Welcome to CommonWealth Beacon‘s Election 2026 newsletter run.

The most generous thing we can say about electoral competitiveness in Massachusetts is that it’s gotten marginally better since the last cycle — from a starting point of rock bottom.

All 200 state legislative seats are on the ballot in November. As has become the standard, most of those have already been decided, either because the primary was the only contested election or, more commonly, because nobody felt like challenging the incumbent.

Only 44 of those legislative contests will feature both a Democrat and a Republican on the ballot. That’s a little better than two years ago, when only 40 districts had candidates from both major parties. Representing just 20 percent of the total seats up for grabs, the rate was the lowest in the country.

For a state that prides itself on punching above its weight politically, very little politicking actually happens locally, at least when it comes to Beacon Hill. (There’s more competition for statewide offices, where Republicans are challenging every office but auditor, and for federal offices, where the GOP has a candidate in six of 10 races.)

Ballotpedia, the nonprofit online political encyclopedia, tracks data on state legislative elections — assessing how often seats open up, how often incumbents face primary challenges, and how often voters get to pick between a Republican and a Democrat. In each of the past five cycles, Massachusetts has come in dead last in the “competitiveness index” Ballotpedia calculates based on those findings.

Much of the stagnation comes from Republicans, who are already outnumbered in the Legislature more than five to one, running candidates in less than 30 percent of districts. And few sitting Democrats draw primary challenges.

When it comes to the most powerful figures in the House and Senate, difficult election seasons are especially rare. House Speaker Ron Mariano, unopposed this year, has faced an opponent two times in the past decade. Senate President Karen Spilka hasn’t been involved in a contested election since 2013, when she finished fifth in a crowded Democratic primary for an open congressional seat.

There is a clear relationship between legislative party domination and competition: Generally, fewer races are contested in states with one-party rule, and states where legislative control changes hands have more candidates willing to challenge incumbents. In Michigan, for example, where Democrats have a two-member margin in the Senate and Republicans have a six-member margin in the House, there was only a single uncontested seat two years ago.

It hasn’t always been like this in Massachusetts. For decades, most legislative races in the state were contested; in the early 1970s, the competition rate surpassed 80 percent. But the trend has tilted steadily downward for decades as Democrats have assembled a seemingly impregnable supermajority.

So where is a voter with opinions to express and no alternative to the incumbent supposed to turn? The answer, at least this time around, is all the way down-ballot.

Nine statewide ballot questions will go before voters, tying the record last set in 1994 for the most in a single year. Several take aim at or are directly inspired by the Legislature. Proponents of one measure seeking to place all candidates on a single primary ballot regardless of party are even pitching their idea as a way to give voters more options.

To some, like former Rep. Jay Kaufman, there’s an inextricable link between the volume of ballot questions and the lack of options in the House and Senate.

“Uncontested elections and the rise of citizen initiatives are two sides of the same coin, evidence of democracy in decline,” Kaufman wrote in an opinion piece for CommonWealth this summer.

Voters will have plenty of choices to make this fall. They just won’t have much say over their reps and senators.

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