Solid GOP control of state governorships gives them enormous advantages when policies for working families are crafted at the federal, state, and local levels. The map could change in the 2002 elections.
Potent Force in National Policy
It’s a fact of modern-day American life: much of the political action has moved “beyond the beltway” -- out of Washington D.C. to the 50 U.S. states.
That's why the people who really follow politics have their eyes locked on the 2001 and 2002 governor’s races. These people understand: whoever controls state government these days wields tremendous power, not simply over local affairs but over the shape and future direction of national policy.
Consider two of the hottest domestic debates in recent memory -- education reform and welfare reform. Both school vouchers and time-limited benefits, the core elements of those new policies, were being “road-tested” by the states years before they were rolled-out for review at the federal level.
The same is true on issue after issue: health care, criminal sentencing, drug law enforcement, tort reform. These days the states, not Washington D.C., are the primary incubators for new ideas and initiatives.
The states have also replaced Washington as the primary “farm team” for recruiting and training future presidents. Four of the last five people to occupy the White House were former governors (George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter). That marks a very sharp break with the past. Before Carter, you have to go all the way back to the 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to find a governor-turned-president.
Consider another political fact of life: the Republican Party has organized itself into the dominant force in state politics today.
Republican Governors currently rule 29 of the 50 states, including eight of the “Big 10” most populous states: Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Penn-sylvania and Texas.
How does this GOP dominance affect American workers and their unions? Are the Republican governors as solidly entrenched as they claim?
Building A Statewide Power
Base
Control over state government
translates into serious political power in the U.S. federal system of government.
And the governor controls the levers of that power.
GOP dominance of the states is no accident. In the mid-1970s, Newt Gingrich, Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed and other conservative activists grew tired of electing Republican presidents only to see them frustrated, time and again, by the Democratic majority in Congress.
They launched a decades-long campaign of painstaking political organizing to re-build the GOP, town by town, county by county, state by state.
They trained thousands of new activists and candidates, raised millions of dollars and patiently constructed a nationwide network of grassroots coalitions backed by high power communications technologies including teleconferencing, video, talk radio and cable TV.
Their years of hard work paid off. From controlling only four state legislatures in 1974 (compared to 37 for the Democrats, with eight states split), the GOP today controls 18 state legislatures (compared to 16 for the Democrats, with 15 states split).
And between 1994 and 1998 alone, the number of Republican governors surged from 19 to peak at 32, prompting the Weekly Standard to dub the GOP “a party of governors.”
Worker-Bashing, State
By State
Not surprisingly, American
workers were high on the hit list in state after state where the Political
Right brought the GOP back to power. The record shows:
- 66 percent of the states that deny state employees any legal right to unionize are ruled by Republican governors.
- Of the 25 states paying the lowest rates of Workers Compensation to injured workers, 68 percent are ruled by Republican governors.
- Republican governors are in charge of 71 percent of the states with “Right-to-Work” (for less) laws on the books.
So-called “Right-to-Work” laws, of course, drain money and resources from the unions by championing the right of workers to not pay dues while requiring the unions to represent them all the same. Studies show workers in the “Right-to-Work” (for less) states earn 18 percent less each year than workers employed in the free states.
Studies also show “Right-to-Work” states are the deadliest places to work. Eight of the 10 states with the highest rates of on-the-jobs fatalities are “Right-to-Work” (for less) states according to OSHA records -- and all but one of these states are run by Republican governors.
Growing Cracks in GOP
Armor
The pro-union political
forces, of course, have not been standing still. In 1995, the AFL-CIO went
“back to the basics,” too, with a heavy focus on educating and registering
voters, one on one -- and turning them out on Election Day.
Their efforts have paid dividends at the polls. Since 1998, the number of state legislatures under GOP control has leveled out at 18. The number of Republican governors has fallen from 32 to 29, including a huge GOP defeat in California and the election of the first Democratic governor in Iowa in more than 30 years.
The GOP could suffer far more serious losses during the next 12 months, political experts say.
“This has been a good decade
for the Republican governors, but they’ve got a problem now,” says political
analyst John Kohut of The Cook Report.
Current projections give
the Democrats a realistic shot at knocking off Republican governors in
five of the “Big 10” states (Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan
and New Jersey), Kohut says, and, possibly, in Texas and New York, as well.
In other words, the resurgent
Democrats may be poised to smash the GOP’s 8-2 domination of the Big 10
states.