State Republicans Rush to Align Themselves With Trump: It may be ancient history at this point, but it’s worth reflecting for just a moment about how President Donald Trump seemed not just an unconventional Republican but almost an apostate as recently as his first run for office. In 2016, National Review devoted an entire interview to articles questioning whether Trump was even a conservative, given his views on entitlements and trade. Trump and the Republican National Committee spent much of that election season doing a dance around the question of whether Trump would support the party’s eventual nominee, given his threat to run as an independent if he wasn’t treated “fairly.”
Such arguments have long since been settled in Trump’s favor. Never Trump Republicans are sidelined; they may get speaking spots on cable and book contracts but have no power. Those who do have power — notably, congressional Republicans — are sending every signal they’ll acquiesce essentially to anything Trump wants.
In fact, it’s arguable that Trump holds a stronger position, certainly within his own party, than any other modern president. His party has narrow congressional majorities but no real gadflies along the lines of Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema who forced Joe Biden to trim his ambitions during his first couple of years in office. Today’s GOP lacks the factionalism that similarly curbed policies or forced coalition building during the Bush, Clinton and Obama years.
All of this may change, of course. Still, it’s striking how Republican governors and legislators have been all in on Trump. You’d expect a lot of overlap in their views. During his time out of office, Republican governors talked almost incessantly about border security, no matter how many hundreds of miles lay between their states and Mexico. The skepticism about public health restrictions that grew out of the COVID-19 pandemic would push the party away from vaccine requirements even if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hadn’t been nominated to be federal health secretary.
Now GOP officials at the state level are embracing Trump policies and even his branding efforts in a way they were not during his first presidency. This week, Gov. Kim Reynolds created a Department of Government Efficiency for Iowa. “We were DOGE before DOGE was cool,” said Idaho Gov. Brad Little.
Individual legislators are attempting to package their policy ideas as conscious homages to Trump. This week, Florida Republicans were able to make a deal on immigration after a feud about priorities that was framed as a question of whether the legislative vision (a bill named TRUMP) or Gov. Ron DeSantis’ approach more closely reflected the president’s wishes. Across the country, GOP supporters of school vouchers, voter ID mandates and abolishing taxes on tips are all loudly proclaiming that they’re taking pages out of Trump’s playbook.
In some states, the rush to name highways and buildings after Trump is already underway. “They’re trying to demonstrate their fealty to Trump on a personal level,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant based in California. “[It’s] the main characteristic of the Republican Party.”
Trump is in his honeymoon period. His approval ratings are higher than they were through most of his first term, and he commands support from about 85 percent of Republican voters. Republicans have every incentive to express loyalty and support.
But all this is different than during his first term. Back then, there were a few GOP governors who were openly critical — sometimes even disdainful — of Trump. Others would duck questions about him, begging off by saying they were busy running their own states.
Now, just about all of them are fully on board. Even when Trump’s policies threaten direct pain for red states — such as freezes on higher ed grants from the National Institutes of Health — state-level Republicans remain silent. Democratic attorneys general seem to have prefab “sue Trump” forms prepared to challenge his every move, but Republicans have decided that with this president they simply aren’t going to pick any fights.
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Not Respecting the Will of the People: There are a lot of arguments to be made against ballot initiatives. They’re supposed to express what average citizens want, yet they often devolve into fights between interest groups that cost millions or even tens of millions of dollars. When voters are faced with an up-and-down choice that sounds appealing — cutting taxes or increasing spending on schools — they don’t have to weigh the same set of tradeoffs that legislators make when considering hundreds of programs within the state budget.
All that being said, ballot measures have been around for more than a century now. When a majority or sometimes supermajority of voters decide on a question, you’d expect lawmakers to respect their wishes. Yet increasingly legislators look for every way they can to alter outcomes they don’t like.
Initiatives have often served as conservative tools, such as during the property tax revolt of the 1970s or the move to ban same-sex marriages before the Supreme Court rendered that issue moot a decade ago. In recent years, initiatives have largely been a progressive weapon, a way to protect abortion rights, raise minimum wages or expand Medicaid in red states.
As such, it’s mostly red states that are currently pushing back. Missouri lawmakers are considering a ban on abortion, just months after voter approval of a ballot measure enshrining such rights in the state constitution. Several bills would also roll back a minimum wage increase approved by voters in that state. Similar cancellation efforts are taking place this session in Arizona and Nebraska.
Over the past decade, it’s become fairly common for legislators to challenge laws their constituents have just approved. About a quarter of citizen initiatives are altered after they pass. Now, there’s increasing interest in raising barriers so fewer initiatives pass in the first place or even appear on ballots.
About 90 bills have been filed this year to curtail use of initiatives, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. Idaho legislators want to force petitioners to collect signatures from all legislative districts, although they rejected the idea of allowing the governor to veto successful initiatives. South Dakota lawmakers want to require initiatives to pass with 60 percent of the vote, not simple majorities. In Florida, Gov. DeSantis wants to ban paid signature gathering, but legislative leaders apparently have no interest in that idea.
Legislators aren’t just seeking to block an avenue that leads to enactment of policies they don’t like — they are also protecting their turf. The whole point of initiatives, after all, is to push ideas that legislators are not addressing.
“Limiting access to the ballot or avoiding enforcing the law as passed by voters have the same effect of trying to reduce the impact of direct democracy,” says Craig Burnett, an expert on initiatives at Hofstra University, “thereby bolstering the influence of the legislature — the same legislature that is likely producing policy that the median voter would not prefer, at least some of the time.”
