Your Blue State Won’t Save You: Why State Politics Is National Politics
Why state-level politics is more important than ever.
by Zack Beauchamp and Nicole Hemmer
Jane Coaston
It’s The “Argument.” I’m Jane Coaston.
If there is anything I love more than one big political fight, it’s 50 smaller ones. Yes, this week we’re talking about state legislatures. Since the Dobbs decision, people have been paying way more attention to state level politics — yay. Indiana just approved a near-total abortion ban. Meanwhile, in Kansas, voters soundly rejected a constitutional Amendment that would allow their legislature to ban abortion. And it’s not just abortion — on everything from guns to voting rights, our biggest political disagreements are about to get real local. For many people, it’s been a long time since where they live in America has mattered this much. Today, I want to understand what the battles playing out at the state level mean for our national politics going forward, especially in red states. To help me think through it, I’m joined by Niki Hemmer, a historian of conservative media —
Niki Hemmer
There has been a decades long project to preserve Republican power at the state and local level, and that is going to affect issues around abortion, but around a whole host of other rights and policies as well.
Jane Coaston
— and my friend, Zack Beauchamp, who covers the right for Vox.
Zack Beauchamp
The ability for legislatures to get away with truly wild things, like, not just radical legislation, but also extreme levels of personal corruption, cumulatively, they have a massive, massive, massive impact on national politics.
Jane Coaston
So there are three trends I’m seeing in state level Republican politics that I find concerning and troubling, but I want to get your thoughts on them. And I want to talk about maximalism. I want to talk about the idea of the fear — pent up fear of other places and even one’s neighbors, and the idea of using federalism in bad faith, kind of a federalism for me, but not for thee. And we’re going to talk about these through the lens of a few state laws.
And I think it’s worthwhile starting with abortion — state level abortion laws. If you paid attention to how conservatives talked about the Dobbs decision, a lot of what you heard was, this won’t really change anything. This just returns the issue of abortion to the states, to democracy, where it belonged. Indiana just became the first state in the nation to pass a new law banning abortions. Kansas voters, nearly 60 percent, just rejected a ballot measure that would have allowed the state’s conservative legislature to ban abortion.
And that’s just legislation that’s on the books. There are plenty of other bills that have been introduced. It’s interesting, because the first part of the idea of overturning Roe was to send it back to the states, and democracy will take care of it. But the unspoken and unwritten part of that was, send it back to the states where they will ban abortion, and eventually leading to a federal ban on abortion. So Niki, how concerned are you about how states have been taking that directive on a scale from 1 to 10, because it seems to me to be pretty much what I expected to take place?
Niki Hemmer
My concern level is around a 10, in part because one of the things that we saw even before Roe was overturned was that red states were competing with one another to see how restrictive of a law they could put in place around abortion. And you also see this on things like access to guns and voting rights. There has been this kind of, as you were saying earlier, kind of competitive maximalism that has been taking place in these states to show who is the most pro-life.
Jane Coaston
Right.
Niki Hemmer
And I think we’re starting to see a lot of that at the state level. Now, I’m also concerned that these laws are not staying at the state level.
Jane Coaston
Zack, what do you think?
Zack Beauchamp
So first of all, I share Niki’s concern. But I think almost more importantly in some ways than just like a sort of generalized competition is the splits within the pro-life movement, right? For the past — since 1973, the entire pro-life movement has been united around one objective, which is overturning Roe v. Wade. But now, one thing that you can see are the fissures inside of this movement, right?
And so you have on the one hand the sort of more traditional anti-abortion groups, folks like the National Right to Life. They want to get state level prohibitions on abortion, leading up to some kind of national prohibition. But then you have people in the so-called abortion abolitionist movement, which has cropped up more recently. And it’s just much more radical. Their view, which I actually find more intellectually consistent, is that abortion is murder —
Jane Coaston
Right.
Zack Beauchamp
— fetuses are people who then deserve all the protections that people have under US law. That means, most importantly, that women who have abortions should be treated like murderers, or at least punished in some kind of way.
