And this leads to a second lesson: It’s easy for presidential candidates to talk about state and local issues without doing much of anything to solve them. Federalism has become less a strategy than a prop. But it’s been a prop full of danger for the candidates.
In abortion, Donald Trump was sure he had a winning issue. He declared last year that “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.” But he discovered that the anti-abortion message wasn’t resonating in many states and wasn’t bringing independents over to his side. When pressed on whether he’d sign a bill banning abortions across the country, he waffled.
Kamala Harris tried to make the most of Trump’s discomfort. She said she would “proudly” sign a law reinstating Roe v. Wade. The reality, however, is that she probably couldn’t do anything of the sort. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution doesn’t provide a right to abortion and that any policy has to be left to the states. That largely deals the federal government out of the issue.
So abortion has been federalized in rhetoric. The feds, however, have virtually no room to act.
Meanwhile, the tables have been turned on fracking, the oil and gas extraction process that now accounts for two-thirds of the natural gas that comes out of the ground and about half of the oil. Fracking has been an especially hot issue in Pennsylvania, where there are major disputes about how many jobs it has actually produced and where there are sharp (and nearly even) divides in political support for the procedure.
Harris has changed her views about fracking over the last few years. When speaking about oil and gas companies in a 2019 presidential primary debate, Harris pledged she would “take them to court and sue them.” As vice president, she backed away from that position and in the September presidential debate said, “I will not ban fracking.” But a Trump ad insists that Harris “will ban all fracking” and Trump has tried to use it as a case of her flip-flopping.
The feds, however, have little to do with fracking, thanks to restrictions Congress has placed on federal action. It remains largely the province of state regulators. No president can unilaterally ban fracking — or allow it. The fracking battle makes for great headlines in the swing state of Pennsylvania, but neither candidate would do much about it as president.
The candidates thus have grabbed on to state and local issues to build political support, as if they were somewhere near the top of the federal policy agenda. Meanwhile, both have been light on attention to genuine state and local concerns.
Trump’s “Agenda 47” (his own list of principles, not the ones laid out by conservative think tanks) lays out 20 promises. Four of them touch on state and local government: “stop the migrant crime epidemic” (which would come from aggressive immigration policy); “rebuild our cities” (which would come from “replenishing police departments,” although there’s no plan for providing increased federal funding); “cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory” (which could be done by Congress, although there’s no evidence that K-12 education is involved in critical race theory); and “secure our elections” (which is mostly a matter for state officials, and the federal government has little control over them).
Harris has staked out 19 positions on her “New Way Forward” website. She pledges to “provide a pathway to the middle class through quality, affordable education” (this focuses mainly on reducing college student debt and increasing grants for college students). She says that she will sign a bill “to restore reproductive freedom,” but as I noted earlier, this is a hollow promise. She pledges to “make our communities safer from gun violence,” but there’s little new here beyond the Biden agenda.
Compare this with the issues currently on the minds of most local government officials: the budget squeeze from the end of COVID-19 relief money; workforce recruitment; decaying infrastructure; affordable housing; teacher shortages; and coping with an influx of immigrants. There’s little in the campaign rhetoric of either presidential candidate that deals with these problems.
For the states, there’s the perennial overhang of Medicaid and the struggle to contain its costs. Both Trump and Harris have ideas about Medicare and Social Security, but nothing that would help deal with Medicaid.
For decades, conservatives have had a singular plan for fixing federalism: sort out government’s functions by level of government. The 2024 presidential campaign is bringing exactly the reverse, with candidates seizing on state and local problems without trying to solve them, and state and local governments struggling with their problems but without hearing any plans to help. This campaign is producing the biggest disconnect between the levels of government of any election in recent memory.
We all know, of course, that presidents behave differently in office than as candidates on the hustings. This time around, though, we ought to have a lot more evidence than usual about how each candidate would behave in office. There’s one candidate who has already sat at the Oval Office desk and one who has regularly been beside it.
That makes the disheveled federalism of this campaign especially concerning for the nation’s governors and mayors seeking help. The issues being discussed are mostly a set of political props, and that won’t help them get what they need.
