> So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals

Raises an interesting question of who is less popular, the Californian government or the US Senate. The experiments with long-term professional legislatures have generally not been very promising - rather than statesmen it tends to be people with a certain limpet-like staying power and a limpet-like ability to learn from their mistakes. In almost all cases people's political solution is just "well we didn't try my idea hard enough" and increasing their tenure in office doesn't really help the overall situation.

That's a non sequitur. Creating long-term professional politicians is not going to create legislators competent in the various domains they legislate on. It's going to create politicians competent at being elected long term, whatever the means.

Your solution to politicians being out of touch with reality is to let them remain in office longer?

It is interesting that this is a mainstream existing thing in the US (at the state level), but more of a fringe proposal in the rest of the English-speaking world.

I think the answer may be that the difference in political systems (parliamentary vs presidential) and party systems (less two-party but with greater party discipline) solves many of the problems term limits are intended to solve in completely different ways.

Maybe a better answer would be for US states to adopt the parliamentary system? Although there is some debate about what the "republican form of government" clause means, it arguably doesn't rule out parliamentary republicanism, and Luther v Borden (1849) ruled the clause wasn't justiciable anyway. Added to that, the widespread practice in first half of the 19th century, in which governors were elected by state legislatures, was de facto the parliamentary system. I don't think there is any federal constitutional obstacle to trying this – it is just a political culture issue, it currently sits outside the state constitutional Overton window.

While you could adopt the Australia/Canada model of a figurehead state governor/lieutenant governor with a state premier, I think just having a premier but calling them "the governor" would be more feasible

And yet, term limits are something many people want in the hopes that it will solve some of the problems in Washington DC.

There, the professional legislators can't get anything right either.

Do you think there's a middle ground of increasing the term limits to, say, 18 or 20 years?

Long term tenure won't help. Look at the Federal government. Eventually you end up with a hospice center as your legislature.

> professional legislatures

That should not be a profession.

Decisions should be made by people who are the most informed about the subject matter. By definition you cannot have someone who is the most informed about everything.