Meet the Nurses Running for State Legislatures. The Partisan Split Defies the Stereotype.

Part of Nurses on the Ballot, Nurse.org’s new research series tracking every verified nurse running for office in 2026. This November, at least 140 nurses are on state legislative ballots in 42 states, and the partisan split defies the stereotype: 61 Republicans, 75 Democratic-aligned candidates, three nonpartisan or undeclared candidates, and one minor-party candidate.

Congress gets the headlines, but your statehouse writes the rules you work under. State legislatures decide what advanced practice nurses are allowed to do, whether staffing laws exist, whether your state joins the Nurse Licensure Compact, and how much money nursing schools get.

This November, at least 140 nurses are asking for those seats, the 118 our original review found and 22 more we’ve verified and added since, each confirmed against state licensure records first. Counting every nurse on every legislative ballot in the country turns out to be genuinely hard, and we’d rather keep finding them than pretend the first count was final.

And the split still defies the stereotype: 61 Republicans and 75 Democratic-aligned candidates, across 42 states, in a profession often assumed to lean one way overwhelmingly.

Here’s who they are, what their campaigns say about nursing, who they’re running against, and the one statewide question on a ballot that comes closest to nursing.

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The 140 break down as 61 Republicans, 68 Democrats, 4 Democratic/Working Families, 3 Democratic-Farmer-Labor, 3 nonpartisan or undeclared (two in Nebraska’s officially nonpartisan unicameral, one undeclared in Alaska), and 1 minor-party candidate. Count the Democratic-aligned labels together, and it is 61 to 75, plus three nonpartisan or undeclared candidates and one minor-party candidate. With the primaries complete after Delaware’s on September 15, this is the list we have found and verified so far. 

Nurses are running in 42 states, in chambers from New Hampshire’s 400-member House to the Alaska Senate. And they span the whole profession: licensed practical nurses, bedside RNs, nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists, a nurse-midwife, retired critical care nurses, and current and former directors of nursing.

For contrast, we also built the roster of the 91 nurses we verified already serving in state legislatures, and that group leans the other way, 52 Republicans to 38 Democratic-aligned members, with one unaffiliated. Sitting nurse legislators skew Republican; the 2026 candidate class leans Democratic, 61 to 75. We report those as counts, not conclusions, in part because states differ in how officially and consistently legislator biographies state occupations.

The two rosters overlap heavily: 71 of the 140 candidates, more than half, are sitting state legislators; 69 are defending their seats and two, Denise Garner in Arkansas and Amy Regier in Montana, are sitting House members running for their state Senates. The nurses on this year’s ballots are mostly not newcomers. They are nurse incumbents defending, joined by 51 challengers and open-seat contenders.

Every verified nurse on a November general-election ballot is included, both parties, no screening for politics or positions. The result spans the full range of American politics, from Freedom Caucus conservatives to single-payer progressives, and that range is the point.

Nurse State Legislature Race Composition at a Glance

The full roster is below, sorted by state, then chamber and district; incumbents defending their seats marked in the Name column; sitting legislators running for a different seat (2) show their current chamber in the Race column; Area descriptors from official state district maps, independently verified. A notable share of the roster describe themselves as retired nurses, a reminder that the profession’s political bench includes the nurses who have already left the bedside. 

You may notice 8 states are absent from the roster above, split two ways. Four (Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia) hold no regular state legislative elections this November. In the other four (Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Vermont), we have not identified a verified nurse candidate on the final legislative ballot. 

Where the Nurse Candidates Stand on Nursing Issues

We reviewed what every campaign publishes and checked each platform against six nursing issues, counting a position only when the campaign takes a specific one in writing.

Saying nothing is not a verdict. It means the campaign has not put a position on that issue in writing, not that the candidate opposes it or would vote against it. Campaign platforms are choices about what to emphasize to voters, and that is what this measures: which nursing issues each campaign chose to run on.

The six issues, and what counts as a position on each:

• Pay: what nurses are paid, including raising salaries or lifting pay caps.
• Staffing: safe staffing levels, nurse-to-patient ratios, or staffing requirements, in any care setting.
• Workplace violence: protecting nurses and other healthcare workers from violence on the job.
• Retention: keeping working nurses in the profession, or bringing them back to it.
• Education funding: money for nursing schools, faculty, and training, including loan repayment tied to nursing education.
• Scope of practice: what advanced practice nurses, including NPs, CRNAs, nurse-midwives, and clinical nurse specialists, are authorized to do.

Our companion piece on the eighteen federal candidates checks a seventh issue, burnout support; for state candidates we used the six above, applied identically to everyone.

