0ne of the still-memorable events for celebration at the Republican National Committee was November 4, 1967. With the upset election of Republican Louie Nunn as governor of Kentucky in that off year, the GOP won a majority of the nation's governorships--26 (the Democrats got 24)--for the first time in a decade. In a year with few memorable contests, this was a booster shot for the out-of-power party, especially since its strength at the gubernatorial level had in recent years been rather modest.
Republican National Chairman Ray Bliss happily predicted that taking the majority of governorships was yet another harbinger that his party would seize the White House the following year. And it did, along with making a net gain of five more governorships. In 1969, the party swept both races for governor that year (New Jersey and Virginia) and seemed to be developing a hammerlock on statehouses.
But the 1970 elections proved a major blow to GOP gubernatorial stock, as the party dropped 11 statehouses to the Democrats. They have never had a majority of them since, and their ranks at the legislative level have been increasingly mediocre. Indeed, Republicans have rarely (if ever) held rule over both houses of a state legislature anywhere, and, for all the advances the GOP has made in the South, it has only once controlled a single legislative chamber there since Reconstruction--and then for only two years (1968-70, when the Tennessee House had a Republican majority).
As America went into the 1994 midterm elections, only three states had Republican governors and majorities in both houses.
"A lot of this has to do with the fact that Democrats gear their young people toward local politics and local office seeking," observes veteran pundit M. Stanton Evans. "Republicans send their young to Washington; Democrats send theirs to state capitals and city halls."
Democratic muscle in governors' mansions, and even more might in state legislatures, has had its impact on national politics. Republicans clearly lost ground in crucial congressional reapportionment in both 1971 and 1981 as a result of having the political deck stacked against them in state capitals, where the redistricting is done.
In California, for example, GOP House candidates drew more than half the total vote cast in congressional races in 1980, but, following highly unfavorable treatment by the redistricting knife in 1981, Democrats had more than twice as many House members from the Golden State as did the GOP.
In addition, Democratic control of statehouses has fattened the party's patronage and, with it, its available army of campaign canvassers, undoubtedly giving the party an advantage in delivering the electoral votes of their states to their presidential standard-bearers.
A big political shift
All of this seems poised to change this November--on a grand scale, as more than 36 states are having races for governor, and, in more than a third of them, incumbents are stepping down. As Gov. Jock McKernan of Maine, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, put it: "They're [Democrats] going to be in
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