Michigan Office of the Governor via AP
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer addresses the state in Lansing, Michigan, April 20, 2020. Whitmer compared the fight against the coronavirus to the sacrifice needed during World War II.
The coronavirus pandemic has delivered a change in our politics that I hadn’t thought possible. Despite the nightly Trump rally/press conferences, somehow the lens of national politics has been pulled away from Washington, ending roughly a 20-year run of centralization.
Since 9/11, we have generally thought of politics as something that comes from D.C., rather than from the fragmented federal system. George W. Bush had been a governor, but he personified the top-down policy response to terrorism that dominated political conversation. Labeling his response a “war on terror,” he assumed much of the power of a wartime president. Thus the failure of Hurricane Katrina, though localized in New Orleans, was a failure of federal emergency management. The financial crisis saw blame placed on federal regulators (and to be fair, federal regulators deliberately hampered localized responses by preempting state consumer protection laws). State governments saw their budgets decimated during the ensuing Great Recession, leaving the federal government—and the president—the key player in recovery efforts.
A senator, Barack Obama, became the first president elected out of Congress since the Kennedy-Johnson years. (Yes, George H.W. Bush had served three unremarkable terms in the House, but he subsequently held several more critical roles, like CIA director, Republican National Committee chair, and vice president.) His tenure accompanied an age of polarization, where split tickets became a memory and politics became nationalized. Donald Trump ran as an outsider, but as a businessman/carnival barker, not a state chief executive.
Governors were once surefire presidential material, with their get-things-done profiles and ability to stand outside Washington debates. As Alan Greenblatt has written for the Prospect, however, governors were completely invisible in the Democratic primary; their records of accomplishment notwithstanding, Jay Inslee of Washington, John Hickenlooper of Colorado, and Steve Bullock of Montana barely registered a ripple. They couldn’t pierce a cable news bubble that perpetually looks to national figures, and a donor class that does the same.
Suddenly governors are relevant again, as they have been occasionally in times that demand reform.
But the crisis has brought the realization that governors have power and can drive the national response in crisis. By not wanting to take responsibility for anything, Donald Trump has facilitated this, leaving stay-at-home orders and testing frequency up to the states. By using the FEMA task force to commandeer medical equipment, he has forced states into daring measures to secure supplies. And governors have echoed Trump’s nightly press briefings by giving regular updates of their own, which a bored and locked-down cable news media has periodically run. Nothing so illustrates Trump’s singular ineptitude than the fact that he’s the first “wartime” president—or at least a president in a time of great national crisis—to lose power to the states, to governors.
At first, this mostly benefited Andrew Cuomo, whose boisterous daily talks and proximity to the New York/D.C. corridor made him a natural candidate for the spotlight. More recently, governors across America have won attention for their decision-making. We’ve seen #PresidentNewsom hashtags for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. Republicans like Mike DeWine of Ohio and Larry Hogan of Maryland have also won national reputations. Governors prematurely reopening their states, like Brian Kemp of Georgia and Henry McMaster of South Carolina, have earned a different kind of spotlight, one that could turn catastrophic if infections in those states rise. Florida’s Ron DeSantis’s scattershot response has already given him negative publicity.
Suddenly governors are relevant again, as they have been occasionally in times that demand reform. The Gilded Age led to governors like Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, gaining the presidency. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan came out of the post-Watergate era, free from the taint of Washington politics. In the pandemic, leadership and minimal competence has become more valued, and given that none of that is on display in Washington, the public has naturally looked to governor’s mansions.
This could reverberate in national politics almost immediately. Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of swing state Michigan, has been rumored as a vice-presidential candidate. It’s almost entirely for this reason, and for the expectation that politics is getting away from Washington, that Republicans have targeted Whitmer with astroturf protests backed by wealthy interests to “liberate” Michigan.
Whitmer has almost exactly the same résumé as fellow VP hopeful Stacey Abrams. Whitmer served 14 years in the Michigan legislature, Abrams 10, and both were minority leaders of one chamber of their respective legislatures. A million years ago, Whitmer gave the Democratic response to the 2020 State of the Union address; Abrams gave it in 2019. The only real difference is the fact that Whitmer won her gubernatorial race in 2018, and Abrams lost hers. (OK, “lost” hers.)
In a time when institutional trust has been lacking, governors are seen as acting to protect citizens.
By serving as governor now, Whitmer has seized the opportunity for the national spotlight as she grapples with the crisis. Her state suffers from the nation’s third-largest outbreak of COVID-19, with 2,700 deaths as of Wednesday. In Michigan, a key battleground state, Whitmer’s handling of the pandemic, right-wing protesters aside, is seen favorably, by a 57-37 margin, compared to Trump’s 44-50 approval there. That also explains the conservative noise machine’s interest in taking Whitmer down. (Whitmer claims she won’t be selected as Joe Biden’s VP, and that she’s spending no energy on politics, but that’s what you say in this position; in my view, she’s going to be picked.)
In fact, most governors are benefiting from a “rally round the state flag” effect, winning broad approval for the measures they’re taking amid the crisis. In a time when institutional trust has been lacking, governors (Kemp and McMaster aside) are seen as acting to protect citizens, and so far, that’s enough.
Liberals have long been interested in a strong central government, rather than a fractured patchwork that leaves too many people at the whim of conservative statehouses. In the Trump era, however, that dynamic has been turned on its head. But in general, the recognition that governors have power and can wield it can complement progressive governance, and break through a gridlock that gives people the impression that government is feckless. A state that can muster a pandemic response that stops debt garnishment, releases prisoners, and coordinates supply chains could also act after the crisis to, say, slash drug prices, or build a state single-payer system, or make college free.
States are obviously constrained by their budgets, and that’s going to be an absolute disaster in the coming years. But politics has turned its attention to what’s happening in the states, with governors seen as advocates for their people more than ever before. Given what remains of Washington right now, having any leadership and a government that actually tries to act is a distinct positive.
