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发帖数: 29846 | 1 The Rise of One-Party States
States are increasingly dominated by one side or the other, so voters’
choices will be clear.
By Michael Barone
In Washington, Americans have two-party government, with a Democratic
president and Senate and a Republican House. We had it before November’s
election and will have it again for the next two years.
Looking back from 2014, we will have had two-party government for most of
the preceding two decades: for six years of Bill Clinton’s presidency,
three-and-a-half years of George W. Bush’s, and four years of Barack Obama
’s.
But in most of the 50 states, American voters seem to have opted for
something very much like one-party government.
Starting next month, Americans in 25 states will have Republican governors
and Republicans in control of both houses of the state legislatures. They
aren’t all small states, either. They include about 53 percent of the
nation’s population.
At the same time, Americans in 15 states will have Democratic governors and
Democrats in control of both houses of the state legislatures. They include
about 37 percent of the nation’s population.
That leaves only 10 percent in states in which neither party is in control.
The Republican edge is largely a result of the Republican trend in 2009 and
2010. Normally, you would expect the Democrats to recoup and shift the
balance the next time they have a good off-year. Maybe they will in 2014.
But what’s striking now is the wide margins in legislatures for one party
or the other in state after state — most of them, in fact.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Republicans will
have more than 60 percent of the members of both legislative houses in 17
states (Nebraska has a single nonpartisan legislature). And in nine more
states, they’ll have 60 percent of the members of one house plus a majority
in the other and the governorship.
Democrats will have 60 percent plus of both houses in eleven states, and in
two more they will have 60 percent in one house, a majority in the other,
plus the governorship.
This is true even in presidential target states. The Ohio senate will be 23
–10 Republican, the Florida house 74–46 Republican.
This trend to one-party control seems likely to have two consequences — one
of interest to political scientists and pundits, and the other to the
larger public.
Pundits and political scientists will start to identify the chief conflicts
being played out not so much in battles between the two parties — like the
struggle over public-employee bargaining in Wisconsin — but increasingly
within the parties.
We’ve already seen examples of this. The key event in Kansas politics this
year was the defeat of moderate state senators by Republicans in the August
primary. The November election was irrelevant.
This is reminiscent of the one-party politics in the Old South, in which
victory in the Democratic primary was, according to the political cliché,
“tantamount to victory.”
Political junkies may want to dust off their copies of political scientist V
. O. Key’s classic Southern Politics, first published in 1949, which showed
how each southern state had its own particular brand of one-party politics.
For the national public, one-party Democratic and one-party Republican
states provide a look at how each party governs — and the results.
In California, voters just gave Democrats two-thirds majorities in both
houses and a tax increase, as well. We’ll see if their policies help
California reduce its dismally high unemployment and resolve its enormous
pension underfunding.
In Illinois, Democrats won again, despite increasing the state income tax
from 3 to 5 percent in 2011, after which the state’s unemployment rate went
up, while the unemployment rate declined in neighboring states. Democrat
Michael Madigan has been speaker of the Illinois house for 28 of the last 30
years.
Many Republican governors and legislatures have gone in another direction,
holding down spending increases and seeking to cut taxes or hold rates even,
rather than raise them.
Texas’s low taxes (no income tax) and light regulation have been followed
by some of the most robust job creation in the nation. Texas’s population
grew so rapidly in the last decade that it gained four U.S. House seats from
the 2010 Census.
No-income-tax Florida gained two seats, and no other state gained more than
one. California, for the first time in its history, gained none.
States are laboratories of democracy, Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis
wrote. Citizens of every state can monitor their experiments and judge which
set of one-party states is getting better results.
— Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, is
a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel
contributor, and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. ©
2012 the Washington Examiner. Distributed by Creators.com. |
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