It’s been a year of hope and uncertainty in the states — and the prospect is for more of the same in 2022.
Hope has been spurred by the economic rebound: sales tax revenues swelled as Americans bought taxable items at pre-coronavirus pandemic levels while also boosting personal savings rates and inflation.
Hope also came from Congress, which after a series of false starts provided state, local, territorial and tribal governments with $350 billion as part of President Joe Biden’s American Rescue plan.
State Budgets Good, But Uncertainty Remains
Despite this economic cushion, uncertainty prevailed in most states as the COVID-19 pandemic surged, topping 50 million cases and more than 800,000 deaths in the United States alone.
Most of the current suffering has been caused by the potent Delta variant, but the spread of the new and highly transmissible Omnicom variant has added to the uncertainty and threatened a return of lockdowns and other inconveniences.
Delta has disrupted demand, prolonged supply bottlenecks and negatively affected housing starts, said Lael Brainard, the vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve.
National inflation ballooned to 6.85 in November, the highest rate since 1982.
Economists say that inflation, in which too much money chases too few goods, is a byproduct of the pandemic.
With restaurants and other public places shuttered and people working from home, demand for services declined while demand for products increased.
As an example, movie and theater revenues all but vanished during the pandemic while demand for home entertainment centers increased.
Clogged supply lines, factory shutdowns abroad and a shortage of truck drivers made goods scarce and therefore more expensive.
The future is viewed through partisan lenses: Biden insists the inflation spurt has peaked, while Republicans predict it will be of long duration. No one really knows.
Voting and the Rule of Law
Economic uncertainty is mirrored by political uncertainty, as states prepare for the midterm elections of 2022 under a cloud of hyper-partisanship and controversial redistrictings of congressional and state legislative districts.
Nineteen states controlled by Republicans have made it more difficult to vote, while 25 mostly Democratic-controlled states have eased voting restrictions, according to data compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice.
Politicians on both sides in these states accepted the conventional wisdom that heavy voter turnout inevitably favors Democrats.
After they won the governorship and legislative control in 2019, Virginia Democrats repealed the state’s voter ID law, allowed 45 days of absentee voting, made Election Day a state holiday and automatically registered anyone receiving a driver’s license.
These actions were supposed to increase turnout, and they did. Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, this year’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, received 200,000 more votes than Democrat Ralph Northam did when he was elected governor of Virginia by a landslide in 2017.
But McAuliffe lost the election to Republican Glenn Youngkin because GOP turnout increased even more than Democratic turnout.
The result vindicated demographer Nate Cohn, whose evaluation of state voting laws in The New York Times was quoted in my Aug. 17 column.
“There’s a real — and bipartisan — misunderstanding about whether making it easier or harder to vote, especially by mail, has a significant effect on turnout or electoral outcomes,” Cohn wrote. “The evidence suggests it does not.”
Rough Road Ahead for Democrats?
Virginia and New Jersey were the only states to hold gubernatorial elections in 2021, and the results augur well for Republicans.
Although Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy won a second term in New Jersey, his margin of victory was 3 percentage points in a state that Biden won by nearly 16% in 2020.
In Virginia, Republicans won the House of Delegates, as the lower legislative house is known, as well as the governorship.
Republicans now control 67 of the 99 partisan state legislative chambers with Democrats holding 31. A multiparty coalition shares power in Alaska.
History favors Republicans in the 2022 congressional elections as they try to wrest control of the House of Representatives and the Senate from the Democrats.
Since 1934, the party out of power in the White House has gained an average of 28 seats in the House, winning 19 of 22 midterm elections. Democrats presently hold the House by eight seats.
The historical portent is not quite as strong in the Senate, where the party out of power has prevailed two-thirds of the time. The Senate is now tied 50-50.
State legislatures have been redistricting House seats based on the 2020 census. Nineteen states have drawn new maps so far, and six states do not have to draw them because they have only a single representative.
Surprisingly, according to the data-driven demographic website FiveThirtyEight, Democrats have picked up six seats to two for Republicans.
