New Governors Face Opportune But Bleak Times

by Craig Ruff
August 16, 2010

The new batch of state governors will be large in size and power. Winners of the nation’s 37 gubernatorial elections in November will hold enormous sway over political parties’ fortunes, redistricting, and budget priorities.

At next year’s National Governors Association meetings, new members may number the largest in modern history. At best, only 26 will be veterans.

The 13 governors not on this year’s ballot include four who were elected in odd years, 2007 and 2009, and nine whose elections to four-year terms coincided with the 2008 presidential election. Only 13 incumbents are seeking re-election this year, and six of them are hardly shoo-ins.

Some of the remaining 24 incumbents are term-limited, as in Michigan, while others haven chosen to retire, and a couple want to go to the U.S. Senate.

Partisan stakes
A state’s interest groups, media, partisans, pundits and lawmakers care far more about who is elected a governor than a member of the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives. After all, a governor is the political CEO of an entire state.

Political observers rarely factor governorships into which party is the majority or dominant party in the land. That is a mistake. Parties draw organizational and financial strengths from their governors.

National media and pundits are fixated on which party will control which or both chambers of next year’s Congress. Those are big stakes, of course. But insiders and observers are beginning to weigh the consequences of big changes among governorships.

Governors are party and policy leaders in their states. Some, past or present, also command national attention, even staking claims to presidential aspirations (ask Republicans Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, and Mike Huckabee).

As it stands now, 26 states have a Democratic governor and 24 a Republican. (Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida was elected as a Republican, but is running for the U.S. Senate as an Independent.) Despite very challenging Democratic election cycles in 2006 and 2008, the GOP has fared well in gubernatorial elections.

You can track polls of gubernatorial contests online at Real Clear Politics. The six embattled incumbents seeking re-election include five Democrats (Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Ohio) and one Republican (Texas). In the remaining 31 open seats, Republicans may make almost unprecedented gains.

At this writing, only Connecticut and Hawaii are expected to replace Republican governors with Democrats. At the very least, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Wyoming are likely to go the other way.

If a GOP tide materializes (still a very big if), Republicans could wind up holding as large as a 36-14 edge among governorships at year’s end. The GOP is nearly assured of holding 30.

Redistricting
In 2011, all states will redistrict their state legislatures. Most states will redraw boundaries of U.S. House of Representatives seats. Single-member states, such as Alaska, Delaware, the Dakotas, Vermont, and Wyoming will not have to.

The power of the veto may never be so critical as when it comes to redistricting. In the states without redistricting panels, line drawing is left to lawmakers and governors. In short, you need a statute — and to enact a law, you need a majority of state legislators and the governor’s signature.

Read what RealClearPolitics.com’s senior elections analyst, Sean Trende, wrote on July 19:

If the GOP wins [governorships] where they currently lead and chambers in close state legislatures flip, Republicans would control redistricting for 214 House districts and have a say in another 149. Democrats, on the other hand, would control redistricting for only 33 seats.

Holding the governorship alone is not sufficient to gerrymander congressional districts. On the other hand, it blocks the opposition party in the legislature from doing harm and, at worst, throws redistricting into state and/or federal courts. If the governor enjoys partisan majorities in both state legislative chambers (as Gov. John Engler did in 2001), it’s nearly a carte blanche ability to gerrymander.

National pundits may focus on redistricting as it affects seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, but state observers will be more attuned to redistricting’s impact on state legislatures.

To find my hypothetical redrawing of Michigan’s U.S. House districts, please check out my earlier Dome column.

Taxes and spending
States have enormous sway over policy affecting everyday people in their everyday lives. Combined with local government, states still collect and spend more revenue than the federal government. States and their localities control far more power than the federal government (at least for the time being) on education, road maintenance and new construction, public safety, utilities, environment safeguards, and public and mental health.

With all due respect to the eight full-time and 42 part-time legislatures, governors set the policy agendas of states. Scores of people cannot share the bully pulpit, and therefore the chief executive (president, mayor, county executive, or governor) focuses the attention of legislative bodies.

As most states grapple with budget crises arising from revenues falling short of existing levels of spending commitments and days being marked of the federal government’s ability to shore up state education, transportation, and Medicaid programs, incoming governors will have their work cut out for them. The term of 2011-14 may be the worst in modern history in which to preside over a state government. The final fiscal imbalance may be at hand.

In states north, south, east, and west, there is no public appetite for higher taxes. That will be particularly true should the president and Congress permit the so-called Bush tax cuts to evaporate in 2011. A higher federal tax burden comes at the expense of state and local tax collectors. The public will not countenance higher taxes all around.

States cannot coin money. Ergo, they cannot blithely outspend their pocketbooks. Governors will be on the hook for reconciling promises with dollars available. Few Democratic governors support higher taxes, but one logically could expect a larger number of Republicans to prune spending more zealously. Ambitious reforms of government employees’ benefits, corrections budgets, and other budget busters are inevitable.

In sum
A good number of states will fall into GOP hands come November. It could be historic numbers for Republicans. That would strengthen the base of the GOP, even if it does not foredoom President Obama’s re-election.

