Desert Sage column


A previous version of this story misspelled the author's name.

As you may remember, 2010 was a big year for Republicans. The GOP took the speaker’s gavel away from Nancy Pelosi and gained ground in the senate, but they also made big gains in the states.

In Kansas, Governor-elect Sam Brownback promised to make Kansas a “red state model” and declared, “If you want to know what a Tea Party America might look like, there is no place like Kansas.”

In his second term, however, the Republican-led state legislature repealed his tax cuts and then overrode his veto. They proceeded to increase spending on education, which had seen severe cuts including school closures.

Political scientist and writer Matt Grossmann points to Kansas as a notable peak — an unusually bold conservative victory at the polls, followed by an unusually strong backlash — illustrating a pattern.

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Grossmann’s forthcoming book, “Red State Blues,” is a deep, deep dive into a wealth of data analysis on state elections and their outcomes as measured in policies and their consequences.

His conclusion, amply supported by his research, is that while Republicans are good at winning elections and consolidating their power, and have scored some ideological victories, in the big picture the “red state model” has not gained ground.

To use a crude metaphor, Grossmann is pointing out something in state politics akin to the difference between weather and climate. The fact of snowy weather does not refute the earth’s climatic warming and its severe consequences.

Likewise, despite the fact that Republicans hold more governorships and state legislatures than Democrats, and despite controlling 26 states prior to the 2018 midterm elections and making some highly visible policy wins, the climate overall has seen rising state budgets and slowed, not halted, progress on a number of liberal initiatives.

“Unlike at the federal level, deficit spending could not cover the direct consequences of tax cuts, so citizens sat up and took notice when revenues and funds for schools were reduced,” Grossmann writes. “The electoral backlash eventually hit the party, even in deep-red Kansas, but not before the party itself had decided to pursue a different path.”

At the state level, Republicans have made gains, as with so-called “right to work” anti-union legislation and vouchers for private schools, but Grossmann points out that Democrats have tallied some visible victories as well, as with gay rights.

Yet Grossmann finds no proven “blue state model,” either, and when it comes to the direst challenges afflicting people at the sharp end of class relations and economic distribution, or the threat to species due to climate change, Democrats aren’t delivering us from tribulation — nor confronting the structure that causes it.

Neither of the dominant parties in our two-party duopoly has transformed the orientation of government or socioeconomic disparity. Outside the book’s scope is the absence of a critique of capitalist ideology and what is consequently considered possible in politics.

As it appears, regardless of anyone’s party affiliation one can gain applause and win elections by bashing government; and yet people appreciate many things that governments do. In other words, putting aside the spectacle of politics, policy matters.

“The daily work of government is still consequential — despite the partisan theatre — even when it is not about one side winning a battle,” Grossmann writes.

There is a reminder for us, here, that we are being played for fools when political rock stars so easily distract us from what government actually does: where it succeeds and where it fails, and what we as a people want government to do.

Red State Blues: How the conservative revolution stalled in the states,” by Matt Grossmann. Cambridge University Press, 208 pages, $24.99 (softcover)

Desert Sage enjoys hearing from readers at Or find him on Twitter at @AlgernonWrites.

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