What Nurse Campaign Platforms Say

About 1 in 10 takes a specific position on a nursing workforce issue. Fourteen of the 140 do, several on more than one issue. Here is what they are running on:

• Staffing (7 candidates): Kyle Mullica (CO), Rachel Gross (MI), Liz Boldon (MN), Maria Collett (PA), Tarik Khan (PA), Sarah Jayne Della Vecchia (TN), and Kimberly Slone (AK), whose site champions “safe hospital staffing to protect patients and medical workers.” Della Vecchia’s platform is the most direct: “Pass safe staffing laws to support healthcare workers and create safer and better healthcare environments.”
• Retention (5): Danielle Penman (IL), Rachel Gross (MI), Sandy Pickert (KS), Jenifer Jones (NM), and Jessica Kusner-Kalarchik (AK), who mentioned “training and keeping our own people through nursing and allied health programs at Mat-Su College.” Pickert’s platform points to her record “addressing harsh disciplinary actions for minor re-licensure errors and empowering experienced nurses to return to the healthcare work force.”
• Nursing education funding (4): Mullica, Erin Murphy (MN), Boldon, and Collett.
• Scope of practice (2): Gale Adcock (NC) and Rachel Baker (OH).
• Pay (1): Boldon, who is also the only candidate with positions on three of the six issues, and commits to “ensuring nurses, direct‑care workers, and behavioral health providers have safe working conditions, competitive wages, and opportunities for advancement.”
• Workplace violence (1): Baker.

Beyond the fourteen:

• Another 22 use general healthcare-workforce language, commitments on shortages or provider supply that name nurses among other professions (Kathleen Brudvig’s shortage pledge and Cindy Ledbetter’s provider-supply call reclassified here under our definitions), without a nursing-specific position: strengthening the healthcare workforce, supporting providers, and similar.
• About a fifth publish no platform content at all. That group skews heavily toward long-serving incumbents, who often do not maintain issues pages, and it includes most of the seven New Hampshire candidates , whose campaigns run through party pages and voter guides rather than candidate websites. A missing platform is a fact about what is published, not the candidate’s views.

Who the Nurse Candidates Are Running Against

We verified the November field race by race, using post-primary official sources first; Delaware, the country’s last primary on September 15, resolved the list without changes, and one Connecticut race awaits the state’s certified list.

• Roughly 9 in 10 face a November opponent. The 140 are running in 137 distinct races; most are contested, and about fifteen nurses are running unopposed.
• Five races worth watching:
  • Connecticut Senate 20 took a radio show off the air. Incumbent nurse Martha Marx drew talk host Lee Elci as a late-filing challenger; when Marx invoked federal equal-time rules, his station took his program off the air. 
  • Minnesota House 4A: Erika Yoney beat Moorhead’s sitting mayor two to one in the primary and now faces Republican Andrew Rockhold.
  • South Carolina House 36 came down to 34 votes out of 3,556, the state’s only automatic recount this cycle.
  • Two Washington races are nurse versus Democrat, no Republican in sight: under the state’s top-two system, Ashley Fedan advanced to face incumbent David Hackney, and incumbent Tarra Simmons faces Daria Ilgen.
  • Alaska Senate E has no Democrat: three Republicans, ranked-choice ballot, incumbent nurse Cathy Giessel leading the August vote.

Our review found that no state is asking voters to decide anything about nursing practice this November: no staffing ratios, no scope of practice, no licensure changes, across 164 certified statewide ballot measures that we could find.

But one ballot question comes close. Rhode Island’s Question 1 asks voters to approve $275 million in higher-education bonds, most of it, $165 million, for a new Integrated Health Building at the University of Rhode Island that the state’s planning documents and the university say will primarily house the College of Nursing.

The last time nursing practice itself was on a statewide ballot was Massachusetts in 2018, when Question 1 would have set maximum patient-to-nurse ratios in hospitals. Voters rejected it about 70 to 30, 1,858,483 to 787,511 per the Secretary of the Commonwealth. It remains the only direct statewide vote on nurse staffing ratios that we identified.

So much of a nurse’s working life is decided in state law. This November, 140 nurses are asking to help write it, in numbers that defy the profession’s stereotype, in 42 states, and from every corner of the profession.

The federal picture is smaller: at least eighteen nurses are running for Congress, including the only two-nurse Senate race in the country, and our companion piece covers who they are, what they say, and what they’ve raised.

Election Day is November 3.

More From Nurses on the Ballot

🤔 Is there a nurse on your ballot this fall? Tell us who in the comments below.

We confirmed the candidates on the November ballot using official post-primary sources wherever states have published them: certified candidate lists, official results, and state filing records; one Connecticut race awaits the state’s certified list. Nursing backgrounds are stated the way official records, legislature biographies, or the candidates’ own materials state them, under one rule applied identically to both parties: every verified nurse on a general-election ballot is included. Where credential sourcing was weakest, we verified licenses individually against state board of nursing records; every candidate we checked held a current or past nursing license. Platform readings cover what each campaign publishes, read on recorded dates; a mention without a position doesn’t count.

Update (September 23, 2026): Our original September 21 roster counted 118 nurses. Since then we kept looking: 22 more verified against state licensure records and added, including two in a single Alaska district, the only state legislative race we found with two nurses on the ballot. Counts, tables, and the party split are updated throughout. If we missed a nurse on a state-legislature ballot, tell us; we will verify and add them.

Nurse.org Analysis