Written by Alan Greenblatt, special to CQ.

Among the priorities of House Democratic leaders when they take control in January is an increase in the minimum wage. That’s old hat to some of their colleagues at the state level: Two dozen states have already approved minimum wage hikes that are higher than federal law, including six where voters approved an increase Nov. 7.

Much of the domestic agenda for the new Democratic Congress, in fact, reflects issues that Democratic governors and state legislatures — and even some Republicans — have been working on throughout the Bush administration. Frustrated by the opposition of the White House and GOP congressional leaders to initiatives on stem cell research, environmental protection, access to health care and climate change, a growing number of states have been taking action on their own.

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The Governors:
Click Here to View Graphic Party leaders now hope that federal and state Democrats will cooperate on such issues and get them enacted in Congress, much as Republican governors and state legislators worked closely with GOP leaders on their agenda when they took control of Congress in 1995.

“With Washington so preoccupied with war and foreign policy, the real action for domestic public affairs is in the states,” said Richard P. Nathan, co-director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, N.Y. Because some states have been more receptive to liberal ideas, Nathan said, “This election is not just a political earthquake, it’s a policy earthquake.”

The election certainly broadened the Democratic base in the states and, potentially, the party’s regional influence. Democrats won a net total of six governorships, giving them control of 28 states — their first gubernatorial majority since 1994.

Races for governor are generally decided by state issues and personality, not by national trends, and governors this year were largely immune from the anti-incumbent wave that swept Congress. Maryland Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. was the only incumbent defeated — by Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley. Democrats won five of the nine GOP seats left vacant.

“The Democrats, to their credit, did a very good job on candidate recruitment,” said Craig Pattee, president of Dutko Worldwide, a lobbying firm.

Still, it seems an unlikely coincidence that Democratic gubernatorial candidates have won and lost their majorities in the same elections as congressional Democrats. Prevailing conditions clearly had some effect.

“How do people judge legislators — they don’t have the foggiest idea,” said Alan Rosenthal, an expert on state legislatures at Rutgers University. “It takes something like the Iraq War or a recession or a major scandal like Watergate to get the people riled up.”

Democrats also increased their representation in state legislatures, particularly in the Midwest. After the 2004 elections, the two parties were virtually tied in control of state legislatures; now Democrats will have a majority of both houses in at least 23 states, compared with the GOP’s 15. Ten states will be split. (The outcome in Pennsylvania isn’t known yet, and Nebraska’s legislature is nonpartisan.)

Using Their Influence The partisan balance means more in state legislatures, where laws are passed, than among governors, who tend to be more centrist than their legislative colleagues because they have broader constituencies.

The current group of Democratic governors, for instance, has largely resisted trying to raise taxes despite some tough budget cycles. “It is a little surprising to see so many Democratic officeholders embrace the language of fiscal responsibility,” said Constance Campanella, president of the lobbying group Stateside Associates. “Those issues used to be owned by the Republicans. No more.”

Conversely, Republican governors have championed many liberal innovations. During his re-election campaign, Ehrlich touted his support for stem cell research. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who staged an impressive comeback to win another term as governor of California, is an even bigger supporter of stem cell research and signed a landmark bill in September limiting emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

And it was Mitt Romney, stepping down as governor of Massachusetts to pursue the GOP presidential nomination, who in April signed a bill that aims to guarantee health coverage for all state residents.

To the extent that these types of policies are associated most closely with Democrats, however, the increased number of governorships they hold should spur more action at the state level and in Washington.

Teamwork with the Democratic Congress would echo the mid-1990s, when Republican governors were able to work with the congressional GOP on such issues as welfare overhaul. “What the Republican governors did was phenomenal,” said Campanella. “They took an agenda and nationalized it, not only working among themselves but with the Congress to yield great change.”

Collaboration between the states and Congress has been in short supply since then. States have instead been crouched in a defensive posture toward Washington. Congressional Republicans who once protected the prerogatives of states and praised the wisdom of their policies have more recently angered state officials of both parties with mandates and pre-emptions in such areas as tax policy and environmental protection. A law imposing nationwide standards, including security requirements, on drivers’ licenses will cost the states more than $11 billion to implement, according to an estimate by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Governors of both parties hope to have more influence with Congress on issues of common concern, including Medicaid, immigration and next year’s scheduled reauthorization of the “No Child Left Behind” education law. If they can get a more sympathetic hearing from Democrats, that will represent a welcome change for state policy makers of all stripes.

“Whether it’s cutting back on federal pre-emption or strengthening the role of states in education and homeland security, I think governors — Republicans and Democrats — are looking forward to playing a stronger role,” Pattee said. “They all want it, and we’ve been having a bit of a dry spell.

“Nancy Pelosi is going to be very surprised by the activism of the governors. She’s not just dealing with her friends on the Hill.”

It Takes All Kinds One of the best-known advocates of state-level activism on domestic issues has been New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who last week won the governorship of New York, succeeding retiring Republican George E. Pataki.



