How much difference does that experience make? What happens when the statehouse moves to the White House?
Since 1961, every president but one (Donald Trump) came to the presidency with experience as a governor, senator or member of the House. But serving as governor has always been an especially good way to get to national office. Of the 46 presidents and 49 vice presidents elected to date, 27 had previously been a governor. Among the vice presidents, Walz would be the 17th governor to hold the job.
Once in the White House, though, governors have not been noticeably friendlier to state and local governments than presidents who did not serve in state office.
Ronald Reagan spent eight years as governor of California, but his career in the White House brought the end of the popular General Revenue Sharing program, which provided flexible federal cash to state and local governments. The relatively string-free block grants picked up a lot more strings. Reagan slashed spending for Medicaid while giving the states more flexibility in managing the program. That, he said, would make up the difference — but it never did.
Bill Clinton, a six-term Arkansas governor, promised to “end welfare as we know it.” He did that, and states got a lot more flexibility in running welfare programs and block grants to fund them. The number of people on welfare fell 60 percent in the first decade. But critics since have contended that the program unraveled the state-and-local safety net.
During the two presidential terms of former Texas Gov. George W. Bush, his No Child Left Behind program, designed to boost educational outcomes by insisting on more accountability for local schools, led to overreliance on testing and a collection of unfunded mandates that many states could not afford.
Compare that with some of the non-governors who sat in the West Wing. Lyndon B. Johnson, a former schoolteacher who became “master of the Senate,” had the biggest positive impact on state and local governments of any president in recent times. His “Great Society” brought new health-care programs, including Medicaid. He launched big educational programs, like Head Start. There were federal programs for urban transit, urban renewal, federal aid to local education and to colleges and universities, and rural development, among many others. After accounting for inflation, federal aid grew by two-thirds from just 1965 to 1969, while Johnson was in office.
Richard Nixon served just two years in the Senate before becoming Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president in 1953. But after he became president in his own right in 1969, Nixon emerged as a champion of the “New Federalism” and led the charge in creating General Revenue Sharing and block grants.
We don’t often think of Trump or Joe Biden as presidents with big federalism agendas, but cash — $745 billion — rained from heaven as they tried to fight off the economic damage from COVID-19. It was part of what the New York Times called “the largest flood of federal money into the United States economy in recorded history.” Then, after years in which presidents promised more investment in state and local infrastructure, the Biden administration got a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed in 2021.
In playing the odds, it’s not a safe bet that having a governor in the West Wing helps state and local governments more. That’s a bizarre paradox. What explains it? One reason is that, as president, governors have to run a lot faster to catch up with the vast range of federal issues, including foreign affairs, where their learning curve crowds out their time for issues on which they focused as governor.
A second reason is that presidents have fewer hands-on opportunities for policy impact — certainly when compared with occupants of the governor’s mansion. The White House is the land of tough battles with Congress, where the policy experience of governors doesn’t matter as much.
A third reason is that federalism issues rarely float to the top of the policy stream in Washington. To move policies that affect state and local governments often requires an especially deft hand and the skills of compromise acquired on Capitol Hill. That gives former senators an advantage.
So non-governors benefit from the national perspective and Washington experience, and state and local governments tend to do better in their administrations. That’s a peculiar paradox in a political world where it’s easy to think that governors have the upper hand.
