It was the mid-1970s. If you were a Republican governor, you didn’t have to worry about Watergate anymore. If you were a Democrat, you could take comfort in the fact that your party controlled the government in a majority of the states. You had partners to work with. But you weren’t governing at a moment of crisis or great opportunity. That made it, for some governors, a bit too quiet.
There are times when a governorship can be one of the most exciting and rewarding jobs in the American political system. But there are times when it isn’t any fun at all.
Some of them have come at relatively recent moments. It was no picnic to be a governor in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 recession, taking painful steps to cut valuable programs to bring the state treasury closer to solvency. It was depressing to run a state a decade or so later as COVID-19 ravaged your population and you were helpless to do much about it.
So there are ups and downs in the gubernatorial life cycle. But what about now? This month, President Donald Trump went out of his way to embarrass the nation’s governors — or at least the Democratic ones — by disinviting two of them from the traditional White House dinner held in conjunction with the annual Washington meeting of the National Governors Association. Most of the Democratic governors responded by saying they didn’t want to participate in the dinner or in a separate White House meeting.
ON THE SURFACE, it reads as a low point in the endless fluctuation in gubernatorial power. But is it? In the second year of Trump’s second administration, Democratic governors have emerged as the most cohesive and articulate bloc of opposition players in the political system. The Democratic minority in Congress has been largely sidelined. The task of forming an opposition has fallen largely on the 24 Democrats running government in the states. They are the ones doing the talking, and by and large they are making themselves heard — particularly the ones believed to have their own presidential ambitions.
California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, sued the Trump administration over placement of federal troops in Los Angeles. A federal court upheld the challenge. Weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois called the administration’s cuts to health care and other programs “villainous cruelty by a few idiots.” Courts have generally restored most of those cuts.
And when Trump talked recently about nationalizing federal elections under the control of the Republican Party, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, vowed that “it won’t happen on my watch.” She declared that “any attempt by the federal government to take over Michigan elections should be viewed as an attempt to take away Michiganders’ constitutional right to vote.”
You might expect these challenges to be coming from the Democrats in Congress. But with a few notable exceptions, they aren’t. They are coming from the statehouses and from the Democratic governors who preside over them.
This is not just a swing of the political pendulum, but a substantial revision in the way the American political system works. Governors have had their bright moments in the 250 years of American government, but by and large they have been a separate entity, responsive to national events but functioning outside the circus of partisan national politics. They have largely operated on a bipartisan basis. For the foreseeable future, they will not able to do that. And most of them will not want to.
TO SEE THE GOVERNORS as semi-independent players in the American federal system, it helps to look back briefly at a couple of them who excelled at innovation. At the beginning of the 20th century, in Wisconsin, there was Robert M. La Follette, a Republican who in five years as governor (1901-1906) enacted a full-fledged progressive agenda. He pushed through legislation creating electoral primaries, thus deleting the influence of an entrenched party hierarchy. He fought to increase tax rates on the state’s railroads, encountering fierce opposition from the railroad barons but getting the job done in spite of their efforts. One modern historian has called him “the most celebrated figure in Wisconsin history.” La Follette wasn’t working with the federal government, and he wasn’t working against it. He was playing on an entirely different state-centered political field.
One can say much the same thing about New York’s Alfred E. Smith, a Democrat who served eight years as governor prior to his nomination for president in 1928. He established new regulation of working conditions for women and children, expanded workers’ compensation and promoted the development of hydroelectric power. You can’t escape the fact that Smith was governing in the presence of Republican presidents and heavy Republican majorities in Congress. But they didn’t really matter. Washington was Washington, and New York was New York.
So it has been throughout virtually all the periods of American history. Governors who had sufficient support in their legislatures could function largely as independent operators.
SOMETIMES, HOWEVER, activist governors did mount experiments that had eventual impact on government in Washington. In the 1980s and ’90s, Republican Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin pioneered a welfare program that helped to promote reforms later enacted by the feds. Bill Clinton’s emphasis on education in Arkansas was a forerunner of No Child Left Behind under President George W. Bush. The opposition they faced came largely from forces within their states. With a few exceptions, it didn’t come from Washington.
And during his four years as governor of Massachusetts in the first decade of the new century, Republican Mitt Romney managed the creation of a health program that heavily influenced the Affordable Care Act pushed through by President Barack Obama in 2010. Romney repudiated much of his achievement when he ran against Obama for president two years later, but the fact remains that the initial health-care revision was enacted by Romney and Massachusetts on their own, with little federal guidance or interference.
Of course, there have always been less aggressive governors who took their cues from what was going on in the nation’s capital. The Democratic governors of the 1930s were by and large New Deal loyalists who professed ultimate fealty to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the era of fully nationalized state politics lay far in the future. It has arrived now.
So is this one of those times when a statehouse is a stimulating office to hold? As always, it depends on where you sit. If you are an aggressive challenger to the Trump administration, a Gavin Newsom or a JB Pritzker, there are crises to surmount and national attention to attract. It may not be fun, but it is rewarding. If you are a less vociferous Democratic critic of the president, you can still take some satisfaction in the protest movement that continues to grow.
But one thing is certain: If the Trump administration is going to encounter assertive opposition, it will come from the statehouses, not from Congress. Does that make the present a stimulating time to be a governor? For some conspicuous dissidents, the answer is clearly yes, even at a moment when it seems that all politics is national.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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