Jane Coaston
I see these laws as examples of state level maximalism. And voters don’t want it. Legislatures — you think about Louisiana’s scrapped bill that would have defined abortion as homicide. They are like, we can’t defend this, and this won’t work. There’s this idea of, yes, this is intellectually consistent, but it’s unpopular.
But Zack, what does Kansas tell us, if anything, about a majority of voters rejecting an amendment to the state Constitution regarding abortion in a state that Trump won easily — a state that’s, despite what a lot of conservative commentators have said over the last couple of days, is still pretty conservative. What does that say about the voters’ reaction to maximalism?
Zack Beauchamp
I mean, look, there’s a cliche in American political punditry, that abortion is very complicated in the public’s eyes, and that —
Jane Coaston
It is.
Zack Beauchamp
— nobody knows what the public thinks. I’m like, there’s a way in which that’s true, but there’s a way in which the simpler explanation, which is that polls have told us a very consistent story over the course of the past 40 years. And that story is voters want limited access to abortion. They want it to be legal. They only want it to be illegal under a certain set of circumstances. Right? That’s just what the polling says. It’s what it has said.
It’s one of the most remarkably consistent issue polling things I’ve ever seen when looking at American polling, and it’s one that Kansas shows us holds true, right, when it comes to the actual ballot box. We haven’t gotten a chance to see American voters in states, even in conservative states, getting to weigh in directly on outright abortion bans. Now, we’re seeing what happens.
We’re seeing that even in red states like Kansas, pro-life people who want bans, full bans — right, maybe with exceptions for rape and incest and health of the mother, maybe, right, those positions are just unpopular — they are. And so in order to implement them, even in red states, you need to have some kind of situation where the legislators are insulated to a degree from public input.
And the question is, like, how is that insulation accomplished? And there are a variety of different mechanisms. And I think in some states, they’ll be more effective than others for doing so. But that is what you need, right, given how unpopular these policies are proving themselves to be.
Niki Hemmer
Yeah, I don’t think you’re going to see a whole lot more Republican led state level referenda on the issue of abortion, right? I think they probably are learning their lesson from Kansas. But as Zack was pointing out, there are so many other ways to avoid public feedback when it comes to legislating at the state and local level.
Jane Coaston
Zack, you mentioned the idea of insulation, but I’m curious as to whether you both think — Niki, we’ll start with you — are we losing the accountability relationship between voters and state representatives, particularly in these states where either the Republican Party is so dominant it can only be pulled for the right, or in states where the Republican Party is dominated by the far right. Even if you vote for the Democrat, the Republicans do not respond with becoming less maximalist.
Niki Hemmer
Oh, absolutely, and this has been an issue across the board for quite some time. It’s something that we talked about with voting rights and with gerrymandering at the state level. Places like North Carolina that have done quite a lot to make sure that Republicans stay in power, even if that is not the will of the people — going so far, in fact, as to strip the powers of the governor when a Democrat won that office.
Now, I don’t think that it’s absolute. I don’t think that those legislators have completely walled themselves off from public feedback. And Kansas is a really good example of that. Remember, Kansas, in the twenty teens, had an extremely conservative government that basically took away almost every state service. And Kansans finally rose up, and they were like, this is not how we want to live. And that’s part of the reason why you have a Democratic governor there now.
So there is still space. Like, if you push people far enough, they can break through some of those limits on popular will and popular expression at the voting booth.
Zack Beauchamp
Yeah, what I would add to that is there’s an interaction between formal restructuring of the rules and the changing fundamental character of state politics in the United States. Right, it used to be the case — and this was, by the way, the way the system was designed — that state politics would be responsive to hyper local concerns. Right, if you were voting for governor in Maryland, you’re voting for governor in Maryland because you’re concerned about, I don’t know know, the state of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
Or if you live in that area — right, like, something that really matters to you on a basic level.
And those things still matter to a degree. But what has happened in most places, and virtually everywhere to some degree, is that local politics have become nationalized. So you end up voting for governor based in significant part on your national political ideologies. The abortion debate is a good example of this. Abortion is one of the fundamental issues that sorts you into a red versus blue camp in the first place.
And you end up getting this situation where people are thinking based on their view of the national political environment as to who they want to vote for.
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