The website said Republicans “pulled their punches” in Indiana, where they passed up the chance to convert the Democratic-leaning 1st District into a Republican district and in Iowa, “where they could have overridden the state’s nonpartisan redistricting agency to draw more solidly red seats and didn’t.”
At the same time, Democrats “used hardball tactics” to push through a map in Oregon adding two Democratic seats and in Illinois, where they increased Democratic-leaning seats to 13 from 11 despite losing a seat in the census.
But Republicans can take over the House by maintaining the status quo, including states where they created lopsided districts in 2011.
Take Ohio, where Republicans hold a 12-4 edge in the House, meaning they hold 75% of the districts in a state where Republicans typically receive 54% of the congressional vote.
After a new Ohio Redistricting Commission failed to come up with a bipartisan map the Republican-controlled Ohio Legislature quickly drew and passed a map that maintains the GOP’s partisan dominance.
Ohio lost a seat in the 2010 census, and the new map favors Republicans by either a 12-3 or 11-4 margin, depending on the analysis.
The Ohio map is being challenged in court as is the map in North Carolina, which was gerrymandered to favor Republicans in 2011 and again this year.
Reformers who prefer competitive elections have made some progress, notably in California, a Democratic state where an independent commission draws the maps.
Democrats hold a 42-11 edge in the Golden State’s congressional delegation, but the commission has drawn several competitive districts, enabling Republicans to gain four seats in 2020 even as Biden was defeating President Donald Trump in California by more than 5 million votes.
Bipartisanship Isn’t Dead
Aside from partisan redistricting, state legislatures achieved worthwhile accomplishments in 2021.
Several states and cities enacted modest police reform measures in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but the calls for defunding the police diminished as homicides rose throughout the land.
Reflecting the changing times, 22 states passed laws enabling telemedicine, and a number also expanded broadband access.
Here are a few examples of constructive legislation provided by Kate Blackman and others at the National Council of State Legislatures (NCSL):
» The Democratic-controlled Legislature in Illinois passed legislation providing tax credits for the manufacturers of electric vehicles and paying the costs of training new or retained employees. The state is home to EV manufacturer Rivian.
» The Republican-controlled Legislature in Georgia enacted legislation protecting consumers against balance billing and the surprise medical bills associated with this practice.
» The Democratic-controlled Legislature in Vermont vastly improved access to child care. Families with income up to 150% of poverty will receive free child care; those with incomes up to 350% of poverty are eligible for a state subsidy.
» In Colorado, legislation sponsored by two Democrats and two Republicans provides up to three state-paid mental health sessions for all Colorado youth.
All of these measures had near-unanimous bipartisan support.
And Then We Came to the End
This is my last column for State Net Capitol Journal, as I’m retiring at the age of 88 to write my memoirs. I’ve been associated with this newsletter and its predecessor, California Journal, since that magazine’s first issue in January 1970.
I thank my editor, Rich Ehisen, and my colleagues, Korey Clark and Mary Anne Peck, and you, dear readers, for the support you’ve provided. I also thank those who have kept me informed about state issues, especially Tim Storey and Wendy Underhill of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
State Net Capitol Journal is resolutely nonpartisan. That suits me, as I much prefer explanation to ideology and try always to rely on facts.
One hundred years ago, the great journalist C.P. Scott wrote: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” His point was that anyone can have an opinion but that it’s sometimes challenging to learn the facts.
The Constitution of the United States, wonderful as it is, rests on certain unstated premises without which a functioning democracy could not long endure. One of these premises is that the loser of an election concedes to the winner.
Richard Nixon in 1960 and Al Gore in 2000 had reason to believe they might have won the presidential elections in which they competed. But the count and the courts said otherwise, and they graciously conceded to Presidents John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, respectively.
Like it or not, Biden won the 2020 presidential election. That’s a fact.
— Lou Cannon, a Summerland resident, is a longtime national political writer and acclaimed presidential biographer. His most recent book — co-authored with his son, Carl — is Reagan’s Disciple: George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy. Cannon also is an editorial adviser to State Net Capitol Journal, which published this column originally. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
