A year ago, Warner was the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, running on a platform of making schools better and bringing "the bounty of the information age" to every corner of his state. But even as he spoke, the bounty itself was slipping away. By the time he took office this past January, Virginia was facing a deficit of $3.8 billion. Warner was forced to slash higher education funding and, he ruefully notes, many of the high-tech executives whose help he was counting on to revive the state's rural areas were struggling to stay in business themselves.
Next year's crop of incoming governors will have one advantage over Warner: They won't be caught by surprise. All of them will know what they are about to inherit. But they may find it a little depressing, nevertheless. Virtually all states are facing deficits next year that could be even worse than this year's record shortfalls. The relatively easy one-time spending cuts and funding shifts have already been made, and the rainy day and tobacco trust funds are all but spent. Now come the hard choices. "It's no longer just a question of where else you can cut," says Warner. "It's really going to go into questions of what are the functions state government should perform."
The people who will be asking and answering those questions will be, for the most part, new to the game. There are 36 elections for governor this year. At least 20 of them are certain to result in new officeholders because of term limits or voluntary retirement. It is the largest number of open governorships in 40 years. On top of this, at least a half-dozen incumbents face serious challenges. The bottom line is that there are likely to be more governors starting out fresh in January than at any point in recent times.
What the new gubernatorial voices will be clamoring for is far from certain. Whether Democrat or Republican, they will barely have time to sweep up after their inaugural balls before they have to begin patching billion-dollar deficits. How they go about doing that, at a time when tax revenues are plummeting, Medicaid costs are soaring and education remains one of the sacred cows of American politics, will set the tone of state governance for the decade ahead.
The new governors will have plenty of first-term company in the legislatures they will be seeking to influence, with as much as 25 percent average turnover in the legislative ranks. Term limits continue to wreak their effects: This year's election will result in a 50 percent turnover in the Missouri House, for example, and a 75 percent change in membership of the Michigan Senate. Quite a few legislatures are likely to change partisan coloration as well. In an average election year, about a dozen legislative chambers around the country switch control. If anything, the odds this year favor more upheaval than usual.
Democrats, whose decades-long dominance of state legislatures eroded seriously during the 1990s, now have only the slimmest lead in the number of seats they hold nationwide. If history is a guide, Democrats should be able to rebuild their numbers a bit this year. The president's party has suffered a net loss of legislative seats in every midterm election going back 60 years, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But in the current situation, history may be misleading. Republicans were well positioned to dominate last year's redistricting process in several of the larger states, and by and large they did so. Even if Democrats increase their overall numbers among the nation's 7,400 state legislators, Republicans should be able to preserve or even enhance their control of legislative chambers.
In particular, Republicans have reason to be optimistic about surging into House majorities in North Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas. Democratic control seems shaky in the Vermont House, and Democrats were lucky to pull into a tie two years ago in the Arizona Senate, while both narrowly Democratic chambers are up for grabs in Washington State. The few solid hopes for Democratic takeovers lie in the Illinois Senate, the Minnesota House and the two chambers in Oregon.
But even as they continue building muscle in legislatures, Republicans are almost certain to lose ground at the gubernatorial level. They currently lead Democrats 27 to 21, with two independents, but it's hard to construct any plausible scenario under which they could hold those numbers.
Democrats not only have momentum on their side, having won 12 of the last 15 gubernatorial elections, but they are defending far less turf than Republicans, who must protect the governor's mansion in 23 states with just 11 incumbent candidates (including two unelected incumbents, in Wisconsin and Texas).
Whatever the individual results, 2002 will mark the end of an era in American gubernatorial politics--a relatively brief but important era in which Republican governors took advantage of their numbers to lobby Washington for a devolution of power to the state level. It was an era dominated by GOP voices such as those of John Engler in Michigan, Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, governors who had the ear of the congressional leadership and, most recently, of the president. And tangible changes in the state-federal relationship took place as a result.
Many Republicans are hopeful that, even with the departure of these stars, the GOP case for devolution will still be a persuasive one in Washington. "It's like a basketball team," says Connecticut Governor John Rowland, first elected in 1994 and now seeking a third term. "You've lost a lot of starters but you're moving people up from off the bench." Even with an effective corps of new spokesmen, however, Republican governors will have to make their arguments without the benefit of majority status.
To start with, Democrats are favored in the contest for the biggest gubernatorial prize of all: California. Democratic incumbent Gray Davis, although weakened by a $24 billion deficit and by last year's electricity deregulation debacle, drew a stumbling opponent in businessman-novice Bill Simon. "Governor Davis is beatable," says one national Republican strategist. "Whether we have the candidate to beat him remains to be seen."
Meanwhile, Democratic candidates hold a substantial edge in states that have long had Republican governors but have been voting Democratic for other offices: Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. Democrats are competitive-- or even leading--in several other states where they have not won recently, such as Kansas, South Dakota and Tennessee.
Incumbent Democratic governors are nervous in Alabama, Iowa and South Carolina, and a Republican is likely to be elected in Hawaii for the first time since 1959. GOP candidates have an excellent chance to win governorships that Democrats are vacating in Alaska and New Hampshire. But the bottom line is that Republicans simply have to defend too much ground this year, and have too few seasoned incumbents to defend it all effectively. All in all, it's likely to be a happy night for Democrats on the gubernatorial front November 5.
How happy they will be come November 6, though, is another story. Most of the Democrats running for governor this year are counting on the party's traditional messages on education, the economy and health to resonate with anxious voters. And they may. But with the decline of state revenues, Democrats can no more realistically proffer large- scale spending programs than the GOP can deliver on big state tax cuts. For all the talk about core domestic issues and the Democratic desire to blame both state budget shortfalls and business scandals on Republicans, Democrats have not been putting forward ambitious plans, excepting the now perennial promises to supply senior citizens with prescription drugs.
The grandest plans afoot this election year, as is typically the case, have taken the shape of ballot initiatives and referenda. There are a couple of truly ambitious ones, such as a measure to abolish the income tax in Massachusetts and one to provide pre-kindergarten care to every 4-year-old in Florida. But those are rare exceptions. November's ballots will include relatively few ballot measures nationwide, including fewer than 50 initiatives--representing the lowest number since 1986 and a 40 percent decline from just two years ago. "Lawmakers have added increased regulation to make the process more difficult for people to use," complains M. Dane Waters, president of the Initiatives and Referendum Institute.
But Waters admits that another inhibiting factor for initiative writers has been uncertainty in many states about the makeup of next year's gubernatorial leadership, about the changes that will reorder legislative power, and perhaps most important, about trying to sell any major initiatives at a time of serious economic stagnation. "Post- September 11, everyone's concerned about the government not having enough money," Waters says, "so some people have decided to hold off."