The Third Democratic Majority:
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As attorney general, Spitzer has been one of the most prominent state officials in the country, suing gunmakers and polluters and using his position to extract settlements in high-profile lawsuits against Wall Street brokerage houses and insurance companies. Spitzer has maintained that he merely stepped in to curb corporate abuses because the Securities and Exchange Commission, in his eyes, had been too lax. He was alternately lionized and excoriated for his actions — some of which Congress contemplated blocking — but no one denied his importance. In fact, some have wondered whether Spitzer’s influence won’t diminish in his new job.

Spitzer’s victory, the first by a Democrat in New York since 1990, was one of two pickups for his party in the Northeast. In the other, Deval Patrick will succeed Romney as governor of Massachusetts. Patrick, a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, will be just the second African-American ever elected governor. The first was L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia in 1989.

This year also was a high-water mark for women in governor’s races: Six won election, the most ever in a single year, bringing the total number of female chief executives to nine.

Democrats have also been courting centrist candidates and religious voters, and in Ohio, a former Methodist minister who won the endorsement of the National Rifle Association, Ted Strickland, defeated Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Exit polling, however, suggested that Strickland barely won among voters who attended church weekly. He was probably helped more by the scandals that have plagued GOP Gov. Bob Taft and other Republicans.

Democrats did well in the Midwest, with potentially vulnerable incumbents Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan and James E. Doyle of Wisconsin winning handily. Chet Culver, the Iowa secretary of state, held that state, the only one left vacant by a Democrat (Tom Vilsack is retiring.) Iowa Democrats also took control of both the state’s legislative chambers.

Democrats, in fact, made big gains in the Minnesota legislature, padding their Senate majority by six seats and taking the House with a 19-seat swing. They narrowly missed the chance to unseat GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who won by a slight plurality. The fact that Pawlenty was able to hold on at all in a blue state during a Democratic year suggests that he may become a national figure for his party.

Republicans did well in Southern contests, as had been expected. State Attorney General Charlie Crist held Florida, where incumbent Jeb Bush was term-limited out of office. In one of the stranger contests of the year, Texas Gov. Rick Perry prevailed in his re-election bid over a field that included country singer and author Kinky Friedman.

Democrats did pick up one Southern state. Mike Beebe, the state attorney general, carried Arkansas, which still has a tendency to vote Democratic for state races despite outgoing GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee’s 10-year run.

Think Regionally Democratic success was particularly notable in the Mountain West. As recently as 2002, Democrats did not hold a single governorship in the Rocky Mountain states, but they now have five, including a pickup in Colorado. Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter easily defeated Rep. Bob Beauprez (news, bio, voting record), and Democrats solidified legislative majorities they had won there in 2004.

Democrats have formed alliances in Colorado with business groups and other Republican constituencies frustrated by the congressional GOP’s focus on social issues. “How permanent their majority may be will really depend on whether or not a moderate Democratic governor and a moderate [state House] Speaker can keep their base in line while not playing to it on a continuous basis,” said Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.

The Mountain West has been, along with the South, the foundation for the GOP’s contemporary strength in both the Senate and the Electoral College. But the Western states have a long populist tradition and had been open to electing Democratic governors until the mid-1990s.

Still, Democrats had their worst showing in Montana, where they watched their two-year-old legislative majorities slip away. Republicans took back the state House and pulled into a tie in the Senate.

Return of the Terminator Four years ago, there was much more upheaval at the gubernatorial level, although not as much overall partisan change. Fully two dozen new governors were elected, all but four of whom represented a switch in party control. Budget conditions were miserable at the state level in 2002, with many states running deficits that ran into the billions. Voters were glad to toss out the incumbent party, regardless of which one it was.

Four years down the road, most state economies are in better shape, and so are state budgets. That made it easy for incumbents to take credit for conditions that have improved. All the “off-color” governors prevailed in their re-election bids, with the exception of Ehrlich.

Perhaps no governor benefited from the improved economic outlook more than California’s Schwarzenegger.

Taking office in 2003 after his predecessor had been recalled, he inherited a budget deficit somewhere north of $10 billion. But things had turned around in plenty of time for his re-election campaign, putting enough money at Schwarzenegger’s disposal to help win over old adversaries. He restored money for education that he had previously cut and came to an agreement with Democrats who control the legislature on $37 billion in infrastructure bonds that voters approved Nov. 7.

Schwarzenegger had made a stunning change of course since November 2005, when his package of ballot initiatives was defeated and his popularity sank to about 30 percent.

Working with Democrats he once ridiculed as “girlie men” allowed Schwarzenegger to seize the center in his race against state Treasurer Phil Angelides, a liberal Democrat who talked openly about the need to raise taxes.

“He had the courage to completely reverse direction, or the naivete,” said Bruce E. Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “It turned out to be courage, a move that a lot of people were skeptical about. Now, in retrospect, it was a brilliant move.”

But it was a move that left many Californians wondering which Schwarzenegger will show up for a second term — the conciliator or the confrontationalist.

Cain believes it will be the former. “He’s an entertainer. He’s a person who believes you give the people what they want.”

Alan Greenblatt is a staff writer for Governing magazine and a former CQ reporter.

This story originally ran in the Nov. 13 edition of CQ Weekly. For more information about CQ Weekly, please visit CQ.com.