PrintOctober 13, 2011
Making State Governments Matter
Although some conservatives are disappointed that an outspoken governor like Chris Christie is not going to be running for president, he has more important work to do in New Jersey. The same is true of Mitch Daniels in Indiana. What these men are showing is that our myopic obsession with Washington may mask where the real action is in revolutionary reform: state government. This is particularly true of robust conservative change.
First of all, Republicans, and especially conservative Republicans, actually have a big hammer in state governments today. As this NCLS map shows, Republicans made huge gains in state legislatures, gaining 21 chambers and picking up more state legislative seats than in the 1994 landslide. Moreover, the Democrat losses in gubernatorial elections in 2010 reduced the number of states in which Democrats run state government (control the legislature and the governor) to only eleven, while Republicans run state government in twenty...(Read Full Article)
