Republican governors and local lawmakers push back against Obama-era progressivism with an array of pro-growth policies.
Shortly before leaving office in January, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley found himself speaking on the phone to a utility-company employee about setting up an account for his family’s new private residence. Asked how he spelled his last name, O’Malley, a Democrat, responded: “Like the outgoing governor.” The woman on the other end of the line quipped, “Ah, yes. The tax man.”
O’Malley himself tells this story, perhaps to burnish his left-of-Hillary credentials for a 2016 presidential run. But the tax-happy reputation he gained in Maryland—by one estimate, he hiked taxes and fees 40 times during his two terms—probably cost his party the governorship last November. Republican challenger Larry Hogan, founder of the antitax group Change Maryland, defeated the Democratic candidate, then–lieutenant governor Anthony Brown, in a state that Gallup recently declared America’s second-most Democratic. Hogan wasn’t the only 2014 GOP gubernatorial candidate to win in deep Blue territory. Republicans also captured the governor’s mansion in Massachusetts (the country’s most Democratic state, according to Gallup) and in Illinois (the ninth-most). Republicans picked up a governor’s seat in GOP-leaning Arkansas, too, with Asa Hutchinson succeeding term-limited Mike Beebe. The Democrats, by contrast, took only one governorship from Republicans, in Blue-tinted Pennsylvania.
JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AP PHOTO
. . . and Larry Hogan in Maryland.
The victories continued a remarkable state winning streak for Republicans since Barack Obama became president. Pundits initially described the 2008 election as a major leftward shift in American politics, and it’s easy to see why: as the Obama era opened, the GOP held just 22 governorships and 14 state legislatures. But voters almost immediately began electing Republican lawmakers who rejected Obama’s call for bigger government and higher taxes. And they kept electing them last year, despite failed efforts by Democrats’ union allies to unseat incumbent Republican governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio. Today, Republican governors rule in 31 states, and the party has gained nearly 900 state legislative seats, giving it control of 30 state legislatures; Democrats hold the majority in 11, with eight split, and one (Nebraska’s) unicameral and officially nonpartisan.
That leaves the Republican Party with an array of highly visible elected officials in states likely to decide the 2016 presidential election. Further, if the GOP maintains momentum through the next election cycle, it will control a majority of state governments during the upcoming redistricting process, which will determine the election map for Congress and state legislatures throughout the 2020s. The long-term balance of power in American politics may well rest, then, with how the Republican governors perform during the next few years. And the Democrats know it: the national party’s Legislative Campaign Committee has launched a special fund-raising campaign—Advantage 2020—to help state parties retake state capitols.
Republican candidates’ recent success resulted partly from local voter backlash against state tax increases during the Great Recession. Confronting budget crises back in 2009, with tax collections plunging 8 percent as the economy reeled, many governors assumed that voters would accept a bigger government pinch on their income. After all, Obama had just won the presidency decisively, running on a liberal platform. States proceeded to pile on $29 billion in new taxes in 2009, according to the National Conference of State Legislators—collectively, the largest single-year state hike ever recorded. It turned out to be a bad move politically. Republican gubernatorial hopefuls ran successfully against the rising taxes and in favor of restraining spending in New Jersey, where Democratic governors had raised taxes by approximately $5 billion over eight years; in Wisconsin, where Democrat Jim Doyle had boosted them by $3 billion over the same period; and in six other states with tax-friendly Democratic governors.
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