finance laws on how often incumbents are reelected.

Teams were provided with the updated State Legislative Election Returns (SLERs) database (see Klarner Reference Klarner2018) through the 2018 elections, which I collected, to enable them to participate in the symposium. The new edition of SLERs will be publicly available sometime after the 2020 election. Teams also were provided with lists of state legislative candidates as filing deadlines were reached, as well as preliminary coding of the candidates’ gender based on first names. These lists allowed the authors to collect information on the race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation of state legislative candidates.

The errors in the research process about to be alluded to should not be taken as criticism of the symposium participants because I believe similar problems are widespread in political science. I often become aware of errors in others’ work because of my knowledge of common pitfalls and data sources and because I frequently help scholars by providing them with data. These problems are a natural consequence of scholars presented with substantial service and teaching requirements, imperatives to publish, and less financial support than in other fields. As a result, I refrain from mentioning any particular team, which has the awkward consequence of implicating teams that did not make errors.

Several teams made substantial errors in the implementation of their analyses necessitating redoing them. I directly handled the data for only two teams and therefore did not have access to all of the variables used in the models. Replicating teams’ samples with SLERs and comparing reported and replicated Ns resulted in several substantial errors becoming apparent, which the authors confirmed were indeed errors.

Analyzing state legislative elections in particular presents unexpected challenges because of institutional differences among states. Not taking into account irregular redistricting was a source of error for several teams—again, an error that I often observe outside of this symposium.