MAKING CHANGE: For Money, Guns, Governors, and Growth Policy : Out of the Boondocks Into Mansions of Power

When the nation’s governors gather in Washington next month for their annual winter meetings, they will be in an unaccustomed spotlight.

The reason is 1990 reapportionment--the decennial Super Bowl of American legislative politics. Following each census, state legislatures (subject to gubernatorial veto) draw the congressional and legislative districts that govern elections for the next 10 years. Their map-making, which establishes the partisan balance of each district, is as influential as any single factor in determining how many seats each party holds. Democratic control of state legislatures--and thus reapportionment--is the foundation of their enduring majority in the House of Representatives. When one party controls both the statehouse and the governorship, their freedom to gerrymander favorable districts can realign state politics overnight: Democratic dominance of the map-making process in California expanded the party’s margin in the congressional delegation from one to 11 seats after the last reapportionment.

The opportunity for creative cartography is greatest in states where reapportionment will change the congressional delegation’s size; and almost all of the states either gaining (including California, Texas and Florida) or losing seats (most prominently New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois) will elect governors next year. Virginia, which is expected to gain a seat, and New Jersey, whose numbers will probably not change, are electing governors this fall.

For the GOP in particular, the 36 gubernatorial races next year are crucial, because the party brings so few other cards to the reapportionment table. Without substantial gains, the Republicans face another Democratic-dominated reapportionment that will lock-in the Democrats’ House majority through the end of the century. That’s because the GOP’s White House dominance hasn’t trickled down into statehouse gains: The GOP holds fewer state legislative chambers today than in 1979, and less than one-third overall. Republicans must elect governors to offset these Democratic advantages. “We are going to get a lot more attention than ever before because of reapportionment,” says Michele M. Davis, executive director of the Republi can Governors Assn. “We are going to get some heavy resources from the national (Republican) committee.”

This attention is somewhat new for the governors, whose travails in the boondocks have rarely moved Washington. With the exception of a few large-state governors, and the occasional rogue with a calling for larceny, state chief executives have typically served out their careers with as much fanfare as bank tellers. Nonetheless, powerful governors--from Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in California to Nelson A. Rockefeller in New York--transformed their states. It’s a rewarding, comfortable job. Most get a state-maintained mansion, a police escort wherever they go and power to appoint hundreds of supporters to well-paying jobs--instead of dozens senators and congressmen can satisfy. Senators can debate policy; governors make it. What they haven’t been able to do--until recently--is influence national issues, even those that directly affect states.

But governors have quietly grown up to a major role in the development of domestic policy. When Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty 25 years ago, the underlying assumption was that Washington needed to fill the gap left by inert state governments. Now the reverse is true. With the federal budget deficit paralyzing Washington, governors in both parties have been forced to develop programs for coping with persistent domestic problems. Their ideas now bubble up to influence Congress. The movements to reform the nation’s educational and welfare systems grew as much out of state initiatives as Capitol epiphanies. “It’s a complete flip-flop of the imbalance that prevailed in the 1960s when nothing was happening at the state level,” said former Arizona Gov. Bruce E. Babbitt.

What have the states wrought? A politics of striking moderation--an almost nonpartisan agenda that enlists the business Establishment behind traditional social programs such as education and assistance to young children by repackaging them as investments in economic growth. From Republicans such as Thomas H. Kean in New Jersey to Democrats like Arkansas’ Bill Clinton, governors are now building their administrations on bland but sturdy bipartisan pillars: public-private partnerships to cope with social needs, increased funding for education and training, leveraging of limited public funds in other areas. This isn’t the kind of politics that sends pulses racing--ask Michael S. Dukakis--but at the state level, at least, it is effective at producing policy and reelecting office-holders.

The new approach has most dramatically affected Southern and Southwestern states where governors were previously judged by their success at narcotizing government. Across the Sun Belt, governors devoted themselves to promoting a “good business climate”--a near mystical condition of corporate rapture that translates into few government services and low taxes. That worked when the Sun Belt’s economy was built on brute low-wage manufacturing--in the South--and bountiful natural-resource industries--in the Southwest and Rocky Mountains.

But as foreign competition hammered the manufacturing base, and falling energy prices undermined the oil states’ passive prosperity, innovative governors in these traditionally conservative states have redefined the good business climate. Even tightfisted business leaders now grudgingly accept the need for government to provide the infrastructure for economic growth: strong early educational facilities, research universities, roads, airports, ports.

Stretching this new consensus to its limits, several governors in recent years have been willing to do what Washington hasn’t: raise taxes to maintain services. Governors in states ranging from Michigan to Utah have won reelection despite major tax increases. In this budget year alone, four states raised income taxes, and another seven hiked sales taxes. In his reelection bid next year, Florida’s Republican Gov. Bob Martinez, hurt badly by an early sales tax hike, will provide 1990’s tightest test of that connection.

The two most prominent exceptions to this trend toward more activist state government are the states that will probably be most fiercely contested next year: Texas and California. (Texas is expected to gain four congressional seats in 1990, second only to California, where the delegation will swell by at least five and maybe six seats.) Though retiring Texas Republican Gov. William P. Clements Jr. accepted a substantial tax hike to cover budget shortfalls, he hasn’t launched aggressive programs to diversify the state’s economy. In California, retiring Republican Gov. George Deukmejian’s Reaganite resistance to government expansion has intensified the gridlock over mounting transportation, environmental and social needs: He has played the role of a traffic light stuck on red.

These open-seat 1990 races may pivot on whether voters believe the next governor should expand his vocabulary beyond “no”--even at the risk of raising some taxes. In Texas, the debate is likely to center on education, and some GOP strategists worry that Clements has left the party in a weak position. In California--where anxiety about the quality of life is matched by skepticism about tax hikes--the two parties are likely to fence over the state’s role in funding not only education, but also transportation and environmental protection.

Those kinds of personalized local concerns, not the polarizing ideological themes that dominate federal races, determine gubernatorial elections. On the surface, governor races may look like Senate and presidential races, with the same consultants hatching the same expensive--and negative--media campaigns that force candidates to spend ever more time dialing donors for dollars.

But governor races have remained independent from larger trends in more fundamental ways. Despite George Bush’s victory in the presidential campaign, the Democrats actually gained one governorship in 1988; two years earlier, when the Democrats gained eight Senate seats, they lost as many governorships. Because of the governors’ influence over reapportionment, no races will be more important to the national parties in 1990. But no races will be less susceptible to their influence.