Any governor who wants to bring businesses to his state must be sharply partisan as in low taxes, right to work, anti-union and pro Castle Doctrine. NPR’s Alan Greenblatt notes that governors have become more partisan as of late.
Today, whether fueled by their own presidential ambitions or pressured by interest groups that figure they can get more action in states than from a gridlocked Congress, governors have become more polarizing figures.
“There just seems to be more of a partisan edge,” says Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson, whose father was a popular governor of Utah. “They seem to be infected along with everyone else, there’s no question about it.”
For decades, observers have talked about states as “laboratories of democracy,” experimenting with ideas that often blossom into national policy.
Today, we have red labs and blue labs, with partisan governors pushing entirely different and opposite types of laws.
“The vast majority of states are deeply red or deeply blue, and they reflect that,” says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “Governors used to be the most bipartisan group, but now they’re as divided as everybody else.”
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