New governors will come to office at a most opportune time, that of redistricting. That could cost Democrats dozens of congressional seats and scores of state legislative ones. The new crop of governors, however, will occupy statehouses that are financially depleted. With tough, perhaps ever harsh decisions inevitable, many will be one-termers.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.

Cherry the Alternative

by Gongwer News Service
November 13, 2009

Right now there are at least 11 people running for, or thinking about running for, governor in 2010, and in the last two weeks the one who has done the most interesting stuff in the still-nascent race is the one who already has a governor tag to his name: Lieutenant Governor John Cherry Jr.

Before reflecting on some of those developments, note how much more publicly intense already the election has become now that there is at least a temporary resolution to the 2009-10 budget and that the 2009 election is done.

On the Republican side alone a potential controversy involving Attorney General Mike Cox and the fallout from the investigation into an alleged wild party at the Manoogian Mansion in Detroit is brewing (and one lobbyist is already taking bets the issue will force Mr. Cox to drop out of the race early), Oakland Sheriff Mike Bouchard is starting to rack up endorsements, and Rick Snyder, a favorite candidate of top business people in the state, is becoming more aggressive in pushing his economic proposals.

Among the Democrats, House Speaker Andy Dillon (D-Redford Twp.) has said he will make a decision on running soon. The speculation on whether he will, in fact, get into the race has led Democratic discussions for some time. He has met with former political officials for President Barack Obama (leading to speculation the White House is worried about Mr. Cherry, something Mr. Cherry’s campaign calls useless rumors). There is no word about whether the White House has met Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith (D-Salem Twp.), former Rep. John Freeman and former Michigan State University football coach George Perles.

But while Mr. Dillon is speculating, Mr. Cherry has taken some significant moves to assert himself more forcefully as a candidate.

He says he will not formally announce his candidacy until early 2010. These days, however, a formal announcement of candidacy is essentially boilerplate to the fact that he is running and making himself a more difficult candidate to catch.

Early on, Mr. Cherry took aim at Mr. Dillon with a completely unsubtle attack on the speaker’s agreement with Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop (R-Rochester) on the 2009-10 budget. In an email message and web post, Mr. Cherry raised the question of what do Democrats stand for if not for funding education and social services.

Then, practically at the same time Mr. Dillon said he would make a decision soon on running, all four of the last Democratic speakers of the House — Bobby Crim, Gary Owen, Lew Dodak and Curtis Hertel — came together in a press conference to endorse Mr. Cherry. Intentional or not (and why would anyone think it was anything but intentional?), the move was a slap at their successor speaker. It was especially so, given the primary stated reason the four backed Mr. Cherry: experience. He has the experience to understand issues, they said, the ability to work with people, understand their needs and concerns, and work out needed agreements.

In other words, Mr. Cherry has what Mr. Dillon does not.

Mr. Cherry made headlines of his own, with a speech before the Lapeer Economic Club calling for a business profits tax. Should such a tax be enacted it would be one of the most significant changes in state tax policy since the state dropped a profits tax in favor of the value-added Single Business Tax (which was replaced by a similarly complicated Michigan Business Tax).

Okay, it’s fair to say business will always opt for no tax at all if it could get that option, but would they like a profits tax? After all the ahemming and hawing and timid comments about definitions of profits and rates imposed and credits allowed and devils and details and all that, the answer is damn tootin’.

So Mr. Cherry has held out an olive branch to business, and in so doing pointed out another difference between himself and Mr. Dillon. After all, it was Mr. Dillon who in the depths of winter called for the state to change its tax structure, and with another winter approaching what has happened with that call? Mr. Cherry has, at least, tossed out a possible tax alternative.

One last highlight from that Lapeer speech: Mr. Cherry said the current Michigan Business Tax could have been designed by “paranoid schizophrenics.” Now that does include Governor Jennifer Granholm, Treasurer Bob Klein and all the folks in the administration, but it also definitely includes Mr. Dillon.

And Mr. Cherry went further when he told reporters that he doubted the legislature could enact major tax changes, that it had become more risk averse than it was in 2007, and that a solution may come from the public that would go on the ballot. Again, while not specifically directed at Mr. Dillon, it was a criticism that gathered Mr. Dillon into its net.

One of the great ironies with these positions and actions is that Mr. Cherry is helping position himself as the alternative as well as the traditional Democrat. Remember, the knock on Mr. Cherry winning the nomination was that he would be too tied to labor and traditional Democratic interests. Mr. Dillon was the alternative Democrat, willing to challenge labor with his proposed health insurance reform for all public workers.

Mr. Cherry is approaching the alternative label in an alternative way, not by distancing himself from labor but by reaching out to business.

All in all, should Mr. Dillon get into the race, it will make for a lot more fun leading up to the August primary. Should it help Mr. Cherry win the nomination it should also help relieve Republicans who, after all, have spent all this time preparing for a campaign in 2010 against the lieutenant governor. No one wants to waste a lot of good campaign rhetoric in these days when everyone is preaching frugality.

For nearly 50 years in Michigan, Gongwer News Service has provided independent, comprehensive, accurate and timely coverage of issues in and around Michigan’s government and political systems. For subscription information, including a free trial, visit Gongwer online.